My Old Confederate Home

by Rusty Williams

  Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop, but a good word maketh it glad. White threw himself into reading, more Bible study, and preaching. Called to the Baptist church of Carlisle, he was an enthusiastic minister who could parse a single Pauline sentence for hours from the pulpit. Thin and loose-limbed, his blue eyes blazing with the Holy Spirit, White had a clear sense of Christian right and wrong, and was never too reserved to rejoice with the saints and cry with the sinners.

  He was a joiner, a tireless handshaker always on the lookout for another soul to bring to Jesus. He was a member of the local Commercial Club and the county United Confederate Veterans camp. (He avoided the secret societies, however, believing them to be clandestine organizations with un-Christian loyalties.)

  The Reverend Dr. A. N. White was an exceptionally smart man; too smart, perhaps, for small-town Baptists who wanted their Gospel dispensed in easy-to-understand doses. Though inadvertent, White's scholarly condescension and evangelical pushiness could become irritating to plainer people.

  He spent the last two decades of the nineteenth century preaching at and organizing a series of increasingly smaller Baptist churches in central Kentucky, a career not especially conspicuous, but not entirely obscure.

  In 1896 a fall exacerbated an old war wound, and his left hip crumbled like chalk.

  “When misfortune overtook me and I became physically incapacitated for earning the means of support,” he wrote, “I was compelled to ask for the protection and benefits of this Home.”

  Bespectacled Salem Ford welcomed him to the Home on January 12, 1903, ten weeks after it opened. Ford arranged for the crippled preacher to receive a new wood-and-wicker rolling chair, and White—never one to be lost in the bitter smoke of regret—embarked on the next stage of his ministerial career.

  By 1920 A. N. White had lived in the Kentucky Confederate Home for seventeen years, longer than any other inmate. White wrote the petition to retain Salem Ford, the Home's first superintendent, but Commandant Coleman considered the old preacher obstructive and impertinent (and one Home matron termed him “a meddler, a sneak and a hypocrite”). Commandant Henry George, however, enjoyed talking the Bible with White, and used him to organize religious activities in the new Duke Hall, with White scheduling visiting ministers, selecting hymnals, and inviting evangelists. (White desperately wanted to be named chaplain of the Home, but Bennett Young resisted the idea.)8

  Chaplain or not, White was doing the Lord's work among the old veterans of the Kentucky Confederate Home.

  W. T. Calmes was a retired bachelor schoolteacher diagnosed with cancer shortly after arriving in the Home. He asked White to accompany him on trips to Louisville for treatment. Calmes had no close family, and White visited his sickroom daily, telling the invalid stories and helping Calmes with his final correspondence. At the end, Calmes greeted death holding White's hand and comforted by an assurance of everlasting life. The funeral of W. T. Calmes was one of dozens White preached in Duke Hall at the request of dying inmates.

  White also wrote obituaries for his fellow inmates, providing dying men of little accomplishment the opportunity to look at their lives and organize their thoughts about what it all meant. In the obituaries he wrote, White would recount a veteran's war record on behalf of the Lost Cause, but it pleased him most to add that the subject “was no less loyal to his convictions as a soldier of Jesus Christ.”9

  Having outlasted three commandants and outlived three hundred inmates, White could be excused some officiousness. He could be high-handed with Home employees, and he had little patience for official ignorance or sloth. When caught in a transgression, he could affect the air of an injured innocent, a simple minister trying to do God's will.

  Commandant Daughtry was certain that the sanctimonious preacher in the wheelchair was feeding tales of impropriety and mismanagement to Charlotte Woodbury, Mrs. Stone, Judge Crowe, and Florence Barlow. Shortly before the fire, he caught White helping inmate Pearce B. Bohannon draft an affidavit alleging mismanagement and brought charges, but White's attorney and a court order thwarted the expulsion.10

  For more than a decade White had scheduled local ministers to preach weekly in the Home. Without giving notice to White, however, Daughtry started bringing in his own ministers to preach in the same place at the same time.

  “On one occasion the Commandant brought in a preacher from Louisville after the services had begun,” White later testified. Daughtry “interrupted the preacher present and the Louisville man preached.”

