My Old Confederate Home (15 page)

And when the board of trustees finally opened the doors to the Kentucky Confederate Home, the ministering angels of the UDC flew in to provide luxuries and comforts for the old veterans. The women arrived at the Home with gifts of clothing, magazines, hard candies, fresh fruit, handkerchiefs, games, rocking chairs, and books. Women from the Paducah chapter staged monthly musicales for the veterans; the chapter in Winchester made deliveries of baked goods and special gifts. Within days of the formal opening, UDC member Virginia Sale—Daniel Parr's daughter—announced the formation of the Confederate Home Woman's Committee, an organization formed to “give all the sunshine possible to these men in their declining years.” The state's UDC chapters vied to provide amenities to the Confederate veterans residing in the Home.
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But in the first flush of excitement after the Home opened, the ministering angels seemed not to notice that many of the old men arriving in Pewee Valley—their “living heroes”—were too blind to read the books, too addled to enjoy the music, too sick to sit in rocking chairs.

“This Home is not intended to be a mere receptacle for men who are paupers,” said one of the speakers at the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home, “but as a comfortable, luxurious home for the honored ex-soldiers who are invalid.”
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Oratory surrounding the opening of the Kentucky Confederate Home (and the speeches that helped raise money to pay for it) described the elegance of the facility and the creature comforts to be showered on those who would live there.

“Here, with sheltering love, no want shall go unsupplied,” Bennett Young had promised. “Tender affection will anticipate every need.”
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From the public words of Young and his board members, Kentuckians could reasonably expect that the Home would be a sort of Cockaigne, a sugar-cake palace of luxurious and idle living where distinguished old Southern gentlemen lounged away their final days. But the realities of overcrowding, financial shortages, and the precarious physical condition of many of the inmates quickly eclipsed the rhetoric.

Living conditions at the Home were indeed far superior to those a destitute old Confederate veteran would encounter at countyoperated poorhouses or state asylums. (Residents of the Bath County poorhouse, for example, were forced to take their meals with criminals from the county jail, and a Clark County inmate, unable to tolerate conditions in the poorhouse there, attempted suicide by jumping headfirst into a rain barrel.) The state legislature would fail to pass a bill raising to $60 the annual mandatory minimum that Kentucky counties could spend on the care of each of their poorhouse inmates. Meanwhile, the state was paying $125 annually for each ex-Confederate inmate.
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But when the women of Kentucky's United Daughters of the Confederacy saw their Confederate Home in operation in the spring of 1903, they weren't happy.

Their immediate dissatisfaction arose from problems with the Home itself: insufficient water, poor sewerage disposal, irregular heating, poor food preparation, and tacky decor (not to mention the coarse deportment of the old inmates). Most women visitors could ignore (or were too modest to mention) the smell resulting from clogged sewer pipes (or the inmates' poor hygiene), and most were unaware of the periodic water shortages. But the lack of general cleanliness tempted many women to grab a mop and bucket and commence to swabbing tobacco stains from the floors or scrubbing handprints off the walls. One visitor, appalled at the quality of the evening meal, put on an apron and proceeded to instruct the cooks on how to properly boil fresh greens. The indignant woman left the kitchen only when escorted out by Commandant Coleman.

Of more serious concern was the poor health of the men residing in the Home.

“It has been demonstrated that the Home is to be a great infirmary,” Florence Barlow wrote to Kentucky UDC members in
The Lost Cause.
“Three-fourths of those who have been received have been unable to do anything for themselves.” Bennett Young was also frustrated by the quality of care, but financial constraints allowed no immediate solution. “The truth is, instead of a Home, we have a great infirmary,” he admitted to the board members. We must, he said, do something “to give these sick men at least the ordinary comforts that sick people are entitled to have.”
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The earliest arrivals at the Home were in many cases the most infirm; they were the ones most debilitated by tuberculosis, most crippled from stroke or lost limbs, most blinded by cataracts. Several upstairs rooms had been set aside as sick rooms, but there was no on-site professional medical care. Due to the expense, Commandant Coleman was reluctant to call for a doctor or send the men to a hospital except in the direst of circumstances, so the healthy inmates would carry the sick and dying from their beds each morning to chairs or daybeds in the warmer downstairs sitting rooms.

