My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Drunkenness was by far the most common discipline problem for Commandant Coleman and the board of trustees. Despite the requirement for references and a medical screening with each application, some lifelong alcoholics were admitted to the Home. Not a few took up alcohol as a way to ease the boredom of living there.

  Section 3 of “The Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Kentucky Confederate Home” strictly prohibited the use or possession of alcohol anywhere in the Home. Experience at other Confederate veterans’ homes demonstrated that availability of strong drink among men with little else to fill their time could escalate into bad language, arguments, destruction of property, or violence. (Worse yet might be the image these “blameless martyrs” would present to the ladies of the UDC if they were allowed to stagger around the Home like drunkards in a saloon.)

  James H. Mocabee was caught red-handed.

  Born in 1840 in Scotland, Mocabee came to the United States as a boy. He was an enthusiastic enlistee at the outbreak of the war, entered the Confederate army in April 1861, and served four years with the Fourth Tennessee Cavalry.

  In April 1904, eight months after Mocabee entered the Home from Paducah, fellow inmate (and night guard) Ed O'Brien heard Mocabee's distinctive Scots burr echoing down a hallway after lights-out. O'Brien summoned Commandant Coleman, and the two men entered the old veteran's room. There they found Mocabee, drunk as a laird, in the act of passing whiskey bottles to several other inmates.

  Commandant Coleman charged the Scotsman with smuggling whiskey into the Home, soliciting other inmates for money to purchase whiskey, and imbibing his own wares.

  The Home wasn't a prison, and inmates who valued a taste (or a quart) of a spirituous beverage could obtain it easily enough. (“Friends, in mistaken kindness are disposed now and then to give the inmates liquor,” Bennett Young noted.) Month after month, Commandant Coleman would bring inmates up on charges for “drunk and disorderly conduct,” “continuous drunkenness,” or being “beastly drunk” on the premises.7

  Coleman was able to tolerate an otherwise well-behaved inmate like E. J. Sanders, who went on the occasional tear but did so without causing a commotion. During his initial crackdown in March 1903, Commandant Coleman cited Sanders for being drunk and disorderly in his room. Sanders expressed contrition and accepted a reprimand. A year later Sanders was caught again, and he was again properly remorseful on accepting his reprimand. Sanders would be charged with drunkenness five more times in the next six years, each time appropriately repentant as he accepted his reprimand.

  Joe Slemmons, on the other hand, was a loud and public drunk from the minute he walked in the door on November 27, 1903. On the one-year anniversary of his arrival at the Home, the Barren County native showed up drunk at Sunday prayer services. Coleman charged him with being “drunk and disorderly,” then added a recommendation to the board of trustees: “In view of the many times [he] has been seen intoxicated at the Home, I respectfully urge his dismissal.”

  There was no tolerance for drunken behavior that spilled outside the gates of the Home and threatened to besmirch the public image of a noble and worthy Johnny Reb.

  Alfred N. Peyton's drunken two-day binge on the streets of downtown Louisville got him removed from the Home. “This man's repeated sprees are a stinging menace to the good morals of the Home,” Commandant Coleman wrote, “and I recommend he be suspended ninety days.”

  Coleman developed a sort of ranking system to catalog the seriousness of incidents involving alcohol. Quiet drunk E. J. Sanders might be “unsteady on his feet,” while the disruptive Joe Slemmons was “drunk and disorderly.” Worst of all, however, was the offense of being “beastly drunk,” a condition that usually involved drunken threats or harm to women.

  One of the “beastly drunks” was H. C. Melbourne, who missed roll call on May 3, 1904. He was spotted later that morning, asleep on the porch of a neighboring Pewee Valley home. A Home employee coaxed Melbourne away from the premises and back to his room, where he was confined to quarters. Later in the morning, Melbourne—still drunk—left the Home and returned to the nearby residence. He was back on the same porch, pounding on the front door and demanding entry while the women of the household cowered inside. Melbourne was later suspended from the Home for ninety days, and never returned.8

  Whether fueled by alcohol or escalating from minor personal grievances, violence between inmates was another issue for Coleman to deal with. Unless one party was clearly at fault (and there was no grievous harm done), the solution was generally to restrict each party to a separate wing of the Home and require them to take meals in their rooms.

