By 1915 the Kentucky Confederate Home was experiencing a cash squeeze.
The Home had always operated at full capacity. Whatever it took—doubling or tripling men in rooms, building an infirmary, encouraging longer furloughs—there was always room for another needy ex-Confederate. More veterans entered the Home each year than left it—until 1914.
“You will observe there were six deaths more during the year than were admitted,” Henry George told the trustees at the end of that year. The inmate population was beginning its inevitable decline.3
By 1914 the Kentucky Confederate Home supported a hefty overhead. More than half the cost of operating the Home—about $26,000—was spent on salaries, fuel, lighting, and other items of fixed expense necessary to keep the facility operating.
Aside from special appropriations, the Home depended for its income on the mandated annual payment: $175 per inmate residing in the Home. Fewer inmates meant less income. If the number of inmates continued to decline (which it certainly would) and the board of trustees was unable to slash the overhead expense, there would be less money available for food, clothing, drugs, laundry, repairs, and maintenance.
At first the trustees took no drastic action—perhaps waiting to see if the downward trend would continue—but they instructed Commandant Henry George to defer all but necessary repairs. They hired an engineer to look after the facility, a skilled and patient man from Anchorage named Alexander S. McFarlan; but McFarlan had his hands full making sure the heating, lighting, and water systems were operable. There was little time left over for renovation or maintenance.4
Bennett Young went to Frankfort to work his lobbying magic on the legislators once more. He informed them that the inmate population had turned the corner and was now decreasing, and asked that the sum of $42,000 per annum (or $3,500 per month) be appropriated regardless of the number of inmates. This amount was based on an average of the amount expended by the Home for the past three years.5
Young's proposal was extraordinary. Every other state-run institution in Kentucky—from prison to asylum—received funding based on its resident population; Young was asking the legislature to fund the Kentucky Confederate Home as its population dwindled to its last, single inmate.
Young was well aware of what he was requesting. The amount he was seeking, he said, was “absolutely essential to the very existence of the Home.”
The Senate passed the appropriation bill just in time, for the Kentucky UDC chapters had been closing their purses to the Home and turning their attention elsewhere.
For fifty years, Kentuckians could refer among themselves to “The War” knowing it was understood that they were talking about the War Between the States. But by 1916, with fighting in Europe and the possibility of American involvement, public attention shifted from America's past armed conflict to the coming war “Over There.”
Kentucky women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy preserved a memory of wartime: human loss, economic hardship, terrifying vulnerability. The Paducah chapter endorsed an appeal by the National Peace Association, urging President Woodrow Wilson to cooperate with other neutral nations to end the conflict in Europe. Wilson promised peace even as America prepared for global war.6
As American involvement became inevitable, UDC chapters turned their attention and efforts to war relief and overseas charities.7
“Our work has been principally for the Red Cross,” the Springfield chapter president reported in 1917. In Williamsburg, members met weekly, “making hospital garments and knitting the various supplies and articles needed for our fighting men.” Another chapter collected and packed 1,359 garments—sweaters, socks, mufflers, wristlets, and bedshirts—for Belgian relief, “filling nine large packing cases.” The same chapter contributed $1,300 to the local Red Cross chapter in one month alone, at the same time buying $250 in Liberty Bonds.8
“Much interest of individual members of the Kentucky Confederate Home chapter has been drawn into the work for the worldwide war,” Florence Barlow reported.9 In the spirit of patriotism, she could hardly refuse when a Red Cross unit asked to take over L. Z. Duke Hall to roll bandages, make surgical dressings, and assemble first-aid kits. “We have felt it would be out of place in these strenuous times to give entertainments for any purpose other than war relief,” she said.10
The inmates would enjoy no more vaudeville shows, strawberry festivals, or musicales in Duke Hall for the duration.
During the Civil War, commissary officers called it “chasing the pig.” It happened time after time during the war: two opposing armies, hundreds of thousands of men facing each other across a valley, waiting to go into battle. There were only so many hogs in the vicinity suitable for butchering into bacon and chops. The commissary officer who did the best job of “chasing the pig” had the better-fed army, and a better-fed army often meant greater success on the battlefield.
In 1917 the U.S. Army was chasing the pig with greenbacks, buying pork, flour, sugar, coffee, and other staples on the open market to feed hundreds of thousands of doughboys bivouacked at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville and nearby Camp Henry Knox. The Kentucky Confederate Home's grocery purveyor charged 16 cents a pound for bacon in 1913; by 1917 Army quartermasters had bid the price up to 30 cents a pound. A barrel of sugar that cost $17 in 1913 was going for $33 in 1917. Flour, laundry soap, brooms, and quinine tablets: all now double in price. After fifty years, the old Confederates were once again competing with the U.S. Army for provisions.11
A year earlier, Bennett Young lobbied for—and won—a fixed annual appropriation for the Home. Now, prices were rising faster than the inmates were dying. Young, John Leathers, William Milton, and Andrew Sea met in executive session at Leathers's Louisville office on August 29, 1917. Soaring grocery prices, along with higher overhead expense and decreased UDC support, were squeezing the Home in a financial vise, and the trustees had to find a way to ease the pressure.