On June 3, 1903, the birthday of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a delegation of women—including Kentucky UDC president Mrs. James M. Arnold—arrived at the Home for a solemn ceremony, the conferring of the Southern Cross of Honor on ninety-two inmates. The Cross of Honor had been created by the UDC that year for living veterans, to recognize their “valorous service to the Southern Confederacy.” In dress uniform, those inmates who were ambulatory received their brass Cross of Honor pins in a ceremony held under the trees on the lawn of the Home. The UDC delegation then entered the Home, going room to room to pin the award on the blankets of those too ill to attend the outdoor event.

That afternoon the leadership of Kentucky's United Daughters of the Confederacy came face to face with conditions at the Kentucky Confederate Home, and they found the situation too dreadful to ignore. (“Perhaps the most pathetic service ever rendered by the chapter,” one woman described it.) By all reports, the Home was going from bad to worse.
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The women of the UDC had been content to do their daughterly duty as ministering angels to the sick old veterans, but it was past time to have a say in how the ministering was done and who was ministered to.

It was time for a woman's touch.

One woman in particular recognized that there was a fundamental difference in how the men of the UCV and the women of the UDC perceived their roles in the operation, management, and organization of the Home. She had bumped into that attitude before.

Almost a year earlier Henrietta Morgan Duke had negotiated—reasonably, she believed—with Bennett Young and Harry P. McDonald for the establishment of a woman's advisory board at the Home in exchange for $1,000 the board of trustees desperately needed to complete the purchase of the Pewee Valley property. Young backed out of the transaction at the last minute, apparently preferring to risk bankruptcy than give the Daughters a say in how the Home should be run. Had Young not reneged on the deal, the UDC would even now be helping to assure healthy meals, provide tender medical care, and maintain cleanliness. Instead, the allmale board seemed determined to turn the Kentucky Confederate Home into an overcrowded, disreputable boarding house, while ignoring some of the niceties that made for a respectable place to live.

Henrietta Duke made no public expression of resentment toward Young or the board of trustees for denying the women a role in managing the Home. (To take personal offense would have been unseemly for the wife and sister of beloved Confederate generals.) A woman as well-schooled in high society as Henrietta Morgan Duke could communicate far more clearly with a raised eyebrow, a knowing smile, or between the lines of chatty letters to other UDC chapter members throughout Kentucky. “Is it right and fair, in your opinion,” she asked, that women be deprived of having a say in the operation of the Home?
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Henrietta Duke thought it was not.

Mary Bascom of Owingsville agreed. It was an issue she had discussed with her husband, and they agreed that the presence of women living in the Home would exert a healthy influence on the men there. “The Daughters had better band together” and buy land adjacent to the Home, she wrote her cousin, who was a member of another UDC chapter. “Put the wives of indigent Confederates on it and keep it as UDC property.”

Mary Bascom expressed a concern noted by women in other UDC chapters: the wives of married men who had been admitted to the Home were left to fend for themselves or live off the charity of others. If there were a place for wives in Pewee Valley, she argued, those women could help care for their husbands and also by their presence reduce ungentlemanly behavior by unmarried inmates.

Mary Bascom was a small-town woman who lacked the elegance and subtlety of Henrietta Duke. She was as plain-spoken and direct as her stockman husband, and she had no problem expressing dissatisfaction with Bennett Young: “There has been no provision made for the wives,” she said, “although General Bennett H. Young promised last winter that should be embodied in the bill that passed the last legislature. So I think the veterans will not do anything for us.” She urged her cousin to “bring this to the attention of your chapter, and see what they have to say about the matter.”
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After the Cross of Honor ceremony at the Home, UDC chapters around the state began to agitate for greater involvement of women in the Home. Some felt that a management or oversight role was the most effective solution; others thought that opening the Home to women residents was the best course.

