Stories about my Father - 26
Part One
My great-grandfather Fred, drank. Eventually, so did my great-grandmother Jennie. I can only guess what they were trying to escape from, but the fact of this seems as good a place as any to begin to try and figure out who they were.
The two of them seem to have had quite a spirited relationship. Did they love each other? That’s an impossible question to answer well over a century later, but looking at the evidence, they certainly had a very strong connection. While they separated many times, up until the last time, they always got back together again. Even when Fred was on his deathbed having long since moved out, Jennie made a difficult several-day trek out to Memphis to see him one last time. Add to that, of course, was the fact of their third child: my Great Aunt Martha. She appeared seventeen years after their last kid was born. They were already arguing a lot by then, but given Martha, they were also, clearly, still making up. Going backward from where they ended, though, there are certainly hints of what eventually must have driven them apart permanently– love or no love.
In 1925, after more than thirty years of marriage, they finally separated for, what turned out to be, good. Fred moved away to Memphis and left Jennie behind with six-year-old Martha. The two moved in with her newly married older daughter, my grandmother Eunice, who was living with my grandfather and my three-year-old father in Rustburg, Virginia. The small house was already full, so they slept in the attic. It was just another in a very long list of varied places that Jennie, over the course of her life, called home.
Fred Lockhart Wilson was born in Arkansas in 1876 just over ten years after the Civil War. He was one of fifteen children. His father, Rueben, was an ordained Baptist minister but had never run a parish. For a while, he had a large farm and a country store in Ellenton, South Carolina, but he decided that he wanted to move to the city. So, he swapped the farm and the store for another shop in Augusta, Georgia. He uprooted his whole brood and they moved into town. Then the shop went out of business. Most of what Reuben touched, in fact, seems to have failed. Fred’s older brother Ben, on the other hand, had started a successful livery stable in Lexington. They rented out horses, carriages, and wagons and made deliveries all throughout the surrounding area. He also looked out for his family. For the last few years of his life, Rueben worked there for his son.
Rueben died in 1889 when Fred was just 13, so Ben took over raising him and his other younger siblings. When Fred was old enough, he, too, went to work in his brother’s stables. In time, he met a girl, and they started courting. When he was twenty-one, he and Jennie Mastin got married.
Much later, Jennie would say that Fred was always gallant and made a big show of helping her off the high sideboard of the car whenever someone was watching. When they were alone, though, he’d get out, slam his door and yell over his shoulder, “All right, old lady, crawl out!”
Fred had very little formal schooling. He and his brothers and sisters could not be spared from working. Education was a luxury out of their reach. His brother Ben schooled his own children but had little time to do the same for his siblings. They were on their own and, I suppose, sank, or swam based on their abilities to take care of themselves. Jennie told my father that you’d never know that Fred wasn’t well educated, because he taught himself what he needed to know. He was very well-read - many of his books, on a wide variety of subjects, ended up in my grandparents’ bookcase. Later in life, he learned to speak Spanish fluently. He became proficient in business and finance in a way that his father never was. He was ambitious and seemed determined to succeed to avoid his father’s fate. That ambition also made him restless.
On February 15, 1898, in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, the U.S. Battleship Maine exploded and sank. About 250 sailors and marines were either killed outright or drowned. Every war needs a trigger. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand ignited World War I. Pearl Harbor is what got us into World War II. The destruction of the Maine was the fired bullet that got us into the Spanish-American War.
At the time, the United States was in a period of expansion. While we had kicked the British out of the Colonies, we were still surrounded by European protectorates. The French and, indeed, the British were to our north in what is now Canada, and the Spanish were to our south. Even though their empire was already in decline, Spain controlled land in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Cuba. They also still maintained ownership over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
Like all wars, our eventual conflict with Spain had been percolating for a very long time. The sinking of the Maine caused it to boil over. Before the U.S. Civil War, the South wanted us to buy Cuba to create a new slave state. For their part, the Cubans who had been under Spanish rule for nearly 400 years were already in open revolt fighting what is now called The Cuban War of Independence. It had started three years before in 1895 and was their third attempt to overthrow their oppressors. The Maine was not engaged in this fighting but was merely in the harbor to protect American interests and citizens during it. Of course, just the very presence of a foreign battleship is provoking.
To this day, nobody knows for sure what caused the U.S.S. Maine to explode, but there is no evidence at all that it was because of anything that Spain did. It was likely just an accident. Before investigations could confirm anything, however, the press got involved. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, who both wanted to exploit expanded U.S. markets in the Spanish regions, decided that Spain was responsible. They published a series of articles in their newspapers with the slogan “Remember the Maine, To Hell with Spain.” They exaggerated, distorted, and lied about what the Spanish were doing. This fake-news media barrage helped set public opinion against Spain and forced our entry into the Spanish-American War.