  But even relatively minor events could whip up a fury.

  J. A. Burdette came to the Home in March 1903. He had been a barber in Louisville, so he knew how to make friends by putting other men at ease. He was well liked. When he felt like it, Burdette cut the hair or trimmed the beards of other inmates, and they paid him a nickel here or a dime there for a haircut (and the conversation that went with it).

  On January 8, 1904, Burdette sought out Commandant Coleman to report that someone had stolen two silver dollars from a coin purse that he kept in his room. Burdette steadfastly refused to name a suspect, not wanting to stain the reputation of an innocent man. Instead, he provided a list of witnesses who he said might be in possession of facts that would determine the guilty party.

  For the next week, suspicions, allegations, and anger ricocheted around the Home, all relating to guilty knowledge of Burdette's silver dollars. Before he could investigate the theft, Coleman had to write up charges against seven inmates for “fistfights, fighting and otherwise disturbing the peace and quiet” of the Home. Commandant Coleman eventually asked the board's executive committee to investigate, but Burdette's silver dollars were never recovered.

  Serious violence was rare, but it could come with sheer and terrifying unpredictability.

  No one actually accused John B. McCreary of stealing the pouch of tobacco, but heads turned in his direction when the issue came up in conversation. To end the gossip once and for all, McCreary rose before five o'clock one morning and, with a fire axe taken from a hallway bracket, crept to the room of Ed O'Brien. O'Brien was still asleep when the fire axe glanced off the head of his iron bed, cutting him on the cheek. O'Brien suffered two more chops to his head and arm before other inmates subdued McCreary and rushed O'Brien to the infirmary. McCreary didn't wait to be disciplined before making his getaway from the Home. Three days later he wrote the commandant from another city, saying he regretted the affair and would be leaving that evening for Texas.9

  Ex-Confederates living in the Home had witnessed their share of military discipline during wartime. A miscreant might have his head shaved or be required to wear a sign describing his offense. Kentucky veterans told of men locked in wooden stocks for days and described the “barrel shirt,” where a culprit would have to give up all clothing and wear nothing but a rough wooden barrel. An entire division might be called out to the parade grounds to witness the execution of a comrade convicted of being absent without leave.10

  Commandant Coleman had none of those punishments at his disposal, of course. Instead, “The Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Kentucky Confederate Home” described a specific process by which discipline would be administered to inmates. Regardless of the offense—from profanity to assault with a fire axe—the commandant was required to file charges with the board of trustees, describing the offense, citing specifications, and listing witnesses. Meeting monthly, a committee of the board would hold a court-martial for each of the accused, calling witnesses, determining guilt, and meting out punishment. “There is no punishment except reprimand, suspension, and dismissal,” Bennett Young explained to Governor Beckham.11

  Whenever possible, trustees would reprimand the misbehaving old veteran, asking only that he express remorse and promise never to repeat the offense. Easygoing E. J. Sanders became expert at expressing contrition for his episodes
of drunkenness, and even the more disruptive Joe Slemmons was allowed multiple opportunities to express his regrets. J. P. Muncy, the foul-mouthed riverman, had his charges of “filthy, indecent and slanderous language” dismissed when he wrote a letter of apology to Mrs. Girand, the Home's matron.

  “After reprimand comes suspension,” Young explained. “This has been found at times to be cruel, and it produces hardships which would touch the heart of any humane individual.”

  Repeat offenders faced a thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-day suspension from the Home. For men unable to earn their own living (and without any other resources), suspension could mean begging for food and shelter while waiting for the calendar pages to turn and the Home's doors to reopen to them.