Henrietta Morgan Duke and Mary Bascom would contribute to the compromise that resulted in The Motion.

The women believed that their large cash donations and active service entitled them to a say in the management of the Home; the men of the board felt that efficient management was men's business, best handled by men. Even so, Bennett Young had to admit that things weren't going well.

Board members were taking a beating in Kentucky's ex-Confederate community over their stewardship of the Home. It was embarrassing enough to hear from friends in the UCV camps, but they also had to answer to wives who had heard of the problems through their UDC chapters. Worse still, friendly newspaper publishers were beginning to spread the word that things weren't right at the Kentucky Confederate Home. Everyone was looking to Bennett Young for answers, and on September 2 he responded with a private letter to the board of trustees.
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“It is now certain that the nature and character of the Confederate Home has been entirely misconceived by those who originated it,” he admitted. “It was believed at the time that it would be a home; instead it is practically an infirmary.” He acknowledged that medical care for the inmates wasn't all it should be: “There ought to be a physician in the Home, and there ought to be two trained nurses constantly on service. These things, of course, cannot be secured now.”

To ease overcrowding and the dearth of available sickbeds, Young recommended that the board act to rent the house on an adjoining property to house the sick.

He lamented the increasing discipline problems: “There has been quite a large amount of drinking. Numerous inmates of the Home have been found in a drunken condition, not only on the streets of Louisville but in Pewee Valley and the Home itself.”

“We have all probably been carried away by sentimental notions as to what was due Confederate soldiers,” he said to the board members. Even so, Young assured them, the general public continued to support the Home and the good work it was intended to accomplish.

To prove his point, he described a woman from Cincinnati, a former Kentuckian, who wanted to provide new bookcases, armchairs, lamps, a sofa, and carpeting for the inmate library. Biscoe Hindman, a well-to-do insurance man, had offered to pay for a monument to Confederate dead on the grounds of the Home. And Dr. Dudley Reynolds, a Louisville optician and Union army veteran, was treating the vision problems of inmates at no cost.

“The people of Kentucky have responded nobly to the call made upon them,” Young reassured the board of trustees. “While there has been some criticism and some friction as a result of these contributions, yet without them the work of this board would have been impossible.”

Uncharacteristically, Young neither took responsibility for nor offered a solution to the problems at the Kentucky Confederate Home. Instead, he seemed to express a willingness to tender his resignation if the board asked for it.

“All these matters are merely suggestive on the part of the president,” he told the members, referring to himself in the third person. “He lays them before the board for its action and for the expression of its judgment in all things.”

For the time being, the judgment of the board was to continue accepting applications and hope for the best.

The judgment of the delegates to the seventh annual state convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy meeting in Owensboro, however, was to act on The Motion.

The second day of the Kentucky UDC annual meeting began with a continuation of chapter reports, committee reports, and memorial tributes read by well-mannered women in large hats. Shortly before lunch, state president Arnold asked if any new business was to be brought before the convention.

Mary Bascom, representing the Bath County chapter, rose to her feet. She had written the words of The Motion in her slanted scrawl on the paper she had in her hand, but she had no difficulty reading it aloud to the women assembled.

“We hereby move that a committee be formed to …”

Mary Bascom, Henrietta Morgan Duke, and other women representing UDC chapters from across the state had decided it was time for women to take a more active role in the management of the Kentucky Confederate Home. The motion presented that morning in Owensboro called for a committee to be “composed of Daughters from different sections of the state” to meet at once with Governor Beckham, asking him to appoint an auxiliary board of trustees, a board consisting of women who would have sole responsibility for the health care, food, and entertainment needs of the inmates of the Kentucky Confederate Home. The same statewide committee would meet with state assemblymen, urging them to require that the Home be opened to aged wives and widows of veterans, who would live in cottages paid for by the UDC.
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