Rupert Murdoch and Fox News did not create a new kind of journalism when they started promoting GOP lies. They just picked up an old existing model and dusted it off. To offset any doubt anyone might have about how powerful those lies were over a century ago, we still remember the phrase they invented, “Remember the Maine,” even if we may have forgotten what it means.
The United States declared war against Spain on April 21, 1898.
To train soldiers for combat, camps had to be created around the country. Great-Grandfather Fred must have been looking for something beyond the staid and ordinary life that he could see starting to unroll in front of him, because right after he and Jennie were married, Fred enlisted in the 2nd Kentucky U.S. Volunteers that had been activated for the war. The now Captain Wilson took his new bride to Camp Thomas in Chickamauga, Tennessee. There they set up house in a tent with a wooden floor. As a wedding present, the men in his company gave them a suite of furniture. I think that some of that furniture is still around.
There’s a family story that one day, much later in their marriage, Jennie came out of a store on Main Street in Lynchburg, just as a parade was passing by. Among a group of marching Shriners was Great-Grandfather Fred dressed only in long johns and a fez, banging away on a drum. Lynchburg was, and still is, a very class-conscious town. She was mortified.
Before I started in on this in earnest, I had rather blithely assumed that my great-grandfather had dragged my great-grandmother kicking and screaming all over the world. I no longer think that was the case. They moved to Chickamauga so soon after they were married that it had to have been discussed beforehand. It seems to me that she probably was just as ambitious as he was. Jennie Mastin Wilson was born in 1875 and grew up on a farm near Versailles, Kentucky. In 1897, when they wed, the only way for a woman to get off the farm was to marry a man who would take her away from it. Women still couldn’t vote. That wouldn’t happen for another twenty-three years when the 19th Amendment passed. A woman’s fate was completely dependent on the man she married. Whatever her life had been like before, when she married Fred, it drastically changed. If she didn’t want that as much as he did, she wouldn’t have married him. From all accounts, she certainly wasn’t shy about making her opinions known, so she must have supported the moves he made. I don’t think Fred had to do much dragging, I think she was right there with him – at least in the beginning.
Each time Fred’s military career progressed, they would have to move to a new place and make a new home. That can’t have been easy. The freedom that being married to somebody like Fred afforded her also must have brought with it a great deal of frustration. While Fred was engaged in fighting or with work, she was left behind to take care of the house and, eventually, the family. As the years progressed, looking in on the excitement from the sidelines must have become difficult to bear. There were times when she’d leave him and return home to Kentucky, but after a while, she’d end up back out in some strange new place with him. However difficult life with him might have been at times, she had very few options available to her without him. I can see her ambition reflected in the fact that two decades later, her daughter went to college. She was able to give my grandmother Eunice the education that she couldn’t get herself.
Not long after they arrived in Camp Thomas, Fred was sent out with a battalion of men to Eastern Kentucky to deal with a family feud. This was an era in which that was common. The most famous big feud of that time was the Hatfields vs. the McCoys, but there were also many others. Human beings are rarely original in their thinking. Once somebody does something spectacularly stupid, it seems like everybody else wants to jump on the bandwagon. In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was families fighting families. In the first half of the twenty-first century, it is kids shooting up schools. Why behaviors like these should be endlessly repeated, I have no idea, but once a particularly horrible door is open, people seem to line up in order to pass through it themselves. This feud had escalated to the point that military intervention became necessary.
While Fred was out with his men, Jennie, who was three months pregnant, stayed behind in Camp Thomas. As more and more men arrived for training, conditions started to deteriorate. Sanitation and clean water became problematic. Fred helped to successfully broker a peace between the families without having to resort to battle and returned a few weeks later. By August 13 the war was over. An armistice was signed. Spain had lost. In September, the regiment was put on furlough and Jennie returned home to Versailles. On October 31st the regiment was officially mustered out for good and on that same day, my grandmother was born.
I had always thought that Fred had fought in the Spanish-American War, but he didn’t. He served and he trained for it, but the 2nd Kentucky never saw action and never left U.S. soil. By the time it disbanded, twenty-seven men had died from diseases contracted in the camp, and twelve had deserted, but no lives from the 2nd Kentucky had been lost on the battlefield.
Where Fred did see action soon after this, was overseas during the Philippine Insurrection.