“There was never such a band of men on the face of the earth before, and there never will be again. While they are living give them a decent home, and when dead put a marble shaft over their last resting place. This is our duty.”
From an editorial in the Laurens County (S.C.) News, quoted in the August 1900 Confederate Veteran magazine.
Beginning in the 1880s, organizations throughout the South embarked on an effort to create facilities for indigent and infirm Confederate veterans. Soldiers’ homes were eventually established in all eleven Confederate states and the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. A home also served veterans in Oklahoma, where many southerners migrated, and – believe it or not – in Los Angeles, where a few others settled.
Over three-quarters of a million men served in the Confederate army and navy. The number of survivors exceeded half a million. These warworn soldiers returned home to rebuild their lives and their country. The vast majority were successful, despite the post-war poverty that gripped the South, and (for tens of thousands) despite the long-term effects of serious wounds.
Many, however, needed help. Their more fortunate countrymen stepped into the breach.
In every instance, private entities took the lead. Organizations of veterans and Confederate women sought donations, bought land and erected buildings.
After a four-year effort to raise funds, the Lee Camp Soldiers’ Home in Richmond opened its doors in 1888. Texans, inspired by Virginia’s plan, started later but succeeded sooner: the Texas Confederate Home for Men admitted is first inmates in 1886. (The term “inmate” is used almost exclusively in the Confederate Veteran articles and bears no negative connotation.) In 1893 the Confederate Association of Florida announced in the Confederate Veteran that it had
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bought land near Jacksonville and would soon have ready for the state’s veterans “a home…they may be proud of.”
Some of the donations came from unexpected quarters. Ulysses Grant contributed $500 for the Virginia home; a Vermont veteran gave $1,200. The citizens of Quincy, Ill., donated funds for one of the cottages at the Missouri home. The Georgia home received a donation from the state’s Reconstruction governor, Rufus Bullock. In 1902 the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic issued an appeal to Union veterans to donate to Confederate soldiers’ homes. (The editor of the Confederate Veteran published a letter that mentioned this appeal but said he was confident that Confederates were “too proud to accept alms…in the manner proposed.”)
It was time to let bygones be bygones, even if the editor of the Veteran thought otherwise.
A relatively small number of men (perhaps a total of 18,000) would rely on these homes, but even so, the costs proved too onerous for private resources. The veterans and the women soon called on the states for support. Eventually all the states did so; however, the expenditure of public funds for soldiers’ homes was often controversial.
One would think that state governments would not hesitate to render aid to the poor and aging veterans. However, in the opinion of many, such expenditures violated state constitutions. Some legislators and their constituents opposed this kind of welfare in principle, believing that it encouraged sloth among those who could and should support themselves. States faced numerous fiscal challenges and were reluctant to assume another burden. Some Unionists from East Tennessee opposed using their tax money to support the men they fought. As the states already provided pensions, some legislators believed that distributing the aid in money was a superior method than providing support in homes. In Georgia, numerous contentious issues took a decade to resolve, a decade in which the home stood vacant.
The state of Texas took over the home in Austin in 1891 after the state constitution was amended to authorize the appropriation. States sometimes insisted on title to the real estate in return for their support and agreement to use the property as soldiers’ homes as long as they were needed. Supporters in Kentucky and Virginia considered the terms harsh and expressed some resentment, but agreed.
It is noteworthy that the state of Maryland provided support for that state’s home earlier than its neighbors to the south opened their coffers.
The political difficulties were overcome and eventually all the homes were operated as government institutions. As time passed the state legislatures of necessity became more generous. By the 1920s the inmates were very old indeed, and required more expensive care than did the inmates in the 1890s.
Several of the homes were designed with residential cottages surrounding a central building with offices and rooms for common use. Others were built as hotel-like structures which contained living quarters as well as other facilities. The Kentucky home was, in fact, a converted hotel.
Some homes were working farms. In Kentucky, the land was planted in corn, wheat, oats, alfalfa, red clover and Irish potatoes. In Oklahoma, the inmates had an orchard and a dairy and grew corn and melons.
The descriptions of the facilities could make them seem like a nice summer camp. A summary of the plans for the Florida home contains this appealing image: “The tract contains ten acres of land, with orange and other fruit trees. On the riverfront will be placed a commodious bath house, and boats…for fishing.”
The reports in the Confederate Veteran often emphasize the homes’ modern amenities – libraries, steam heat, laundry, dining halls, electricity, chapels, hot water, infirmaries and hospitals. These articles invariably praise the efficiency, dedication and kindness of the homes’ superintendents and staff.
While the advocates for the homes stressed the duty owed by the states to the indigent and disabled, whose plight was often directly related to their service to the Confederacy, not all the inmates were destitute. The large Texas institution was home to “all classes of men – farmers, mechanics, lawyers, judges, doctors, teachers, preachers and a few hobos.” The hobos were there because by necessity; the judges must have preferred to live out their lives in the company of old comrades-in-arms. A 1923 article on the history of the Alabama home tells us that the veterans “come from all walks of life; some have occupied high positions is Church, State, society and business.”
