General Jo Shelby's March

PART ONE

The Call to Arms

1830–65

Chapter One

From Privileged Youth to Border Ruffian

In the early 1850s, a dozen years before he crossed into Mexico, nothing could have compelled Jo Shelby to leave the world of privilege and wealth into which he had been born. Well before his birth, the Shelby name was a famous one in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, denoting a numerous, widespread, and very successful clan. A common ancestor from Wales, Evan Shelby, had arrived in Pennsylvania in 1735 with his wife and four sons. Evan set the tone for the strain of violence and eccentric independence that would emerge in some of his progeny: Presiding at a wedding in Maryland, he blessed the couple by saying “Jump Dog, Leap Bitch, and I’ll be damned if all the Men on Earth can unmarry you.” He also threatened to “job a fork into the Gutts” of the groom when he showed signs of backing out. Evan’s energetic sons soon moved west and south, becoming wealthy entrepreneurs and men of property along the Appalachian frontier. His second son, David, sowed crops and begat children, eleven in all; the ninth of these was Orville, Jo’s father, born in 1803. Orville’s short life was shadowed by illness, but he had a golden touch when it came to business and marriage. His first wife was an heiress who died young and left him wealthy. His second, in 1829, was Anna Maria Boswell, daughter of a prominent physician in Lexington, Kentucky. Their son Joseph Orville—called J.O. or Jo for his initials from the day of his birth on December 12, 1830—would barely remember his father, who died, just thirty-two, in 1835. Orville left behind enough for his family to live on, including a trust fund for his son that would be his on his twenty-first birthday, in 1851—a healthy sum of $80,000, the equivalent of more than $2 million today.

In 1843, when Jo was twelve, his mother married Benjamin Gratz, who was already related to Jo by marriage: Benjamin’s recently deceased wife was Anna Shelby’s aunt. Gratz was then forty-nine, with three sons in their late teens and a fourth, Cary, who was just a year and a half older than Jo.

Benjamin Gratz was the scion of a family of eighteenth-century German Jewish immigrants who became merchants and men of distinction in prerevolutionary Philadelphia. Educated as a lawyer at the University of Pennsylvania, he had met Maria Gist, Anna’s aunt, while on a business trip to Lexington in Kentucky, one of several states where his family owned land. Among the Gratz holdings in Kentucky was the farmland where Mammoth Cave was discovered in the late eighteenth century.

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Lexington developed from a rough frontier village into one of the country’s more sophisticated inland cities; it liked to call itself the “Athens of the West.” Gratz become a wealthy hemp merchant and a leading citizen. One indication of Lexington’s sophistication may be suggested by its apparent willingness not only to tolerate but to welcome a Jew—even an essentially secular, nonobservant Jew like Gratz—into its aristocratic hierarchy. It could not have hurt that Gratz’s sister Rebecca was said to be Sir Walter Scott’s model for the beautiful heroine of that name in the hugely popular historical novel Ivanhoe: Scott’s novels had long provided models of chivalric behavior for those in the South who considered themselves aristocrats, as the wealthy planters and commercial barons of Kentucky did.

For seven years, young Jo Shelby lived a charmed life of privilege and ease in Benjamin Gratz’s brick Georgian mansion. He was an impressionable boy, with an intellectually acute and involved new father who saw Jo’s education in all things—or tried to. Too restless to be a good student, Jo was tutored at home by a succession of frustrated young men, students at Transylvania University, just down the street. His mother offered only occasional supervision; she would bear three children by her new husband within the first five years of their marriage, and whatever free time she had was devoted to her passions for cultivating roses, reading Shakespeare, and supporting the city’s orphans’ home.

Riding was Jo’s passion, and it was readily indulged. In a part of the country devoted to fine horses and daredevil feats of equestrian agility, he excelled. Slender and lithe, Jo sat his horse like a young centaur—no fence was too high, no ditch too wide for the sorrel roans he preferred because they rarely stumbled.

Jo’s exemplar as a horseman was his neighbor John Hunt Morgan, five years his senior, and destined, like Shelby, to become one of the Confederacy’s greatest cavalry officers. Another older youth who impressed Shelby with his brilliant mind and argumentative nature was his stepcousin B. Gratz Brown, who would later become governor of Missouri and Horace Greeley’s running mate in the 1872 presidential election.

