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Confederate veterans’ organizations that was beginning to occur throughout the South as veterans aged and their needs increased. The new Louisville association would certainly serve a social purpose, but its membership was sworn to aid, honor, and support their less fortunate comrades.
    The veterans who chartered the Confederate Association of Kentucky were lawyers, physicians, legislators, educators, judges, bankers, and business owners. They were members of Louisville's commercial and social elite and could certainly afford the association's $5.00 initiation fee—the equivalent of a week's wages for a factory worker—and dues of $1.00 at every meeting. The organization's money would not be spent on elaborate banquets and bands, however. Instead, the funds would be banked (at Leathers's bank, of course) in separate accounts, with initiation fees designated for relief and dues used to pay the group's minimal operating expenses. From time to time, amounts not used for organizational expenses would be moved into the Relief Fund. The Confederate Association of Kentucky was strict about spending its money on relief and not revelry. During its first nine years the group collected $7,500, spending all but $425 on relief and memorial work. 16
    The association's bylaws empowered the officers of the organization—including Eastin, Leathers, and Osborne—to examine applicants for need and worthiness, then make their recommendations for assistance to an executive committee.
    When Billy Beasley, disabled and destitute at forty-eight years of age, arrived in Louisville with his two-year-old daughter in the humid summer of 1889, no public assistance program was available to him. But Beasley and his family would receive the help of some of Louisville's most prominent citizens.
    P. H. Tapp, John Leathers's former partner in the clothing business and a native Alabaman, may have introduced Billy Beasley to the banker. Or perhaps Beasley wrote his own letter of introduction to Leathers, who was fast becoming one of the most prominent ex-Confederates in the state.
    By whatever means the introduction occurred, Beasley and Leathers met at Leathers's office off the main lobby of the Louisville Banking Company in November 1889. Beasley needed help, and Leathers would give a serious hearing to any man who had worn the gray.
    Leathers and Beasley had been born just two months apart. Both grew up practicing a trade, and both might have lived fulfilling lives as tradesmen had not the war intervened. But in 1889 it would be difficult to find two men more different.
    Leathers stood tall. Freshly barbered, with his made-to-order suit and shined shoes with thin leather soles, he radiated the vitality of a successful capitalist in the process of building a New South. The cork soles of Beasley's shoes scuffed across the floor as he hobbled into Leathers's corner office. He was bent at the waist, barely able to look Leathers in the eye, a secondhand derby in his hand.
    The first order of business between the two men was to establish Beasley's bona fides as a Confederate veteran: date of enlistment, units served, marches, encampments, and, finally, the battle that put a ball through Beasley's hip. Beasley produced his discharge and parole papers.
    Discussion then turned to Beasley's need for assistance and his worthiness for relief.
    The bent man told of his years since the war: constant pain, increasing disability, a growing familiarity with alcohol, and the loss of job after job. Like a guilty traveler emptying his suitcase before a customs inspector, the Alabaman laid out the sad highlights of his life story for Leathers.
    Beasley had married for the first time in Nashville three years before. She was a churchgoing woman for whom Beasley had forsaken alcohol completely, but his bride had died in childbirth. Now, with hands too tremorous and brain too slow to find employment sorting type for a printer, the crippled veteran was left with a