"Clubfoot" Fort and the Lunatic Asylum

My thanks to the many of you who sent messages of congratulations for my just joining the “grandfather club.” I gotta say the first three days of membership have been wonderful. Not to be too sappy, but last night Jackson and his parents joined us for supper at our round kitchen table. It was Jackson’s first day home from the hospital, at the ripe old age of about 48 hours. Of course his adoring mother held him during the meal, but Jackson was awake watching with bright eyes when I reached out and held his wee hand, a fragile new hand in our family circle, while I gave a blessing for the food and the new little guy, the next generation of our branch of the McBride family tree. Pretty special. I think I’m going to like the grandfather club.

Moving on, the Texas Legislature has just convened for its “odd year” session in the state capitol building. It’s always a show, especially if you’re the type who enjoys watching sausage being made. Most people may enjoy the final spicy product, even if it’s greasy and bad for us, but we really don’t want to know what goes into the sausage mix or witness its making. Ditto for watching any legislature, since lawmaking often has some dead cats ground into the mix

Appropriately, in my historical “rabbit chasing” on the internet this week, I came upon the recently published memoir of a Texas legislator and Confederate soldier who I had never heard of before: Dewitt Clinton “Clubfoot” Fort.

Fort wrote a lengthy and very entertaining memoir of his war experiences, while awaiting trial in prison in Tennessee, accused of plotting to murder the newly appointed governor of Tennessee. He eventually beat the charge and returned to Bellville, Texas. His memoir lay undisturbed with his descendants until 2007 when it was dusted off, transcribed, footnoted, and published.

Just before the Civil War, in 1859, Mr. Fort won a seat in the 8^th Texas Legislature in the House of Representatives. Fort described himself as a one-issue member of the House – secession. He wrote that every vote he cast was based on whether passage of any bill would further the likelihood of secession. He also wrote some entertaining side stories of his time in Austin, including his visits, shortly after he arrived in Austin, to the state-run facilities for the insane, blind, and deaf.

Wrote Representative Fort: “I had always thought a lunatic asylum was a place where a person’s mind was strengthened and then restored to normalcy. Imagine then my surprise to learn that about only one person in ten had any sense at all, that at least 9/10’s of the residents of the lunatic asylum having lost their wits. I was at first apprehensive that should I linger too long, the same malady might become my fate. I have always been fearful of epidemics.

“But then I felt sure if I were to fully lose 9/10’s of my wits, there would still be very few members of the Texas Legislature that had has much sense as myself.”   

His words are old proof that some things are constant in politics, whether in 1859 or 2015.

As a Confederate officer, even with a crippling foot deformity, Fort earned a reputation as the fearless leader of a small company of cavalry scouts who first fought with JEB Stuart in Virginia, and later with Nathan B Forest in Tennessee. He was once captured and escaped by diving into the muddy Mississippi off the river boat that was taking him upriver to prison camp.

Fort wrote that he hit the water about dark and swam in the cold water and current for hours before reaching the shore shortly before daylight. After making his way back to Confederate-held land, he resumed his “scouting” duties in the Union-occupied area near Memphis. He led his scouts so successfully that when the war ended, there was a $5,000 in gold reward on his head. Be aware that the term “scouts” during the Civil War often meant a lethal band of guerilla fighters, operating with stealth and great violence within the Union army’s zone of occupation.

Captain Fort wrote very clearly of his band of 43 men fighting repeated engagements with Union cavalry, using ambushes and deception to great effect. His only defeat appears to have been an attempt to board and capture a steamship that had pulled in to the shore to load wood for its boilers. The plan was for Fort’s company to rush up the gangplanks in the dark, but they became intermingled with the ship’s fleeing crewmen who had been onshore loading wood. The noisy confusion allowed the ship’s captain enough time to slip the boat from the shore, leaving Fort’s lieutenant and first sergeant stranded onboard. They resisted capture and were killed by the ship’s guard detachment of Union infantry.

Although Fort wrote of leading multiple mounted charges straight at Union cavalry, remember that Fort nicknamed himself “Clubfoot” for his deformed extremity. That handicap must have kept him from leading from the front when his company charged up the gangplanks. In the tradition of military leadership, it’s not surprising that the men who were second and third in command of Fort’s company were the first onto the ship, stranded, and died fighting. (Think of the Israeli commando attack to free the civilian hostages of an airplane high-jacking at Entebbe, Uganda in the 1976. The Israeli commanding officer was the first one through the door of the building where the hostages were being kept, and the only Israeli soldier to die in the violence.)

After beating his murder conspiracy charge and returning to Bellville, Texas, Fort practiced law. In 1868, at the age of 38 and recently a new husband and father, Fort was gunned down by Lancaster Springfield, who himself had been a Confederate captain, and who was an angry courtroom opponent. The cowardly assassin first knocked Fort to the ground with a shotgun blast to his back on a dusty street in Hempstead, Texas, then walked up to his prostrate victim and finished him off with a derringer bullet to his head.  As an aside, this was during the era of reconstruction in Texas, and a jury acquitted Springfield of the murder.

I’m trying to think how to insert Captain Fort into the McBee saga as a tough-as-nails “scout” with a quick wit, but I’ve already closed the door on 1862 in Tangled Honor, the last year Foot was in Virginia. McBee is not destined to fight in western Tennessee where Fort spent the last half of the war, so if Fort makes the story it would have to be after the war, back in Texas, and right now the grand plan ends in Virginia, not Texas. But, dang, if Fort is not an intriguing character.

It’s this sort of discovery of real people with engaging stories, people like Lucy Pickens and Clubfoot Fort, people who tempt writers to stretch the facts of real history to fit into our fictional stories. Sometimes I sigh in regret and move on, sometimes a facsimile in a new character joins the cast, and sometimes I close my eyes and cheat the dates or the geography, putting a real name in a place and day where he/she wasn’t. That’s when I excuse my departure from historical exactitude by reminding myself that I’m writing historical “fiction,” and, besides, the devil made me do it.