  In August 1904, the Pewee Valley Depot stationmaster sent word to Commandant Coleman that an inmate was near death at the rail station. Inmate T. B. Patterson was on suspension for drunkenness and insubordination, but he had no other place to go. Patterson was starving and dehydrated when Coleman and Dr. Pryor retrieved him from the depot. Dr. Pryor recommended that Patterson's suspension be indefinitely suspended.12

  James H. Mocabee, the bootlegging Scotsman, discovered during his ninety-day suspension that he preferred living outside the discipline of the Home. He asked for an indefinite furlough and settled in nearby LaGrange. There he raised vegetables and regularly brought beets, beans, and radishes to his old comrades until his death ten years later.13

  Dismissal was the final punishment, reserved for incorrigibles and those whose offenses were outrageous enough to threaten public support of the Home. An inmate dismissed from the Kentucky Confederate Home would, following the verdict of the trustees, be stripped of his Home uniform and given civilian clothes, $1.00 in cash, a lunch basket, and a rail ticket returning him to the community from which he first made application to the Home.14

  “The age of these men makes this still more disagreeable and unpleasant,” said Bennett Young.

  Commandant Coleman recommended dismissal for H. C. Melbourne after the incident on the Pewee Valley porch. The trustees, however, voted to give the eighty-one-year-old veteran one more chance. “For repeated drunkenness and for entering a private citizen's house in a maudlin condition,” Melbourne was sentenced to a sixty-day suspension. He never returned to the Home.

  “If there is no restraint,” Young explained, “it would be impossible for those who obey the rules and are willing to observe the law to live quietly or comfortably in the Home.”15

  Almost lost among the stacks of disciplinary charges and specifications that Commandant Coleman prepared each month was the charge against inmate Joe Pike.

  Sixty-seven-year-old Joe B. Pike was one of the Home's earliest residents, having been recommended by John Leathers's Louisville camp. He had no reputation as a troublemaker. But on a July afternoon in 1904, according to Coleman's uncharacteristically terse report, Pike stated in front of another inmate “that Coleman and Mrs. Girand were stealing everything they could lay their hands on.” Coleman's charge of “malicious slandering” against Pike was forwarded to the board of trustees for action on August 9.

  The trustees might have generally disregarded the Pike matter had it not been for the Lawson letters. In the week previous, four of the trustees had received letters from Alexander Lawson, Home steward and respected ex-Confederate, alleging theft, mismanagement, neglect, and favoritism in the Home.16

  In the early months of operation, when the Home's financial situation was the darkest, Bennett Young enlisted Alexander Lawson as an independent financial agent. Lawson raised a decent amount of money for the Home, earned a decent commission, and in the process made the acquaintance of Kentucky's prominent ex-Confederates and UDC members. A year later, the board offered Lawson regular employment as steward of the Home. As such, he was responsible for implementing some efficiencies in the purchase of supplies and management of the kitchen.

  If the trustees thought that adding Lawson to the staff of the Home might ease Commandant Coleman's administrative burden, they couldn't have been more mistaken. The two men were like tigers in a cage, with Lawson critical of Coleman's management and Coleman suspicious of Lawson's motives. By the summer of 1904, it was obvious the pairing wasn't working. “In view of the friction existing in the management” and “with a view of harmonizing matters,” the board voted on July 9 to end Lawson's employment. Bennett Young received letters from the commanders of the Paris and Boone County UCV camps in support of Lawson, but expressing their support of Young and the rest of the board.17

  At the August 9 board meeting—the meeting at which the charges against Joe Pike were presented—the Home's board of trustees named a special committee, chaired by Fayette Hewitt, to investigate the charges of theft against the commandant and the matron.

  From a public relations standpoint, the allegations couldn't have come at a worse time. The General Assembly had voted $56,000 for improvements, and construction of the new infirmary was well underway. The state's increase of its per capita funding from $125 to $175 was intended to pay for better care of Kentucky's blameless martyrs, not to be siphoned off by crooked bureaucrats.