They cut employee and management salaries by 10 percent. The executive committee voted to notify the state auditor that they would be selling off some dead trees on the property to a lumberman for $80, and they directed Commandant George to move all inmates out of the fourth floor of the main building, then cut off all light, heat, and access to that area. They authorized a contract for $1,000 to retrofit the furnace and reduce the amount of coal necessary to heat the buildings.
The committee's final action of the day, however, was more dramatic and more personal. “It was moved and carried that on the 9th of September only two meals per day be served for the present.”12
The ex-Confederates had lost the pig chase.
The public first became aware of the two-meals-a-day plan a month later, when ex-Confederates and Daughters in Lexington called “an indignation meeting” to protest the reduction in rations. The Lexington Daughters painted a word picture of old men starving to death by the wagonload and threatened to appeal to legislators in Frankfort; a representative of the UCV camp announced their intention to ask for Bennett Young's resignation from the Home's board.13
Newspapers demanded answers: “If the old soldiers of Lexington know anything against the management, let them speak up. If those in charge have anything to say, let them say it. Let there be no hiding behind rhetorical statements.”14
Sensing a dogfight, a Louisville Herald reporter phoned the Home and spoke to an unidentified inmate. The inmate acknowledged that the dining hall had cut back to two meals a day. The reporter then pressed to find whether the reduction in rations was causing a hardship. “I can't say as to that,” the inmate hedged.15
Newspaper editors questioned the wisdom of the menu reduction. They accepted the financial difficulties that confronted the institution, but if “the food is inadequate to meet the demands of the body, some means should be found to effect a change immediately.”16
Young did what any good attorney with an unpopular case might do: he piled up the facts that helped his case, then wrapped them in the flag. He and the board of
trustees released a twenty-page statement to newspaper editors, complete with charts and affidavits, justifying the change.
The statement included a list of twenty-five “articles essential to living in the Home” and a comparison of the current prices and prices five years before. A two-meals-a-day menu was accompanied by the rhetorical question: “Do fifty percent of the people of this state … fare any better day by day than these aged soldiers?” The statement listed the European countries with “meatless days” and the American states observing “wheatless days,” then asserted, “The Confederate Home has none.” Dr. Rowan Pryor and four other physicians on his medical advisory board opined that the inmates were not being hurt by the reduction in rations.
Finally, Young added patriotism to his argument. “The old soldier inmates of the Home would do their bit in helping win the present world war by cutting out one meal a day,” he said. “They would comply as far as possible with the appeal being made by President Wilson and Food Administrator Hoover for the conservation of foodstuffs for the duration of the war.”17
Young had a point: the inmates of the Home—with their two meals a day, gas lighting, steam heat, telephone, and indoor bathrooms—were probably living better than many other Kentuckians. Almost overnight, public interest turned back to the war, and the issue died away.18
The death of Henry George's wife dragged away his ebullient spirit like a creature carrying off its kill. Martha Galloway George, his wife of forty-five years and the mother of his three children, died of breast cancer in 1916.
Henry George spent ten years as commandant of the Kentucky Confederate Home, the longest continuous employment he had ever enjoyed. He earned $1,200 a year, a comfortable salary for the time, and he and Martha made their home in a suite of rooms in the Home. He had his own table in the dining room for meals, and the Home matron made sure their rooms were clean and their laundry was done to perfection.
For a man who had navigated the treacherous shoals of elective politics for most of his life, his berth at the Home was a delight. Florence Barlow handled most of the paperwork; Henry George could spend time sharing stories with inmates and guests. He found time to dabble in local politics and write a book, a detailed history of four Kentucky Confederate regiments.19
But Martha's death dealt the good-natured man a blow he just couldn't shake off. “He pays but little attention to his duties,” an inmate wrote, “his having lost his wife, becoming despondent from it.”20
Fiercely loyal to her employer and friend, Florence Barlow stepped in to do much of his work (“Miss Barlow is virtually the superintendent,” according to a visitor).21 She and Henry George were of like minds about bringing joy and humor to the Home, but there was no more loud, honking laughter from the commandant.
During the financial problems, the closing of Duke Hall, and the two-meals-a-day controversy, Henry George lost weight and the color in his cheeks. Just before Thanksgiving 1917, thin and wan, he presented himself to the resident physician complaining of chest pains. Dr. Pryor sent him immediately to a hospital in Louisville.
Several days later, while convalescing at his son's home in Louisville, George sent a letter of resignation to Bennett Young. His health required that he should give up, at least for the present, his duties and responsibilities at the Kentucky Confederate Home.
The board was divided about how to treat George's resignation. Some trustees felt he really wasn't up to the job anymore; others wanted to give him time to recover from his physical and emotional problems. John Leathers came up with a compromise at their meeting on December 4, proposing that George be “granted an indefinite leave of absence with hope that in the near future he may be able to resume his duties.” In the meantime, trustee Andrew M. Sea would become acting commandant, visiting the Home daily and discharging the duties of the commandant.22
It was a sound plan for about eighteen hours, until seventy-seven-year-old Sea, on a train to Pewee Valley the next morning to assume his duties, dropped dead of a heart attack.
