Then and now 7/17

Poor David P. Giboney just had no luck at all. As if it weren't enough losing his life early in the Civil War and having his body subject to indignities by his Kansas killers, he goes down in history ("The History of Vernon County") incorrectly as "D. P. McGiboney," and even his newly discovered probate records manage to misspell his name as "Gibboney." To top it all off, he often rates merely as "Sallie Mayfield's first husband." Little is known about Giboney, and that little more to do with his death than his life. We know he fought for the Confederacy only because, says the History, all the three older Mayfield sisters, those well-known "lady Bushwhackers," predictably married men who "wore the gray." On the strength of this, Giboney was honored along with two other Confederate soldiers buried in the Montevallo Cemetery, in a commemoration ceremony held in November 2001 by the Col. John T. Coffee Camp No. 1934 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Doubtless he was a very young man when he was killed on Feb. 7, 1862, "in a fight with Kansas troops." Just where the fight took place, and the particulars, we don't know, but in view of what followed it must have been not far from Montevallo. The Jayhawkers "did not bury the body for three days, and then tossed it into a shallow grave near the bank of a small stream. Some time afterward, the young widow-she was then but 23, although the mother of two children-exhumed the body herself and carted it to the old Montevallo graveyard, where it was reinterred March 10, after another exposure of five days." This was the sort of sorrowful ordeal experienced by more than one newly-made young widow, or an aged mother or father, in the Vernon County of Civil War days. Apart from the history account, no trace remained of David Giboney save a rude, dateless stone in the Montevallo Cemetery. Until, that is, the record of his estate turned up in the boxes of original probate records being sorted by volunteers at the Bushwhacker Museum. It had always been assumed Giboney, like others of his type, was a poor man who would have had few worldly goods to leave behind. That the widowed young mother had to go herself and claim and rebury the body doesn't exactly suggest affluence. What we're forgetting is the revolution in ordinary people's lives wrought by the coming of the Civil War. Respectable people of moderate prosperity often found themselves denounced as "traitors" by personal enemies, or ruined just by the disruptions of wartime. A man going off idealistically to fight might have to leave his personal affairs neglected for years. The consequences showed up soon after the war. "About the most important county officer was the public administrator," according to the history. "The legacy left by the war included a number of widows and orphans, whose husbands and fathers had died intestate, and there were scores of unadministered estates in the county." "The accounts of the old officials who were in office when the war began were nearly all unsettled and unbalanced," the history goes on, "some of them were bankrupt, and so were their bondsmen, and competent accountants could not make head or tail of the papers." Not till three years after the war's end did Giboney' s estate come up to be dealt with, first by public administrator Robert W. McNeil, the well-known Nevada merchant and Balltown landowner. Later documents list Charles N. Logan as administrator of the estate. Sallie Mayfield Giboney also distinguished herself by her daring escape, with her 16-year-old sister Jennie, from Federal prison in downtown St. Louis in 1864. They were arrested for the "crime" of being seen riding with male Bushwhackers. Sallie (real name Sarah) after the war became Mrs. Waitman F. Morgan. When the 1887 History was published, the Morgans were living in Kansas City; and like her sisters, Sallie apparently never wrote down or otherwise passed on memories of her stirring personal experiences in the war. Perhaps she found them too painful to remember. And then, this was the Victorian era, when people tended to see such personal troubles as sordid and not "respectable." Giboney, it turns out, had died "seized and possessed of' three pieces of real estate, totaling 165 acres and appraised at $495 -- no trifling sum in those days. Many of the probate papers seem, in classic legal fashion, to concern squabbles over the property. Sarah Morgan, Giboney's "widow and relict," was bringing suit against the estate (but perhaps a "friendly suit"), asserting that though the real estate had been sold as ordered she'd never gotten her one-third, the so-called "dower" she was entitled to under the law. Her attorney was DeWitt C. Hunter, the late colonel of Confederate cavalry who'd gone back to his prewar profession. Papers were also accumulating relating to the probate court's concern for the interests of William A. Giboney, their son, who was still a minor. The History speaks of "two children" but there's no mention of the second, who must have died in the interim. Perhaps the most intriguing paper in the file is a bill from one W. B. Randolph of Montevallo for a "walnut coffin and case." The cost was only $18, but since Mr. Randolph had had to wait five years and eleven months for his money he added $6.39 interest. At first it's puzzling that the widow personally went and "carted" back the body, and yet didn't manage to get it at last reinterred for a further five days. But obviously the extra time was needed to have the "walnut coffin and case" made to order. There was just no other way in those days. There were no readymade coffins to be bought, certainly not in burnt, wartime Montevallo. Obviously, too, notwithstanding the real estate in her husband's name, Sallie Giboney, like most everybody else, was short of ready cash and couldn't pay the carpenter on delivery. Likely many transactions were on credit, and a great deal of personal trust came into play. Moderns who tend to grouse about the cost of funerals would do well to recall what some of their forebears had to go through to get a family member decently underground. Sallie would have had, not only to go and exhume her husband's body, load it on a cart and haul it home, but then personally wash and groom and dress it, and not only order the coffin and case but make the arrangements for the service itself, round up a minister and pallbearers willing to be involved in the funeral of a man righteously shot as a "traitor" by would-be U.S. soldiers. All the while tending her two children and trying to make them understand what had happened. Sallie, it seems safe to say, had little time to sit at leisure, wallowing in her private grief.