  The preacher who was interrupted that day—the man who witnessed Daughtry's petty action and White's humiliation—was the Reverend Father George W. Dow, new rector of St. James's Episcopal Church.11

  Father Dow was new to the friendly little church across the road from the Home, new to Pewee Valley, and new to Kentucky. Father McAllister had retired from the ministry shortly after the Home fire, and George W. Dow took the pulpit in April 1921. Pewee Valley vestrymen had called Dow from a diocese in New York, where he had been an activist clergyman with a working-class parish.

  Dow grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, but he was hardly the cold codfish-and-molasses Yankee many expected him to be. Instead, he was a round, balding, jolly man who never rationed his smiles. Growing up, Dow had heard war stories from the many GAR members in Lowell, and he was intrigued to be living near 150 old Confederate veterans.

  Shortly after Dow's arrival, White wheeled himself across the road from the Home to welcome the new pastor and his wife, and the fifty-three-year-old Episcopalian was charmed by the seventy-six-year-old wheelchair-bound Baptist minister from Mississippi. Both men were well read, and White especially appreciated the company of another educated theologian. Dow loved White's stories of Kentucky's different religious sects, particularly the energetic Primitive Baptists. (Episcopalians, Dow joked, were known as God's Frozen People.) The two men shared a special appreciation for the Book of Proverbs and would recite alternating verses until Dow's wife made them stop. (“A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,” White reminded Dow.)

  In short order, the reverend and the rector became fast friends.

  Dow soon began hearing disturbing stories from White, other inmates, and his parishioners about poor conditions and mistreatment in the Home. In his own visits to the Home, Dow observed inmates wearing ragged uniforms for want of a seamstress, sour milk served at mealtime, dirty bedpans left next to food trays on infirmary tables, and sick men left to moan in pain all night because there was no night nurse.

  And he witnessed White's humiliation at the hands of the smallminded commandant.

  Dow had seen his share of oppressive bosses and petty tyrants in the factories of his old parish, and he was rarely shocked by bad intentions. He quietly convened a meeting of others troubled by conditions at the Kentucky Confederate Home. For the first time, Daughtry's accusers gathered to build a dossier documenting the commandant's mismanagement, misdeeds, and neglect.

  Aware that John Leathers's earlier hearing had exonerated Daughtry due to lack of direct evidence, the group chose to compile a document consisting only of sworn eyewitness testimony. Mrs. Stone, president of the Confederate Home UDC chapter, alleged that substandard food was served to inmates and only one meal a day was available on Sunday. Florence Barlow wrote of seeing Daughtry and his young bookkeeper together in compromising situations. Former Home physician Dr. Rowan B. Pryor documented cases of prescriptions ignored and special food orders disregarded. Matron Lela Henley described Daughtry's erratic behavior and her unwarranted discharge. Ten inmates, including White, prepared sworn affidavits with details of mistreatment and neglect. The dossier also cited several cases of inmates discharged from the Home without justification or due process.

  Reminding himself that by truth and mercy is inequity purged, Father Dow wrote a covering letter and attached it to the dossier. “Local feeling toward the management is ready to break in a storm of scandal,” he warned in his letter.12

  The storm of scan
dal broke in May 1921 when Dow's cover letter and the dossier landed on Governor Edwin P. Morrow's desk and the front pages of Kentucky's newspapers.

  Governor Morrow was a Coolidge Republican who owed nothing to the old ex-Confederate Democratic constituency, but he had run on a platform of amputating corruption and patronage from Kentucky's charitable and penal institutions. Statewide headlines triggered by the dossier—and perhaps a desire to demonstrate his commitment to nonpolitical boards of control—spurred Morrow to launch an investigation of the charges against Daughtry and the Kentucky Confederate Home. On June 7 he directed State Inspector and Examiner Henry E. James to delve into the allegations.13

  For weeks, as Inspector James conducted his public investigation, newspaper columns were awash with charges, countercharges, claims, and lurid speculation. Florence Barlow, Mrs. Stone, and Father Dow repeated their charges to reporters; Dr. Pryor, Lela Henley, and other former employees were hounded for details of Daughtry's relationship with “a defenseless orphan girl” (as newspapers described the twenty-two-year-old Imogene Nall).14 John Leathers mounted a public and resolute defense of the Home's board of trustees—never mentioning Daughtry by name.