  Hewitt's investigation moved quickly. He reported that he could find no evidence of theft, and he implied that Lawson's charges were motivated by his termination. The charges of favoritism and neglect, Hewitt said, were “largely due to the selfish and exacting natures” of the old men in the Home. “We would suggest that many of these complaints might be obviated by a little tact on the part of our superintendent,” Hewitt said of Coleman.18

  Coleman felt vindicated, but Bennett Young wasn't so sure. Three months later the board received more charges of mismanagement and neglect.

  A Freemason living in the Home wrote a desperate—and anonymous—letter to Kentucky's Masonic Grand Master, describing the recent death due to neglect of another Mason in the Home. Not sure how to proceed, the Grand Master forwarded the letter to John Leathers, who delivered it to Andrew Sea, secretary of the Home's board. “In my opinion we have the best Confederate Home in the United States,” Leathers assured Sea, but the letter “contains serious reflections on the Home” and should be investigated.19

  Andrew Sea wasn't able to get the issue in front of the board of trustees before another shoe dropped.

  Inmate Ed Browder, a likeable old coot from Fulton County and the brother of trustee R. A. Browder, wrote a chatty and generally well-meaning letter to the editor of the Fulton Commercial about living conditions in the Home. The newspaper editor chose to build a story around Browder's innocent gripes about overcrowding, poor food, lack of heat, and other management issues.20

  Bennett Young tried to get ahead of the damage by appointing a standing inspection committee, but the newspapers that had given the Kentucky Confederate Home so much favorable ink were now looking for a little muck to rake. In February 1905 the Oldham County Board of Health announced an investigation into sanitary conditions at the Home, which set off a spate of anonymous letters from inmates to their hometown newspapers about conditions real and imagined. Coleman, for his part, cracked down even harder, failing to heed Fayette Hewitt's suggestion that a little tact might be more appropriate.21

  Newspapers received more fodder for speculation and gossip in July 1905 with the sordid death of trustee R. E. Duncan of Hawesville. Judge Duncan checked himself into the Home's infirmary for what was later described to be treatment of a drug habit. At bedtime he took a heavy dose of morphine—supplied, most likely, by Dr. Pryor—then closed the door to his room and slit his wrists. A night nurse found him almost completely bled out, but the dying man was still hacking away at his own throat with a small knife.22

  Alexander Lawson, meanwhile, continued his feud with Commandant Coleman by recycling stories of misfeasance in the Home.23

  In December 1905, intending to blunt the criticism, Young wrote the governor “demanding a full, complete, impartial and rigid examination calling for the closest scrutiny of everything the Board of T
rustees has done.” The board also approved the hiring of an outside accounting firm to prepare “a detailed statement of all receipts and expenditures of the Home from its opening” to the current date.24

  The Kentucky Senate appointed a committee of five to investigate the Home, but, with state senator Henry George chairing the committee, there was little doubt as to its findings. Days before the final report was completed and published, George provided his succinct assurance to Young: “It will be favorable.”25

  The audit was favorable, too, detailing every dollar expended and every dollar received, right down to the single dollar donated by grocer John L. Stout of Bowling Green.

  “It is most gratifying to the board,” Young wrote of the Senate report, “that after an investigation prompted by malice, that such a splendid testimonial has been given to the conduct of those entrusted with the management of the institution.”

  By the end of 1905 the Kentucky Confederate Home was operating on a financial footing more solid than at any other time since it opened. The new infirmary, dormitory, and renovated main building were all fully occupied, but the needy and decrepit ex-Confederates were receiving the best care they had known in their lives.

  The place was respectable again.

  In his 1905 “Annual Report of the Kentucky Confederate Home,” Bennett Young acknowledged that some of the disciplinary problems and operational complaints were inherent in the nature of the institution. “It would be unreasonable to expect that there would be no complaints,” he said. “Many of these [inmates], removed from all that is near and dear to them, with no employment, sick and despondent, where placed together in such large numbers, naturally meet things which result in misunderstandings.”26

  Three weeks after pulling a knife on George Wood at breakfast, William S. Gray went on another of his Saturday night toots. When a drunken Gray was asked to leave the Sunday worship service for shouting out profanities, he threatened the deacon with his blade.