The homes were more than facilities to care for old soldiers: they were living links to the Confederate past. The opening of a home could be a grand occasion. Some 10,000 people attended the dedication of the Kentucky home in Pewee Valley. The Missouri Division of the U.D.C. purchased uniforms to fit out the inmates in Higginsville. Today we would call it living history. Marble statues stood at county courthouses, but at the soldiers’ homes schoolchildren could see and hear fleshand-blood memorials in Confederate gray.
The many articles on soldiers’ homes published in the Confederate Veteran from the 1880s to the 1920s are invariably positive in tone, stressing the comfortable accommodations, the ample food, and the tender care provided by the staff. We read of regular visits by members of the U.D.C.; of musical entertainment and theatrical performances; of contented old men playing cards and checkers on the veranda; of orchards and gardens; of well-stocked libraries and Sabbath services.
There are occasional hints of trouble, but these reports are largely dismissed. A member of the Board of Lady Visitors to the Maryland home wrote that “An occasional complaint from some malcontent comes to the ears of the Visitors, who inquire into the matter, and nearly always find that there is no foundation.” A report from the Texas U.C.V.’s inspector expresses a similar sentiment: “A few complaints come from those who would doubtless be dissatisfied under any conditions of restraint by which they could be surrounded.” Other items in the Veteran referred to arguments over games of checkers or differing recollections of the battles fought decades before. The reader gets a rather comic impression of good-natured quarrels among harmless old men.
However, the only comprehensive study of soldiers’ homes indicates that the quarrels could be more serious, even violent; that more than a few inmates had serious and well-founded gripes; and that discipline was often a major issue. By necessity, these homes had rules governing the behavior of the inmates. The soldiers may have been old and infirm, but often they were high-spirited, disruptive, and resentful of quasi-military regulations. Drunkenness; fighting; refusal to work; drug use (opioids, really!); insubordination; flirting with, harassing and propositioning the female staff; and (in one case) “cohabiting with negro wenches.” Boys will be boys, even if they are in their 70s. Inmates were subject to various kinds of discipline, up to and including expulsion with a dishonorable discharge.
Some of the flirting and consorting were not dishonorable in character. Some of the homes also housed Confederate women and were sometimes the scene of December-December romances and weddings. Perhaps the presence of women and the toll of advancing years had a civilizing influence on the veterans.
A Confederate soldiers’ home would typically house between 50 and 150 veterans at a given time. The Texas home at one point held 400.
When the soldiers’ home movement began, the younger Confederates were in their late 40s and the older men in their 60s. Since the homes were built to provide for the veterans of a single conflict, their need was temporary. By the 1920s and 1930s the few remaining inmates were ancient men. The end was rapidly approaching for these living relics. As the old soldiers faded away so did their communal homes. All were closed in the 1930s and early 1940s. The properties were sold or put to other uses by the states. The sites of most soldiers’ homes now contain little evidence that the facilities were ever there. They are the locations of police stations, parking lots and government or commercial buildings.
In three cases, however, the homes were preserved after the last inmates died. In Mississippi, the site of the soldiers’ home at Jefferson Davis’ Beauvoir has been preserved by the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans as a shrine to the Confederacy’s president. Two state governments have preserved their homes as Confederate memorials. Missouri’s Confederate Memorial State Historic Site in Higginsville displays historic buildings, a restored chapel, and – of course – a cemetery. Alabama’s home in Mountain Creek is now Confederate Memorial Park, a beautiful site with historic structures, a research facility and two cemeteries.
In the larger of the two Mountain Creek cemeteries is buried Jefferson Manly Falkner, the founder of the Alabama home. The burial ground’s oldest and newest graves are nearby. A 1906 grave contains the remains of Pvt. Ezekiel A. Wimberly of the Third Alabama Infantry Regiment, which fought in the Eastern Theater from Seven Pines to Appomattox. In a 1928 grave rests Pvt. James Dallas Rudd of the Fifty-seventh Alabama, which fought in the Atlanta Campaign, suffered heavy losses at Franklin and Nashville, and surrendered at Bentonville.
Visit the cemetery and stand at these tombs. You may hear faint voices coming from the ground, those of Zeke and Jim, telling you, as they told other visitors long ago, of Gordon’s counterattack at Spotsylvania and of the mammoth explosion at the Crater, of the night attack at Pickett’s Mill and of the desperate struggle at the Carter House.
Sources and further reading: Much information here is taken from issues of the Confederate Veteran magazine ranging from 1893 to 1929. The author will provide a list of articles on request. Another source, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South by R.B. Rosenburg (University of North Carolina Press, 1995) is the only comprehensive book published on the subject.