But the most striking of his youthful influences was the darkly handsome Frank Blair, who would later become one of William T. Sherman’s generals in Georgia and a key adviser to Abraham Lincoln. Combative from the day of his birth in 1821, Blair was kicked out of Yale for carousing and left Princeton after shooting a man in a barroom brawl. Sent by his father to calm down at Transylvania, in 1842 and 1843, Blair lived for a time in the Gratz house and was Jo’s tutor—one of the more successful ones because they shared the same rebellious temperament.

Benjamin Gratz was well known for his hospitality and often opened his home to the great men of his own and earlier generations. One of these, the Marquis de Lafayette, provided a link with George Washington himself. In 1826, Lafayette, by that time a hale sixty-eight years of age, was feted at a ball in Lexington while on his sentimental tour of the nation during the fiftieth anniversary of its Revolution. While there, he dined with the Gratz family and dandled the infant Howard Gratz—the stepbrother, five years his senior, with whom Jo Shelby would become closest—on his knee.

Another frequent Gratz guest over many years was Frank Blair’s father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., the newspaper publisher and intimate friend of President Andrew Jackson. (Blair’s former house in Washington, D.C., remains today the official state guesthouse for the president of the United States.) Other renowned visitors were Missouri senators Thomas Hart Benton and Henry Clay, who devoted their careers to heading off the great war between North and South that they saw coming. (Clay lost the presidential election in 1844 to James K. Polk, who promptly embroiled the United States in a war with Mexico whose echoes would touch Shelby profoundly in 1865. In 1873, Clay’s grandson would marry Jo Shelby’s half sister Anna.)

Benjamin Gratz, like most of his guests, was strongly pro-Union, and he would remain loyal to it when war did break out. He was also like Henry Clay and other patriots in that he owned slaves. Jo himself was attended by a black servant close to his own age named Billy Hunter; his mother bought him at the Lexington slave mart as an eleventh-birthday present for her son. (Billy later said that he had cost Mrs. Shelby $2,000—the equivalent of $50,000 today.) Both boys assumed the rightness of the world into which they had been born, and they became close friends in a way that would baffle later generations of Americans. Billy would stay by his master’s side throughout much of the war and would weep at Shelby’s grave more than thirty years after he had won his freedom.

Young Jo was not only indifferent to formal study but inclined toward horseplay and practical jokes. One day, according to family legend, he and some friends crept into a room at the Transylvania University medical school where a cadaver had been prepared for dissection in an adjoining classroom. The boys lifted the cadaver from the coffin, and one of them—perhaps Jo—took his place while the others replaced the lid. The pranksters hid in the shadows as young black slaves came in to carry away the coffin. As they began to lift it, the slaves were terrified to hear a sepulchral moan from within the coffin, and then a hoarse voice pleading, “Lift me gently, lift me gently!”

When Jo was sixteen, Benjamin Gratz decided to send him east for a year to have some of his rough edges sanded off at a finishing school in eastern Pennsylvania. His stepbrother Cary would accompany him for at least part of the stay, and both boys would be able to visit frequently with their aunt Rebecca, who lived with one of her other brothers in Philadelphia.

Born in 1781, Rebecca Gratz was still a beautiful woman in her old age. Like her namesake in Ivanhoe, she had never married. It was rumored that she had spurned a secret Gentile lover—Henry Clay and Washington Irving were among those suggested—but in fact she had chosen to devote herself to caring for her extended family, and she was greatly revered as “the foremost American Jewish woman of the nineteenth century” for her intelligence and her philanthropic works. In 1844 she had spent the summer with her brother’s family in Lexington. Much taken with both Jo and Cary, she assured their father that they would be welcome in her house.

Often sickly, with a tendency toward whooping cough, Cary was quieter than the obstreperous Jo. Rebecca said Cary was a “sweet” boy, “the beauty and the cadet of the family, still in my mind’s eye the loveliest of children.” She was also touched by Cary’s solicitude for Jo, who had his virtues but was never “sweet”: For defying the headmaster at the school he and Cary briefly attended in Philadelphia, Jo was locked in his room and put on bread and water rations for three...