A few nights back my son and I were watching episode one of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary (Now 30 years old! Still classic in some ways, out of step with reality in others). We hit pause along the way to chat about things we were noticing. One of those occasions was the factoid that at the war’s beginning, General Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers”, was commander of the Union army. I told Ike something I remembered hearing when I was a kid: they used to tell me that on my father’s side we were descended from Winfield Scott.
What happened next reminds me a little of the end of William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning.” We find young Sarty Snopes running away in the dark of night, fleeing a violent scene he helped to cause. In an irresistible fit of conscience he has just ratted out his arsonist father and perhaps gotten him killed. There’s no way he can go back to his family. Exhausted, confused, wrestling with guilt, he sits and tries to reconcile two images of his father: the heroic Civil War veteran father he’s been taught to revere and the pissant pyro father he’s seen with his own two eyes. But the narrator adds some complicating details:
My father, he thought, "He was brave!" he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: “He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris' cav'ry! " not knowing that his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did; for booty--it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.
It's like one of those Arrested Development narrator memes:
Sarty: My father was a war hero!
Narrator: Actually, his father was a no account horse thief.
In my case:
Jim: Chances are I’m a descendant of a noteworthy military leader.
Narrator: Actually, he’s a descendant of a two bit train robber.
It went like this: I started with the hefty general, but his many offspring presented a tangle of too many paths forward and I was quickly overwhelmed. So I turned to the other end: my great grandmother, Lula Belle Scott Veal (1889-1943), wife of James McDonald Veal (r. - 1877-1960), the great grandfather my parents named me after. Lula Belle Scott was from Rome, Georgia, in Floyd County, one of the three children of Mina Boyd Scott (1860-1940) and Chester Scott (1866 - ?). Perhaps this fellow Chester would provide a link to a more heavyweight Scott, a Scott from the pages of history, a Scott decorated with a lot of medals. Unfortunately, there are more Chester Scotts in the world than you might imagine (one of them was an amateur radio pioneer in Pennsylvania), making my particular Chester Scott hard to track down. In fact, I am not 100% certain that the Chester Scott I found is my great-great-grandfather. But if he is (you may evaluate the evidence for yourself - it's coming) the first trace of him I found beyond his name and place in the family line was from a report of the Georgia General Assembly, from 1893. A bill was passed for the reimbursement of Jake C. Moore, Sheriff of Floyd County, for expenses incurred in recapturing the fugitive Chester Scott, who had escaped from jail in Rome.
That didn’t shock me too much. My first thought was “bootlegger” (I imagine there was a lot of that in hilly Northwest Georgia), and I was still early in my search, not really buying that this Ernest T Bass of a Chester Scott was my ancestor. But I had a new search term to work with. Adding “escape” to Google provided some new surprises: a few short articles from small town newspapers, appearing to be drawn from wire service stories. The first from November 1892, the second from ten months later, and they both indicated that this person I'd been scouting out as a possible forbear of mine had led a life that would make him unlikely to have a stately Uncle Winfield gilding his pedigree:
McGinnis Is Dead. Rome, Ga., Nov. 29. Sheriff N. H. McGinnis, who was shot last Friday by train robbers at Plainville, died this afternoon. It is feared that a mob of citizens will enter the jail at Calhoun tonight when they learn of the sheriff's death and take out Chester Scott and Ben Morrow and hang them.
A dispatch from Rome, Ga., says: Chester Scott, the noted train robber and desperado and convicted of murdering Sheriff McGinnis of Gordon county, along with five other prisoners in the Floyd County jail, escaped Saturday night shortly after 7 o’clock. The escape was most daring. Jailer Copeland was knocked down, his wife and mother were run over and with crowded streets within a few feet all made good their escape.
The coup de grace is this story published in the Rome newspaper upon Scott’s recapture: “IN JAIL AGAIN: Chester Scott Once More in Durance”. The product of a jailhouse interview, it reads like material for a sentimental country ballad, perhaps to be sung by Johnny Cash, about the misadventures of a small time crook. Scott tells of busting out, of making it to Arkansas by a perilous route, of living there for weeks and working at a cotton gin under an assumed name (Charles Halks) before the law caught up with him (“I was weighing some seed and in walked three men and covered me with four Colts pistols”). At the end the reporter describes the wife coming in with the children, a tender kiss through the bars, the wayward husband handing her the wages he made while on the lam. One of the children is quoted as saying, “Papa’s got a heap of money!” What a line! It’s ironic, it’s poignant, it encapsulates the pathos of the situation. That’s got to be the title of the ballad.
Please note: as these maudlin details of the criminal career of the outlaw Chester Scott kept bubbling up, his hoped-for counterpart - the Chester Scott of Floyd County who married Mina and fathered Lula Belle and DID NOT rob any trains or kill any sheriffs - was nowhere to be found. Was he hiding? Or just non-existent? I kept looking.
