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It was at my Grandfather Saunders’ home on what was then the principal street of our town that I was born and there I lived until I passed my ninth birthday. It was a great town to be born in, being a colorful town and one of character and individuality. And surely that flat-faced, high-shouldered old house and what appertained thereto made a grand place for a child to spend a childhood.

My grandfather built it in the early forties, it being then the largest dwelling in town and the finest. Historically it had another hold on local fame. Until I was a half-grown stripling it was known as “the house the Yankees couldn’t burn down.”

When, early in the War between the States, both sides ran a foot race to violate the legalistic farce of Kentucky’s “neutrality,” Paducah was the first port on the southern banks of the Ohio River to be occupied by invading troops. With his gunboats and a flotilla of transports, Grant came from Cairo and took it after dumping over a few shells at a Confederate flag defiantly floating from a tall staff on the waterfront.^[1]

Possibly also one purpose of the brief bombardment was to put the fear of the Lord into the civilian population who by a large majority so thoroughly were anti-Unionist in their sympathies—and their attitudes—that Paducah was known as “Little Charleston” and all that adjacent tip of the state was called “The South Carolina of the West.” This seemed strange too, seeing that here along the uppermost bounds of slave territory, one would have looked for countering geographical influences from Illinois just across the river, and from Indiana only a short distance upstream, while in the opposite directions the debatable land of Missouri lay even closer. Central Kentucky was divided and the mountains of eastern Kentucky might be overwhelmingly for the Federal cause, as they were, but these counties down in the toe of the sock showed their sentiments in the latest election before avowed hostilities began, by sending to Washington as their representative an ardent advocate of secession—with a thumping big plurality behind him. To this modern day, Democratic spellbinders love to proclaim that of all the congressional districts in the whole country, this is the only one which, neither when armed troops held the polling places, nor in the Carpetbagger period following, nor in any subsequent political upheaval, ever went Republican, although when Al Smith ran in 1928, it did have rather a close call from going Baptist. Indeed, it was said certain unreconstructable veterans insisted on voting for Jeff Davis every presidential election—until weaned on William Jennings Bryan.

So as I was saying, Paducah, having promptly fallen into Northern hands, seethingly remained in those hands until the end, although twice Forrest invaded it, coming up from Tennessee with his cavalry, and drove the Unionists behind the shelter of their barracks and temporarily held dominion of the streets while his men collected horseflesh and supplies and the members of one of his units, the Third Kentucky Mounted Infantry, which had been recruited in that immediate vicinity, hugged their homefolks and their sweethearts before the withdrawal southward. At their first time of coming the sweat of fierce fighting yet was on them. That morning they saw their colonel blown in two pieces by a cannon ball within sight of his father’s cottage where he had eaten breakfast before leading an abortive assault on the enemy’s breastworks. Two weeks more and he would have been a brigadier; his commission was awaiting signatures and seals at Richmond. And some of the ragged gray-jackets who followed him had come back that day to die—as he died—in a rutted byway which as boys they had frolicked through. They still were boys, most of them, with no thatch of beard on their chins; and in that breathing space between the charge and the retreat they whooped and they caroused and told worshiping sidewalk audiences how the blue-bellies had skedaddled from the surprise attack at sunup. Both of my mother’s brothers were among those jubilating raiders and one of them, by dint of patriotic perjury, had lied himself into the ranks as a full-fledged buck private before his fifteenth birthday. At eighteen he came out, a top sergeant and a professional gambler of parts.

Let us get back to the main line: On the heels of the original seizure, the churches and the schools, the larger factories and warehouses had been taken over and converted into makeshift hospitals and very soon these overflowed with sick and wounded soldiers, including many prisoners. Being the foremost physician of the community, my grandfather tendered his services to the military authorities and for more than three years, as an unpaid volunteer, he ministered among the sufferers without regard for the uniform which they might have worn. Behold now, how his merciful labors were as bread cast upon the waters.

When, in April, ’65, the news came from Appomattox, the commandant of the garrison saw his chance and vindictively he took it. This was a sadistic tyrant whose name almost to this present hour was an abomination in the mouths of the few tottery survivors of those times—they spat when they spoke it. He gave orders that this night every house in the captive but still seethingly rebellious town should be illuminated, top to bottom, in celebration of Lee’s surrender. ’Twas a powerfully bitter dose for nine out of ten to swallow but being helpless under harsh bayonet rule, the householders obeyed—with just one classic exception.

My mother often told me how in fear she and her three sisters and her two stepsisters quaked behind curtained and shuttered windows as darkness came on. Presently they were in complete blackness since their twice-widowed father had forbidden that even so much as a tallow tip should burn beneath his roof.