  Back in Frankfort, Inspector James was proving to be a hamfisted investigator with the instincts of a street cop. He compiled a list of more than 119 names of everyone mentioned in either news accounts or the dossier (including seventy of the old inmates) and swore out subpoenas for each. Using sheriff's deputies from Jefferson and Oldham counties, he surprised his witnesses with visits at their residences and requests for immediate depositions. At the Home, James brought the old inmates one by one into a room and questioned them in front of a state attorney and Commandant Daughtry. Most of the witnesses were rattled and unprepared; the frightened inmates were suddenly deaf and blind to anything that may or may not have occurred around them.15

  James's final report, forwarded to Governor Morrow in midsummer, did more to excoriate the accusers than answer the charges.

  “It is a regrettable fact,” James reported to the governor, “that a rebellion has sprung up among some eight or ten inmates of the Home led by the Rev. A. N. White, an inmate, and a dozen or more discharged employees.” He wrote off Dow and other Pewee Valley residents as “a half-dozen good and well-meaning, but deceived and misled people.”

  In the details of his report, however, James validated many of the claims of the original dossier.

  The inspector admitted that, while the inmates received only one meal a day on Sunday and that he had earlier recommended otherwise, the inmates themselves were accepting of the situation and “they always took something to their rooms from the table at noon.”

  Yes, James wrote, there were some problems with the freshness of the food on the days he inspected the Home. “Relative to the milk, it is proper to say that the ice supply was so reduced for a few days that the milk could not at all times be kept sweet.”

  As for the charge that inmates had been discharged from the Home without notice or trial, Inspector James wrote, “The minutes of the Board of Trustees show, and the Board admits, that in some cases this charge is true.”

  James acknowledged that, at seventy-four years old, Daughtry naturally made errors and failed to use perfect tact or diplomacy, but “there is not sufficient proof to justify the charge that he is unkind, crabbed, partial or temperamentally unfit to manage an institution of this kind.”

  Only Imogene Nall remained white as a church lily. For all his subpoenas, depositions, and interrogations, Inspector James—like John Leathers before him—found no absolute, ironclad, firsthand evidence of a dalliance between Daughtry and Nall. (“Your good name remains untarnished and clean,” Leathers wrote her after the report was released.)

  Newspaper headline writers, apparently, never got beyond the report's one-page summary when they wrote: “Report Approves of Conduct of Home” and “Col. Daughtry Is Exonerated.”

  The matter should have ended there, but Father George W. Dow would not allow the reputation of his Confederate friend to be smeared.16 “I cannot allow this published report to go unchallenged,” he wrote in August to newspaper editors in Louisville, Frankfort, and Lexington.

  Dow's righteous defense of “such a sweet-natured Christian gentleman as the Reverend Dr. A. N. White” was everything a friend could desire. The rector defended White's motives while questioning those of Inspector James. He described unsanitary conditions that still existed at the Home and faulted James for his intimidating interrogations of inmates at the Home. “There are many ways to make helpless men uncomfortable when they are not in the good graces of those in authority,” he wrote.

  The inspector's response to Dow's “vicious attack” appeared in newspapers three days later. “I am thoroughly convinced of his insincerity in his latest attack,” James snarled. “Mr. Dow is either ignorant of the facts or seeks to purposely mislead or deceive the public.”17

  This sulfurous personal attack provoked still others to write in defense of Father Dow.

  In the end, all the charges and countercharges, claims and counterclaims, finally faded away to nothing, as Kentuckians eventually grew sick of the story and the press wandered off in search of fresher meat.

  Kentucky's memories of the candlelit days of sixty years before were fading like old photographs, and—except when drawn by stories of disaster or scandal—the public was becoming indifferent to the veterans of the Kentucky Confederate Home. It was the 1920s, and the state was hurtling into a frenetic decade of new roads, rural electrification, installment buying, general prosperity, and rampant optimism. In this modern age the bewhiskered old relics of America's Civil War were little but museum curios.

