Requiem for a Civil War Soldier

 

What follows is two weeks in the life of a genealogist, though the latter is not the term I prefer. Basically I’m a retired sub-sub-librarian--in simpler language a library rat. Books have been the truest companions of my three score and ten. They have been the friend who sticketh closer than a brother. I have chosen to abandon any attempt at objective narration with its implied assumption that the narrator is one who knows. Instead I will speak in my own voice, the obscure voice of one who inquires but does not know, for his inquiries too often do not result in certainty. Here in Japan, where I have lived for thirty years, the Heart Sutra (shortest of sutras at 260 glyphs) teaches that the essential character of the universe is its emptiness. This is certainly correct with respect to the tiny particle of the universe comprised by these pages. 

The gist of the story is easily told, and the Chandler News for 21 October 1898 placed the telling of it in a half-column on page one:

J. W. Fox, an old man who lived about three and a half miles southwest of the Sac and Fox Agency was found dead last Tuesday. He had apparently been dead four days, and appearances indicated that he had been beaten to death. Coroner Harper, assisted by County Attorney Embry and Sheriff Gebke, held an inquest on Wednesday and Thursday. The verdict of the jury was that the deceased came to his death by violence from the hands of parties unknown. Mr. Fox was an old soldier and lived alone on his claim. He was about fifty-seven years of age. Among his papers was found a discharge issued to Mike Carroll, and it is supposed that he may have had an assumed name. Some of his acquaintances say that Fox at times said he had a family, but nothing is known in regard to them. The object of the murder is supposed to be robbery, as Fox was understood to have about $1000 or $1500 in money, all of which was gone when the body was found. As yet no clue has been found [pointing to] the murderers.

As presented in the newspaper, the story might as well be Sanskrit for all the purchase it gives the inquiring reader. Though the names of county officials are intelligible, they mean nothing, throwing no light on the central mystery of who the pathetic old man J. W. Fox might have been. A quality of anonymity hovers over the story, captured in its title “A Murder,” the indefinite article saying it all. Even the fact that Fox had been a soldier in the Civil war is of little initial help, for millions of soldiers fought in that war, and the repetition of names in the records inundates the researcher. Two things help the matter. A poor old soldier with money stashed in his mattress is probably getting a pension, which would make him a Union soldier (Confederate pensions hadn’t begun yet), and if he was getting a pension there would be a record of it. A small question here is that Civil War pensions at this time were about $10 a month. It would seem impossible to accumulate the amount the News asserts. We must allow for journalistic exaggeration. Twenty dollars would have been enough to sign Fox’s death warrant.

More data emerged in a small tidbit connected with the man who was arrested some months later whose surname was Cumberledge, a resonant Anglo-Saxon compound and not at all common. Any Cumberledge living in or near Lincoln County would probably be his kin. The News reported that a $5000 bond had been posted to get William Cumberledge out of jail, and  among the signers of the bond were two prominent bankers. Roy Hoffman and E. L. Conklin. This might seem to indicate that the Cumberledge family must have been respectable people. Not necessarily. All farmers were poor, and raising that amount of money meant a mortgage on the house and farm. That’s why the bankers appear among the signatories. For decades the Union National Bank, represented by Hoffman and Conklin, gave mortgages freely because in many cases the mortgagee would not be able to pay in time and so the bank would immediately foreclose on the farm. That was one way the bank made its money.

The names also included N. S. Cumberledge, and there was my first solid clue. The Bureau of Land Management had a homestead record for Nicholas S. Cumberledge in eastern Lincoln County about ten miles south of the Sac and Fox Agency. And Nicholas, I quickly determined, had a son named William. Born in 1870, however, this Bill Cumberledge appeared to me too young to have brutally beaten to death a weak old man. I needed more, so I turned again to the victim.

The veterans named J. W. Fox receiving pensions in Oklahoma were about twelve in number, men variously named Joseph, John, Jonathan, and James. Here, as may happen even to the least deserving, I got lucky. Eleven of these soldiers either had wives or died after the cut off year of 1898. My old soldier could not have had a wife, or she would have been mentioned either in the 1890 pension record or in the 1898 news articles. And certainly she would never have allowed him to keep the cash from his pension checks--or wherever the money came from--stashed in his mattress. Thus, I felt the sun shining at last on my endeavors. 

The victim was Joseph W. Fox, born in Ohio in 1841. On the census I find him only one time. The Kansas state census for 1885 shows him in Chautauqua County, married but no wife or kids listed, according to the digital record, but an examination of the raw record revealed a wife named May, same age as her husband, and six children ranging in age from fifteen to four along with their names. Though there’s no lack of marriage records for a Joseph W. Fox between Ohio and Kansas, nothing reflects the names on the 1885 census or gives any feeling of certainty. The names of the wife and children lead nowhere, leaving me to speculate that while Joseph lived with May and her children in 1885, it was a common-law marriage that proved ephemeral in the light of Joseph’s inability to support a family, as will be seen later. It is sufficient grounds, however, to explain the speculation in the newspapers after Fox was killed that he had once had a family but nothing was known of them.