About ten o’clock there was the heavy clunk of marching feet, the rattle of side arms outside, then a knocking on the front door. My grandfather answered the summons. He had been standing by in expectation of it. On the wide porch behind a young lieutenant were ranged a file of soldiers.

“Doctor,” said the officer and saluted him, “this is the only house along this street that is not lit up. Perhaps—” his tone seemed friendly, eager almost—“perhaps you did not hear of the order?”

“Young man,” he answered, “my two sons are somewhere in the Deep South—if they’re still alive.^[2] If they are still alive, I trust they still are fighting for the Southern Confederacy. I will not go through with this mockery.”

“Doctor, if after this warning, you still refuse to put lights in your windows, it is my painful duty to instruct these men here to set fire to this house. Won’t you save me from a most unwelcome task?”

Granddad shook his obstinate head. “I only ask that you give me time to get my daughters and my servants out,” he said.

The unhappy lieutenant drew the older man aside, beyond earshot of his squad.

“Doctor Saunders,” he said, “you don’t know me from Adam, but I know about you. Last year my younger brother was brought here, wounded in both legs. One of these slaughter-house hands they call a contract surgeon wanted to operate on him—wanted to amputate. You stepped in; took him over as your own patient. You not only saved his legs for him, you saved his life. That damned butcher would have killed him. We owe you an eternal debt of gratitude—he does, I do, our old mother up in Michigan does. Doctor, go inside and stay there—you and your whole household. Stay there no matter what you may hear outside here.”

Next morning the proofs of what had gone on during the night were revealed in scorched and smoke-blackened patches upon the clapboarded walls. At risk of a court-martial for himself, that Michigan lad had sent a corporal to kindle a blaze against the foundations at the end and the sides, then following along behind the torchbearer, he had, with his own hands, put out the flames. The charred evidences showed that a dozen times he must have done this. Of course, the men under him were bound to know what was afoot. But they must have liked their lieutenant mighty well, for he was not reported on, was never punished.

Verily, it must have been through my two grandmothers that the aristocratic affection got into our strain. For both of them, it would appear, belonged to “old Southern Families.” By the way, who ever heard of a new Southern family? Already I think I’ve made it plain that my Grandfather Saunders was a simple and direct soul, a man without guile and incapable of arrogance. And by all I ever heard, my paternal grandfather Robert Livingston Cobb was genuinely pleased to call himself a commoner. Many of us unwittingly reveal the vanity we would hide under a cloak of falsified humility. In my time I’ve known men who’d spend congenial hours telling me how modest they were. But in the case of this grandparent of mine I’m inclined to believe his customary attitude did not typify the posings of a secret egotist. He may have taken a suitable satisfaction in his estate as a successful merchandiser and exporter and steamboat owner and, before comparative adversity came upon him, as the wealthiest taxpayer and the largest landowner in a wideish area, but he appeared rather more gratified that his progenitors mainly had been plain yeomen and honest artisans than that on the distaff side certain remoter ancestors had figured actively in the making-over of a neglected poor dependency of the Crown into a sturdy little state. For his mother’s grandfather was Thomas Chittenden, first governor of Vermont, and two of her uncles, Martin Chittenden and Jonas Galusha, also governed it; and her father was “Old Rifle” Isaac Clark, a doughty sharpshooter who fought in three wars, once against the French and Indians and twice against the British, and wound up a militia general.

But I’m reasonably convinced that by his wife these somewhat notable personages of an earlier time must privately have been classified as Yankee upstarts—not blue bloods but blue noses. For this high-headed grandmother of mine claimed for herself a line of Old Dominion planters and warriors and statesmen who, in their turns, invariably had wed with seemly ladies. Or at least I’ve been told that this was the impression more or less subtly conveyed by her in her general walk and conversation. Back in 1811, when there was a tragic break in the gubernatorial succession, her father, Colonel Linah Mims, for a period of weeks had, as a sort of stopgap functionary, bridged the vacancy and occupied the executive mansion at Richmond, and by her estimates one acting temporary governor of such a high-toned commonwealth as Virginia—even though without official title or actual warrant of authority—outranked, for family-tree purposes, any given number of regularly elected governors of such a huckstering state as Vermont.

As a young girl, she was brought over the mountains; grew up in Kentucky; was married there and raised a large family and in the fullness of time died there at seventy-odd, but to the day of her death, did she in her travels meet someone who inquired whence she came, it is recorded that invariably she answered: “I am from Virginia, stopping at present in Kentucky.”

Also it was narrated that once a native son, being somewhat nettled by her imperious airs, said: “Mrs. Cobb, you’re forever speaking of the First Families of Virginia. Weren’t there ever any second-class families there?”

“Oh, yes,” she told him, “formerly there were. But they all moved out here to Kentucky.”