  On May 30, 1923, twenty-four veterans from the Kentucky Confederate Home, accompanied by Commandant Daughtry, left Pewee Valley on the electric car to participate in Louisville's first Memorial Day observance for veterans of all American wars. Blue sky and sunshine promised a perfect day for the massive parade that was planned, down Broadway to ceremonies at the National Military Cemetery.18

  Dress uniforms clean and creased, the ex-Confederates, having arrived at the rail station, formed in two lines for a short walk to the Armory, where they would join in the parade with Spanish War veterans, American Legionnaires, GAR members, Kentucky National Guardsmen, and other men who had borne arms in defense of their nation.

  The Confederate veterans unfurled their colors—Stars and Stripes in the place of honor at the head of the right-hand column, Stars and Bars on the left—for the march up Fourth Street to the parade assembly point. Pedestrians on their way to the parade stopped to gawk at the old fellows and, recognizing who they were by their uniforms and banner, broke into applause and delighted cheers. Men removed straw boaters and waved them in the air. Office workers, drawn to open windows by the noise on the street, looked down and shouted encouragement. Children danced along behind the shuffling veterans as if following a circus parade, and the old men's steps grew crisp when Daughtry began calling cadence. Brass uniform buttons, polished with care the night before, gleamed in the sunlight as the proud old men marched several blocks up Fourth Street behind their side-by-side flags.19

  John W. Hammond, chairman of the parade arrangements committee, intercepted Daughtry at the assembly area before the Confederate veterans could join the parade. Hammond told the ex-Confederates that the group would not be allowed to march in the main parade with the Confederate Stars and Bars.

  “One God, one country, one flag,” Hammond told them.

  The inmates took a hurried vote; the result was unanimous. The Confederate veterans folded both flags and walked back to the station for an early return to Pewee Valley.

  That short march along Fourth Street on Memorial Day 1923 was the last time veterans of the Kentucky Confederate Home would march in public under the folds of their old banner.

  The allegations by Father George Dow, the Reverend Alexander White, and others sparked the meanest, most personal dispute in the his
tory of the Kentucky Confederate Home, and the consequences touched almost everyone involved.

  A few concerned citizens, including Florence Barlow and Father Dow, convinced state representative Mary Flannery to introduce legislation disbanding the Home's board of trustees. Fifty-three Pewee Valley residents, many of them Father Dow's parishioners, successfully petitioned other legislators to kill the bill.20

  John H. Leathers was too smart to consider the rancor of recent years a verdict on the four decades—half his life—spent tending to the welfare of Confederate comrades, but the controversy and public bitterness must have sucked away the old banker's remaining energy. A lingering summer cold turned into pneumonia and took his life on June 29, 1923.21

  Charles L. Daughtry, too, was hurt and weakened by three years of allegations and acrimony. He died on July 31, 1923, after a short illness. Confederate veterans escorted Daughtry's body to Bowling Green and his wife, who had never relocated to Pewee Valley with her husband. Imogene Nall did not attend the funeral service.22

  Meeting after Daughtry's death, the board of trustees could find no Confederate veteran of sufficient stamina or health to manage the Home. On August 3, 1923, they turned to the Home's longtime engineer, fifty-five-year-old Alexander S. McFarlan, giving command of the Home for the first time to someone who had not been a Confederate veteran.23

  McFarlan's appointment received scant notice outside Pewee Valley and the community of ex-Confederates, but the application for admission by a black man from Bourbon County threatened to put the Kentucky Confederate Home back on the front pages.

  The issue of black Confederate veterans was an awkward one for ex-Confederates at the beginning of the twentieth century (and remains a contentious one even now).

  While it is certain that some black men marched with, bivouacked with, and even fought with Confederate troops, those black men were—virtually without exception—doing so at the direction of the white men who enslaved them, a fact conveniently overlooked by most Southerners in the years after the war. Ignoring the issue of slavery, Lost Cause adherents painted the Civil War as a sectional conflict where strong-willed Southerners, wishing to retain their agrarian independence, vainly defended their homeland against Northern aggressors. The Lost Cause was a common cause for all Southerners, they said, and as proof they publicly (but only figuratively) embraced men of color who marched with the Southern Confederacy.