Immediately on news of Sea's death, Bennett Young telegraphed another trustee, Charles L. Daughtry, at his farm in Bowling Green, asking him to take charge of the Home right away. Daughtry arrived the following day.
Charles Lawrence Daughtry was a smart man. He was efficient. He was a planner. Active in the Bowling Green UCV camp, he was named to the Home's board of trustees in 1904 and reappointed after each term.
Daughtry's military record is a little sketchy (and he later took pains to smooth over some of the wrinkles). He was fifteen years old, living with his widowed mother near Gallatin, Tennessee, when Union troops occupied the town. With some vague plan to join the Confederate troops, he and another boy stole two Yankee horses, “intending to go to the country for a short while.” The boys spent several weeks hiding in the woods around Gallatin, dodging Union patrols, before falling in with a crew of out-of-uniform marauders. He eventually enlisted in John Hunt Morgan's Ninth Tennessee Cavalry and may have ridden on the Ohio raid. Either with the marauders or with Morgan's raiders, Daughtry was captured and sent to a prison camp under the name Charles Douglass. He was exchanged in time to join General Basil Duke's retreat from Richmond.23
After the war Daughtry and his mother moved north to the high rolling hills near Bowling Green, where he took up farming. Daughtry was an early adherent of what came to be called “scientific farming”—rotating and checkerboarding grain crops, experimenting with seed types, cutting furrows to precise depths—and his high yields made him a success. His success made him a self-proclaimed expert.
Daughtry was short, barely over five feet tall, with all the intensity of a man who never learned how to relax. He wore short-cropped hair on his round head, and a fastidiously trimmed beard accentuated his high cheekbones. He was assiduously self-educated, and he could declaim on topics as diverse as water management or streetcar operation. There was no problem that couldn't be solved, it seemed, if only the listener would adopt Daughtry's solution.
During the 1903 harvest season, Daughtry left his wife, Mattie Rose, alone on their Bowling Green farm while he attended to some out-of-town business. No sooner had he left than the hired harvest laborers struck, asking for more money before they would bring in the wheat crop. Mattie Rose, described as “a club and society woman,” sent the workers on their way, changed into work clothes, and cut twenty acres of wheat before her husband returned. She knew how Charles Daughtry could be when things didn't go according to his plans.24
Over the years, Bennett Young had used Daughtry's selfassurance to investigate problematic situations at the Home. If a woman from the UDC reported that a Home matron had been rude, Daughtry would hold hearings and investigate; if a furnace were malfunctioning, Daughtry would build a case against the manufacturer. His reports were concise, conclusive, compulsively neat, and perfectly spelled.
When Young asked him to come to Pewee Valley to take over the Home, Charles Daughtry knew there were problems there and knew he had the solutions. He didn't need to be likable; he just needed to be smart, efficient, and tough.
Daughtry had three weeks to inspect the Home, inmates, and employees before his first board meeting as commandant on January 5, 1918. The problems facing the Home, he reported to the board members, were greater than he expected.
The Home itself was in deplorable condition—roofs were leaking, paper was peeling from the walls, and dry rot was ruining the floor beams. Too much maintenance had been deferred for too long, and the place was in danger of collapsing on the old men.
Discipline was nonexistent. Daughtry blamed Henry George for laxness, but it was more likely that the inmates were restive after being denied the use of Duke Hall and crowded together again as parts of the main building were shut down.
The employees were in revolt. After twelve years of Henry George's easygoing temperament, Florence Barlow and head matron Lela Henley weren't ready to accept Daughtry's more autocratic management style. Even more critically, engineer Alexander
McFarlan had received another job offer, and without a raise he would be forced to leave. (The board quickly voted the talented man an extra $20 a month.)25
Daughtry drew up a plan for what needed to be taken care of, but Bennett Young had a bigger project to discuss. He needed Daughtry's toughness to help reverse the financial outlook at the Home. Despite deferring needed maintenance and reducing the number of meals, the Home was still operating at a deficit. Young and Daughtry would travel to Frankfort the following week in a plea to win yet another increase in the Home's appropriation. They would ask legislators to increase the Home's annual payment from $42,000 to a whopping $60,000.26
Incredibly, they succeeded.
After the state legislature passed the increased appropriation, Daughtry made ready to work on the maintenance, inmate, and employee problems he had identified. Before the acting commandant could pick up a hammer, however, Henry George wrote the board of trustees announcing his intention to return to work.
It was apparent to others that Henry George wasn't ready to return to work; he just needed someplace to go. The once-vigorous man was still frail and distracted. He wasn't happy living with his son in Louisville, and after twelve years in Pewee Valley he had no home or friends left in Graves County. As much as Bennett Young liked Henry George, Young knew that Charles Daughtry was the man who could whip things back into shape. So Young recommended a compassionate solution that would have unfortunate consequences for the Home.
The board wrote Henry George “to congratulate him on the improved condition of his health and express the appreciation of the board for the good and faithful services rendered in the past.” The board requested that he remain on leave of absence, but “continue to occupy his room at the Home” and “to stay at the Home as much as he possibly can.”27
My Old Confederate Home Page 22