Tracing the other wing, my mother’s mother was a Carolinian by way of Tennessee and she was of the Clan Douglas and like all the Douglases of whom I have ever heard, freely acknowledged direct descent from Ellen Douglas. By all reports, neither was she behindhand in taking merit unto herself for patrician lineage. I imagine it must have been because of her wishes, that my Grandfather Saunders built for her the most imposing house in the then small and straggly river landing of Paducah. I suspect a humbler domicile might have suited him as well, he who had been born in the fringes of a ramping wilderness and reared in most primitive surroundings among people who might have been plebeians but, if they were, didn’t know it and would have tied into any superior-minded interloper who dared intimate they weren’t as good as everybody else—or just a mite better.

But, for my oncoming generation, his wife’s achieved architectural dreams were to prove a marvelous benefaction. Nowhere on the American map, I insist, could there have been a playground more admirably devised to fulfill the cravings of healthy, adventure-seeking youngsters of half a century ago, or thereabouts. Bear with me while I sketch in its manifold attractions: In brief, a farm in miniature set up in the midst of a growing town; two crowded acres within their high planked palings; at the front, facing the street, the angular ten-room house; and packed in behind it and all roundabout such luring joys as the odorous cow shed; the big stable, with a gorgeous grand hayloft; the slatted corncrib—my grandfather kept fearsome pet blacksnakes there to prey on the rats and the mice; fruit trees to be pillaged and shade trees to be climbed; tangles of unshorn shrubbery; a grape arbor and a tool hutch; and at the bottom of the small, compactly planted orchard, a dumpy white structure delicately known as “Miss Jones’.” Then also the smokehouse, its sooty rafters jeweled with fat hams like eardrops and pendent strips of cured middling meat and necklaces of homemade sausages; the well house, with its crocks and pans and jugs and buckets submerged in bricked shallow tanks and it such a lovely cool retreat for sultry days; a densely populated chicken yard; lofty manure piles in the horse lot and beneath the corner eaves, where the tin gutter spouts come down from the roof, open barrels to catch rain water and incidentally to provide breeding places for millions of wiggle-tailed larvae, so that, according to their ordained seasons, we had on the premises an abundance of houseflies and mosquitoes of our own raising. There were no wire screens—they hadn’t been thought up yet by some ingenious Yankee—but only mosquito nets for the beds and at mealtimes a languid little black servitor to wave a peacock-tail fan above the dining table. She didn’t always keep the flies away from the victuals, but she made them nervous and unsettled in their conduct. Those were the good old days before germs were formally recognized.

[1]

Concerning that same flag there was a little epic. The ladies of the town had donated their silk dresses for its making. When Grant’s fleet came and the panic-stricken citizens fled, all directions, it was forgotten. So old Mrs. Jarrett—“Aunt Em” she was to half of Paducah—raced in her carriage to the wharf. She had with her a scared negro boy. She forced him to climb the tall pole and fetch down the precious colors. He feared mightily the shells whistling past, but feared more his grim mistress standing down below with the long snapper of her buggy whip flicking up at his naked shanks. So she got the flag and got away with it. Some Northern sympathizers betrayed her identity to the first landing party and a squad went to her big rambling house up on Island Creek. They came away thwarted. They searched the house and they made threats, but they didn’t search Aunt Em who, under her voluminous skirts, was wearing the flag as an extra petticoat. When she died—as a shaver I went to the services—it served her for a shroud. And the two local camps of veterans gave her a soldier’s funeral, with all the honors. I remember the bugles playing “Taps” and the volleys fired across the grave. And finally—which wasn’t in the regulations—they gave the Rebel Yell.

[2]

They were still alive. Johnston’s broken army having surrendered, they rode home from North Carolina. The elder, Dr. John Bartlett Saunders, who had been a regimental surgeon, went to Honolulu—a tremendous pilgrimage for those days—and having regained the health which had been impaired in service, made a name for himself there doing research on leprosy, and when he died was court physician to the King of the Sandwich Islands.The younger brother, Lewis, wandered westward and eventually disappeared without trace. First though, according to a tale which filtered back, he did some distinguished gun-fighting in Arizona mining camps and gambling houses. As a youngster I was quite proud of this shadowy reputation of my vanished uncle as likewise I glorified in the more authentic claim that he and a chum of his, “Red” Klaw, the son of a German-Jewish clothing merchant of antebellum Paducah, were the two youngest regularly enlisted volunteers—not drummer boys or couriers, but musket-toting soldiers—that Kentucky sent to the Confederacy. “Red” Klaw had a younger brother, Marc Klaw, who emigrated to New York and became senior member of the great theatrical firm of Klaw and Erlanger.