As for the Chester Scott I HAD found, his history before and after those eventful months in the early 1890s was hard to uncover, and it is incomplete. Even the story of his short life of crime is fragmented. What I was able to piece together from further newspaper articles is that he had been a sometime participant in a two year crime spree executed by the “Morrow Gang” ("Robberies galore are laid to them", according to one article). Three of the crimes were train robberies – Scott’s previous employment as a railway conductor, the insider knowledge it gave him, apparently made him valuable to the gang for that purpose. After a failed attempt to rob a train at nearby Adairsville, Scott and his accomplices were hiding out at a home in Plainville, between Calhoun and Rome, when a posse led by Gordon County Sheriff A.N. McGinnis banged on the door. Gunfire ensued. A blast from Ben Morrow mortally wounded the sheriff, and Scott was again on the run. It was during this time that one newspaper reported, “Scott’s wife says that she found, a short time ago, her husband’s black mask and the oath, which was written on legal cap and imposed the penalty of death on any member of the gang who betrayed it” (material for the ballad!). Four days after the shootout a posse located Scott, and after a brief standoff he surrendered peaceably. One article reports that the arresting officers let him have breakfast at home with his wife and kids before they took him in (that's also for the ballad). There were official fears that Scott and fellow defendant Ben Morrow would be lynched, public outrage over the killing of Sheriff McGinnis being so high, but in the end the mob simmered down. Ultimately, Scott was brought to trial in Rome, convicted (with McGinnis’ widow present) and sentenced to life in prison (he showed "visible signs of emotion" wrote the reporter who covered the sentencing). It was during the time he awaited being sent to the state penitentiary that he and five other prisoners escaped from the local jail. And for the second time in a year several hundred (it seems) poorly-supervised, heavily-armed men were trooping all over Northwest Georgia on the hunt for Chester Scott. It's kind of a miracle there wasn't more of a bloodbath.
The newspaper stories I found leave many questions unanswered. What happened to Sheriff McGinnis' family? How did they go on? How did Chester Scott get mixed up with the Morrow Gang in the first place? Was he in a desperate financial situation? Was he looking for adventure? Had he been pressured? All this is shrouded, and I suppose it always will be.
If the quantity of facts the newspaper coverage provides isn't completely satisfying, it does furnish a rewarding case study for media analysis, especially in how it illustrates the marketability of thrilling crime stories and the ready willingness of content providers to deliver the goods. Some of the articles lean sensationalistic, speculating wildly (and inaccurately, as it turned out) about Scott’s marauding during his time in the run, and using terminology – “desperado”, “notorious outlaw”, etc. – that savors of dime novels rather than dispassionate journalism. It doesn’t help that in that era of newspapering, serious news articles sometimes bled almost imperceptibly into pre-FDA patent medicine advertising. One sentence is about a criminal case, the next: “Scrofula, whether hereditary or acquired, is thoroughly expelled from the blood by Hood’s Sarsaparilla, the great blood purifier.” In any case, did Chester Scott really commit enough big time public felonies to earn the label “notorious?” It is worth considering that his brief history in that line of work coincides exactly with the heyday of Butch Cassidy and his famous train robbing gang, celebrity outlaws of the day, so perhaps circulation-minded reporters were just going with the flow when they tried to inject a little extra gunpowder into their accounts of the Morrow Gang. This passage from an Atlanta Constitution story about the McGinnis murder is rather up front (and with a splash of tough guy prose) about the era’s creepy relationship between violent crime and fame-seeking and publicity: “The Morrows, it seems, were ambitious, anxious to surpass the deeds of the James and Dalton gangs, and, like them, their accounts will be closed suddenly. Will Morrow, the one still uncaught in the latest account, has declared that if he were ever brought into jail it would be feet first.” Feet first! Beautiful. “Come and get me, copper! We'll see whose account gets closed!” Chester Scott, crook though he was, did not seem "ambitious" in that way. He surrendered his weapons and turned himself in, lacking the disposition to pursue life as a b-list Jesse James. After his one daring escape he didn’t attempt another, disappearing from the headlines forever. After 1893 he was done furnishing material for Ned Buntline wannabes.
He comes up only twice more in what I was able to find, but strictly in reports of legal proceedings. In 1899, with the support of many people, including members of the posse who had cornered the Morrow Gang at Plainville, Scott’s sentence was reduced from life to 20 years because he had never fired on Sheriff McGinnis. Later, in 1905, the state commuted his sentence to time served because he had been seriously injured in “service to the state.” They let him go.
And that’s it. The trickle of information shuts off completely. How was he hurt? Was the state just unloading him rather than liberating him? Where did he go when they let him out? Did he try to reunite with his people? Had his family back home in Gordon County rejected him? No yellow ribbon around the old oak tree for poor Chester? Or did they welcome their prodigal son home, but only to the back door and after dark, no fatted calf provided? When did he die? Where? How? There’s no record of any of it. My intuition tells me he didn't live long after 1905, that he died obscurely and his remains are in a potter’s field somewhere.