Military records were more generous than the census. Not the record of his regular enlistment in the Indiana 13th Infantry, which like most Army records is a barren fig tree, but his Navy record, for he had served the full four years, a three year regular enlistment and then one year in the Navy. This wasn’t hard to understand if he was from Ohio (as the Kansas record stated) and thus near the Great Lakes. The Naval enrollment at Cincinnati in 1864 gave some details. He was five feet eight inches tall with brown hair and blue eyes, and his occupation was given as “Marble Cutter.”  It was also recorded that he could read and 

Naval Enlistment Rendezvous 1855-1959

write. This in itself gives a small surprise. Most enlisted men in the Civil War were illiterate, a fact that only came to the national attention when the same held true for draftees in World War I.

Two other puzzling facts were recorded. He was the only person listed without a hometown, and his state of origin was given as England. Now, if in fact he was a born Britisher it would make it pointless to search for his family, since it is harder for a genealogist to cross the Atlantic that for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. Especially when the researcher doesn’t even know the place of origin of the person sought. The little Foxes would destroy the vine. Yet if our Joseph was English, it would help explain his literacy. In the U.S., poor children, especially boys, didn’t attend school. They worked on the farm. In England this problem was slowly being corrected through the “ragged schools,” begun in Portsmouth as early as 1844 by the crippled cobbler John Pounds, whose cause was taken up by Charles Dickens, the most influential writer of his day. I’d like to think that this cobbler was my kinsman, but I have no evidence. As I said, in the absence of documentary bridges, the Atlantic is a hard crossing.

The most generous record of all, however was provided by the old soldiers’ home at Leavenworth KS, formally called a Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. First it confirms the Army and Navy enlistments above, including the three years in the Indiana 13th and the year in the Navy with dates of demobilization. Our Joseph was no summer soldier. He served a full four years--a three-year enlistment in the army and then a fourth year in the navy. His disability is given as paralysis, with no further explanation. He now lists his place of birth not as England but Ohio. (This kind of shift was not unusual for people who were naturalized citizens. They would make the state in which they were naturalized their place of birth.) His occupation is given as clerk (literacy again!), his place of residence subsequent to discharge as Junction City KS, and his marital status as widower. He was receiving $10 a month from  his pension, and he was in the home from December 1894 until February of the next year, a total of about two months. He was discharged at his own request. This was a frequent occurrence at the old soldiers’ homes across the nation. It is no criticism of the homes to say that operating on government money they required obedience to rules in exchange for a life of semi-confinement. Many old soldiers felt more comfortable living on the road. For the historian, the upside of institutional life is that the homes kept detailed records. 

John Pounds Teaching in  His Cobbler’s Shop

With this, I now felt satisfied that I had identified the victim, the old soldier the newspapers called “J. W. Fox.” In reporting the killing, the papers inevitably refer to him as an old man and feeble. They had an accurate figure for his age--he was 57--but life expectancy for males in the U.S. in the first decade of the twentieth century was about 48. In those terms he was an old man, and his paralysis, whatever form it took, could have made him seem feeble. He was easy prey for his killer, a man not yet thirty, still in the prime of life. What is yet more striking about Joseph Fox is that he knew his birth year, for this is another argument for his literacy. Illiterate people rarely know their birth year. As a lover of the jazz trumpet, the example that comes first to my mind is that of Louis Armstrong. Because he learned to read only late in life, he told his first biographers that he was born July 4th, 1900. Louis was building a myth, not citing a date known to himself, for in fact he didn’t know. After his death, Armstrong expert Tad Jones discovered in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in New Orleans a baptismal certificate that indicates compellingly that Louis was actually born on August 4th, 1901. 

I had put aside Bill Cumberledge as a candidate for the role of killer, thinking him too young for the brutality of the deed, but it was at this point I went back to review the newspaper clippings I had gleaned and discovered a very detailed one that initially I had only glanced at. 

The article I should have paid attention to was in the Chandler News for 7 April 1899 and was devoted to Deputy Bill Tilghman’s skill in locating Cumberledge in Iowa and bringing him back to stand trial. Tilghman later became  Sheriff of Lincoln County, but at this point he was still a deputy, a post to which he and some later-to-be-famous men like Heck Thomas, Chris Madsen, and Bud Ledbetter had been appointed in 1892 to clean up the bad-asses who were riding rampant over the fledgling state. I wonder if I neglected an immediate reading because of the headline “Tilghman Got His Man.” It begins, “United States Deputy Marshal William Tilghman is one of the schrewdest [sic!] man catchers in the west.” Maybe it was the typo that broke my back, but my spine was kinked by the time I finished the lead sentence. Yes, Tilghman was a fine lawman, but equally yes he had feet of clay, a fact never mentioned in the standard eulogies--especially in Lincoln County, where he is enshrined and where I grew up. In Lincoln County there’s never any mud on Tilghman’s boots. 

