Elizabeth D. Leonard - Lincolns Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky

2011 The University of North Carolina Press
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Frontispiece: Portrait of the young Joseph Holt, ca. 1845.
Courtesy of Dr. Joseph Holt Rose and Halaine Rose, Pasadena, California.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leonard, Elizabeth D.
Lincolns forgotten ally : Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky /
Elizabeth D. Leonard.
p. cm. (Civil War America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8078-3500-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Holt, Joseph, 18071894. 2. United States. Army. Judge Advocate Generals
Dept.History. 3. JudgesUnited StatesBiography. 4. United States
Politics and government1849-1877. I. Title.
KF368.H586L46 2011
355.0092dc22 2011011687
[B]

15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

Henry Clay /

The Holt family mansion in Stephensport, Kentucky /

Charles Anderson Wickliffe /

James Buchanan /

Jacob Thompson /

Edwin M. Stanton /

Major Robert Anderson /

Firing on the Star of the West /

David Yulee /

Secretary of War Joseph Holt /

Joshua F. Speed /

James Speed /

General Fitz John Porter /

Clement Vallandigham /

John Wilkes Booth /

John A. Bingham, Joseph Holt, and Henry L. Burnett /

Hon. Andrew J. Rogers /

President Andrew Johnson /

Richard T. Merrick /

Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt /

Joseph Holts gravestone in Stephensport, Kentucky /

My first encounter with Joseph Holt came in the late 1980s when I was working on my first book, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. In this book I examined the wartime contributions of Northern women, including Dr. Mary Walker, a homeopath who had earned her M.D. at Syracuse Medical College in the mid-1850s and who, during the war, sought to put her training to use as a Federal army surgeon. For much of the war Walkers efforts were in vain. But in 1864 she received an appointment as a contract surgeon for the army, a position she held until the wars end, after which she hoped to parlay her wartime employment into a permanent position as a U.S. Army physician. Unfortunately, a number of the key figures to whom she proposed this idea remained opposed to the notion of a woman doctor serving in the army except in cases of extreme emergency. Among these was Joseph Holt who, as the armys judge advocate general, crafted a brief in the fall of 1865 explaining why President Andrew Johnson should turn down Walkers request. By way of compromise, Holt suggested that Johnson award Dr. Walker the Congressional Medal of Honor instead and send her on her way. Johnson took Holts advice, with the result that Walker became the first woman to earn the Medal of Honor in American history, but she was out of a job.

I confess that for a number of years after I completed Yankee Women I thought about Holt only grudgingly and with resentment because of the way he had handled Mary Walkers case. However, in the course of my research on the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination for Lincolns Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War, I came to know a good deal more about Holts rich and complex life story that diminished my rage and evoked instead a degree of respect and sympathy that grew over time. In addition, my research quite unexpectedly led me to a series of letters Holt received from Mary Walker herself beginning in August 1890, when she was fifty-seven and he was eighty-three. In these letters Walker wrote to Holt with genuine admiration and affection, thanking him for the gifts of melonand cashthat he had sent when she was sick, providing him with advice for managing his rheumatismshe suggested bathing his joints every day in olive oiland indicating that, should she ever return to her hometown of Oswego, New York, and open the retirement community she had been planning, he would be more than welcome to spend his remaining years there. (On one occasion Walker firmly, but fondly, reminded Holt to address her not as Mrs. Walker, but as Dr. Walker.) Half a year

Realizing that Mary Walker had forgiven Holt, I knew that I must forgive him, too. Then, something truly amazing happened: in August 2004, thanks to James M. McPhersons generous review of Lincolns Avengers in the New York Review of Booksand sometime after I had already decided that it was now my professional task to flesh out the biography of Joseph Holt in fullI received a letter from Catherine Rose, who lives in California and is a direct descendant of Joseph Holts brother, Thomas, and Thomass wife, Rosina; Cathy is Joseph Holts great-great-great-grandniece. My grandmother, Cathy wrote in her letter to me, venerated Joseph Holt and spoke of him frequently. Indeed, she explained, Holt was a hero to her grandmother, Mary Holt Rose, and a source of inspiration for all of his brother Thomass descendants, and her father, Joseph Holt Rose Sr., and her brother were both named after him. In his own life and in what he tried to teach us, Cathy went on, my father emphasized the importance of honor, integrity, fairness, and responsibility, qualities he associated with Joseph Holt, for whom his admiration... became a part of his own character.

In the years since Cathy Rose first wrote to me, she and I have maintained a warm and regular correspondence, as I have done, as well, with her younger sister, Margaret Rose Badger, who also lives in California. In January 2009 the three of us finally met for the first time, having committed ourselves, sight unseen, to an adventurous week in freezing-cold Kentucky, where we toured a myriad of sites that were relevant to the lives of Joseph Holt and Abraham Lincoln. There we visited the old Holt mansion in Stephensport, where we wandered through the badly vandalized old structure imagining its former magnificence, and paid our respects in the family graveyard that Cathy, Margaret, and their brother still pay to maintain. While in Kentucky, the three of us met most of the very few people in the state who are doing their part to bring Joseph Holts full story back into the light. Most notably, we met the wonderful local book collector Norvelle Wathen and his wife Cindy, who welcomed us into their home and introduced us to all of their seventeen cats. We also met Susan Dyer, whose courageous drive to preserve and restore the old Holt family mansion deserves enormous praise. Later, in the spring of 2009 I traveled to California for a conference and had the pleasure of meeting Joseph Holt Jr., who goes by the name Holt, and his wife, Halaine. Holt and Halaine graciously allowed me to bring back to Maine several large manila envelopes full of family documents relevant to the Holt familys long history, which have been invaluable in helping me get to know and understand their ancestor. This biography of Joseph Holt is dedicated to Cathy, Margaret, and Holt, who grew up with the spiritand a magnificent portraitof their great-great-great-uncle in their home, and who have so generously shared their family history, their insights, and their friendship with me.