My Old Confederate Home Read Online Free Page A

be read aloud and approved section by section.
    John Weller, a local attorney and former Confederate infantry captain, began his reading with Article I: “This association shall be known as ‘The Confederate Association of Kentucky.’”
    Within three hours the constitution of the new association had been debated and approved. Most of the debate centered around such extraneous items as the meeting schedule—four times annually “on the second Monday of April, July, October and January”—and the means by which men who had brought dishonor on the Confederacy could be excluded—”five black balls shall reject any application” for membership.
    Article II remained just as Leathers and his committee had drafted it. The first object of the association, the constitution read, “shall be the cultivation of social relationships” and “to preserve the fraternal ties of comradeship.” But the organization also pledged to “aid and assist those of the members who, from disease, misfortune or the infirmities of age, may become incapable of supporting themselves or families,” to “pay a decent respect to the remains and to the memory of those who die,” and to “see that no worthy Confederate shall ever become an object of public charity.”
    Much of the rest of the document was organizational boilerplate, but Article IX had been inserted at Leathers's suggestion: “This association shall have power to receive and hold any property, real, personal or mixed, that may be donated by any person for the use of the relief fund or for other purposes of the association.”
    The wording was sufficiently vague so that the article caused little comment on the evening of ratification; but this single paragraph would—more than a decade later—allow for the establishment of the Kentucky Confederate Home.
    The proposed constitution was ratified unanimously.
    The next bit of business for the evening was the election of officers. Reading from a sheet that had been prepared for him, Judge Jackson nominated Eastin for president, Leathers for vice-president, and newspaper editor Thomas D. Osborne for secretary. The slate was approved by acclamation.
    At the end of the evening sixty-eight men answered the first roll call, affixed their signatures to the new constitution, then turned and saluted their new officers. They were the charter members of Louisville's new Confederate Association of Kentucky.
    In the aftermath of the war, some veterans wished never to speak of it again. Others sought to regain the comradeship of others who, like them, had faced the cannon and have the chance to share stories of their wartime experiences.
    The South's surviving upper class—the more affluent, the better educated, the least affected by lasting hardships—were forming the first regional veterans’ clubs almost before the ink dried at Appomattox. The Army of Northern Virginia Association was organized in 1870, its membership consisting primarily of Robert E. Lee's former staff officers. There was the Society of the Army and Navy of the Confederate States, a Society of Ex-Confederate Soldiers and Sailors, and even an Association of Medical Officers of the Army and Navy of the Confederacy. 14
    The Association of the Army of Tennessee (AAT), founded in 1877, provided an opportunity for well-heeled veterans to meet in a different city each year for extravagant banquets, cigars, music, and evenings of drunken storytelling. (The bill of fare from one of these banquets lists a choice of ten wild game entrees, eight oyster dishes, and fourteen desserts.) 15
    Though these early organizations may have espoused noble ideals, most were elitist in their membership and were formed for little more than social purposes. Few expanded beyond their regional roots.
    The founding of Louisville's Confederate Association of Kentucky in 1888, however, marked a change in the nature of