But this is not a tale of my prejudices. Suffice it to say, Tilghman had a line on Cumberledge from the start. Cumberledge, the News tells us, was “wanted for complicity in several postoffice robberies and is under indictment at Muskogee for horse-stealing and is out on a $500 bond for appearance.” And more than that, the authorities had a witness who’d heard Cumberledge threaten Fox’s life. It turns out (inevitable phrase) that Cumberledge “on a former time had robbed Fox and the old man told who did it. This enraged Cumberledge and he said the next time he robbed Fox that he would never live to tell any tales.” 

Now Cumberland’s age is given along with other details that catch our attention:

Cumberland is a comely looking fellow about 25 years old. He has black hair and combs in to one side over a high forehead. His eyes are bright and he has an intelligent countenance. His appearance indicates that his habits are good.

At this point, with Cumberledge in his mid to late twenties, we are looking at the making of a badass. A badass was what every enterprising young man of no education wanted to be if he was handy with a pistol. If he thoughtfully employed his skill, his ranking would start to rise. If he killed a man he was on the highroad to ephemeral fame and fortune--the famous “broad is the way” of course that also leadeth to a place that starts with a D and rhymes with ruction. It’s a basic trick even the stupidest badass learns. If you commit a robbery don’t leave any witnesses. 

This is where the tale gets basic and bloody. The News still reporting:

J. W. Fox was a decrepit, miserly hermit-like character and was supposed to have some money hid away somewhere. The crime was discovered by a neighbor who had been used to seeing Fox every day and not noticing Fox out around his home his suspicions were aroused . . . . They broke open the house and found the old man lying beneath a pile of bedding, stove wood and other rubbish. His head was split open and nearby lay an axe with blood all over it.

We notice some details have changed in the six months since the first news report. The belief-defying sum of “$1000 or $1500” has disappeared without further mention. And as if to compensate, for this missing thrill, a new one has been added. The murder weapon, unmentioned before, is now specified as an “axe with blood all over it.” Perhaps the tale of Lizzie Borden’s 1892 axe-wielding influenced this choice detail.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Perhaps Oklahoma was not to be outdone by Massachusetts. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, the whole affair seems to have taught Bill Cumberland a lesson. How the wangle was wangled, I cannot say, for defense lawyers are a clever breed. First, it seems the prosecution agreed to drop the various robbery charges against Bill in order to try him for the greater crime of murder, but once that was done they had trouble finding witnesses. The lack thereof was usually the first line of defense in a murder trial. If that was the wangle, it worked. Bill seems to have served no time in Lansing prison. At least there is no record of it. 

Nor does a 1900 census appear either for Bill or for his father Nicholas. The latter is of interest because it would be evident whether or not Nicholas had mortgaged the farm. Such evidence as exists suggests he lost the farm, for in 1905 he is living with his wife (no children) in Wilson County, Kansas. The census for his son is of greater interest because it could show him still in Lansing, but Fortune frowns on that contingency as well. Neither census exists, and we are left to wonder why. By 1910 the father is dead and the son is living in McDonough County, Illinois, where his sister Rachel has married into the numerous, photogenic, and stoutly named Stoneking family. 

By 1919 Bill Cumberland had himself married. He seems to have returned to Creek County by 1915, where initially he was employed as a jail guard. Four years later he married Lena Reynolds, and the couple made their home in Euchee (later called Sand Creek), Creek County. Four children were born to them, including one boy, none of whom were ever known to be in trouble with the law. In short, the consequences of killing of Joe Fox seem to have put the fear of Law into Bill Cumberland. Whether the consequences included imprisonment in Lansing or merely the threat of it, it straightened him out. Once released, he seems to have walked the straight and narrow.

As the injured party, that leaves only poor Joe Fox--the decrepit, miserly hermit dead by an axe-blow for a fistful of dollars. Probably an immigrant but one with no known family, no one to weep over his dead body or arrange his funeral. Decrepit he may have been, miserly too, but he was once alive as you or I. Knowing no other gesture to make, I have created a Find-a-Grave memorial for him. Normally such a memorial would be part of a cemetery, but there is no graveyard close enough to his place of death to provide him even a pauper’s $1.00 burial. Find-a-Grave provides for such cases by offering a category of “no burial place known.” That is where I put him. If you find it in your heart, please go by and offer him the tribute of a flower: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/220573430/joseph-w.-fox

He was some mother's darlin', he was some mother's son

Once he was fair and once he was young

And some mother rocked him, her darlin' to sleep

But Bill left him to die like a tramp on the street

Tokyo

4 January 2021