So what makes me so sure that the Chester Scott who made shocking headlines is the same Chester Scott who married Mina Boyd and fathered my great-grandmother Belle? The newspaper stories, perhaps with good reason, are silent about the name of his wife, protecting her identity even though she's often right there in the background - finding his mask, visiting him in jail, supporting him in court. Nevertheless, even without that confirmation, the details match up in a convincing way. If the outlaw Chester Scott isn't Mina Scott's husband, where is the law-abiding Chester Scott? I can’t find him. All signs point to there being only one man of that name in that time and place. The Chester Scott who married Mina was born in 1866. That lines up with the 1893 newspaper stories about the trial, where outlaw Chester Scott is described as being 26. In the genealogy Chester has three kids; so does the Chester of the newspapers. We do not have a year of death for the Chester of the genealogy or the Chester listed as "husband" on Mina's death certificate - instead there’s just the opaque word "deceased" - when or how, God only knows; the Chester who left prison in 1905 seemed to disappear without a trace, too.
The concurrence of all these details leads me to a certainty that when my father (b. 1936) was a baby, he was sometimes held by a Grandma Belle who had an ancient memory of kissing her father through the bars of a jail cell. She might even have been the one who exclaimed, "Papa's got a heap of money!"
But in reality it was a heap of trouble, not just for Papa, but for all of them. He and Mina never reunited. What had brought them together in the first place? And how does the unusual fact of her being six years older than he was fit in to that unknown story? Whatever the case, the scanty available material suggests that the years after 1893 were a world of struggle for Chester’s onetime family. The 1900 census identifies Mina as head of household in Rome, renting in a poor neighborhood and working as a dressmaker. Belle, 11, was in school, but her twin brother Thomas was already working as a delivery boy. It is difficult to tell what happened to Leila, the older sister, other than that she never married and died at 75 in 1962 as a resident of the state mental hospital in Milledgeville. One can imagine many possible stories behind that fate, none of them cheerful.
Mostly I think of Belle. In that era, in that place, from that background, how limited the options for my great grandmother must have been. And for someone who came of age as she had, life must have felt perpetually unsafe. But she made her way. Within a few years of that 1900 census, when she was just 16, Belle married James M. Veal and before long they moved to Atlanta. There they raised three boys. There's a photograph from the early 1990s of me and my paternal grandfather (Leland - just to my right) and his two older brothers, Joe and Don: the sons of Belle, all very old men by that time. They were not particularly colorful characters, but all solidly successful - Joe was a career army officer, while Don and Leland were planners in the Georgia highway department. And they were paragons of safe conventionality, no more likely to get themselves arrested than they were to fly to the moon. Belle must have been proud, and relieved. They're all gone now, of course. Last week, just after I uncovered Chester Scott, I thought of the three of them and I found it surprising that not one of them had ever thought it worth mentioning to me that THEIR GRANDFATHER WAS A TRAIN ROBBER. Not even in an offhand "Oh, by the way . . . " fashion, the story and its attendant shames being too far in the past now to hurt anybody. But later I wondered if they'd been kept in the dark themselves - maybe they didn't even know. Or, if they did know, a learned habit of keeping the secret meant they would never tell me. A conspiracy of silence in Belle's family after Chester went off to the pen is not hard to imagine, or justify. To the Scotts and Veals who migrated from Rome to Atlanta, the "desperado Chester Scott" wasn't what he is to me, a source of amusement and fascination. To them he was a burden. Perhaps the relocation to Atlanta was, in part, a way of escaping a bad family reputation and putting bitter memories of "a pathetic scene at the jail" and all the rest as far away as possible - up in the hills, back in the past. And maybe all that Winfield Scott stuff was part of the same collective family effort to change the subject.
MOTHERS!! To know that a single application of the Cuticura Remedies will afford instant relief, permit rest and sleep, and point to a speedy and economical cure of torturing, disfiguring, itching, burning and scaly humors, and not to use them without a moment’s delay is to fail in your duty.
UPDATE 1: 
One week after undertaking this investigation I have located what I believe is conclusive evidence that the Chester Scott who is my great great grandfather is also the Chester Scott who . . . did all those things. This eureka moment did not result from a new discovery arising from my diligence but because of my noticing something rather obvious I had overlooked before. An Atlanta Constitution story about the arrest of Chester Scott four days after the shoot-out at Plainville reports that he was apprehended at the home of his father-in-law, who had persuaded him to surrender. That father-in-law was named John Boyd, and as we all know by now, my great great grandmother was born Mina Boyd.
UPDATE 2: My mother (this afternoon): "We almost named you Scott."
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