By late Spring of 1861 only the formalities were needed to place Tennessee in a state of war. The difficult…part had already been accomplished by the politicians. Like expert harpists they had strummed the emotions of the people…who stood in town squares and heard the politicians extol the virtues of the South…. Political rallies took on the appearance of religious revivals…after which “men of courage and patriotism” were invited to come forth…to protect southern property and the honor of southern womanhood.
—BOB WOMACK, Call Forth the Mighty Men
August 10, 1897.
The Rogers home, 75 Maiden Lane. New York City.
THE REMAINDER OF THE INTERVIEW for the pamphlet took place in Albert’s stables behind his stylish townhome, where, the night before, his wife, Clara, and their three young sons had excitedly welcomed the Tennesseans to New York.
The following day Rogers resumed his questions on the subject of Jim’s education, returning to the point at which Doc Key had first come to believe that he was an unusually smart horse. As his exchange with the Doc proceeded, there was something unnerving to Rogers about the presence of the tall bay, who seemed to be following the interview closely, even nodding yes to agree with points, at other moments nickering for dramatic emphasis.
Rogers finally commented about it. Was he imagining things, or was Jim following the conversation?
Bill Key almost laughed. “Of course, Jim understands what one is saying.”
Astonishing, Rogers said, then turned to Jim Key and told him how magnificent and brilliant he was. Unmistakably, Jim Key nodded in agreement and preened for his admirer.
“You see,” said Dr. Key, “when he is praised his head goes up so as to say, ‘What horse is as smart as I?’”
Rogers had a twinge of suspicion. Maybe this was all part of their act, a trick.
Dr. Key sensed the skepticism and spoke to it, matter-of-factly, explaining that he and Jim had established their connection as a powerful open channel of communication. “I believe he knows every word I say to him, and sometimes it seems to me that all I’ve got to do is to think a thing and he knows it.”
Was it, then, some strange symbiosis or hypnosis? Rogers had to ask, knowing that reporters at the press party would be watching Jim and Dr. Key closely, looking for familiar tricks and signals, anything that hinted at fraud, including mind control.
“Some say it’s hypnotism and that kind of thing—but I don’t know anything about that.” The Doc was diffident, adding as an afterthought, “But I do know Jim knows and does what I ask him to do.”
This was also how Jim Key so easily mastered bits for the medicine show. Initially, the Doc hadn’t planned on putting him to work. But since the two were inseparable, it had been only natural that the year-and-a-half-old Arabian-Hambletonian had wanted to get in on the act. Not unlike his dam.
By the 1890s, with the patent medicine era thundering toward its peak and a crowded marketplace creating increasingly tougher competition, the marketing challenge for every medicine vendor was how to provide innovative, spectacular crowd-drawing entertainment. The medicine man of the 1890s, unlike the pitchman of old, needed to be a theatrical producer. For quack and genuine healer alike, what was needed was a gimmick.
Doc Key paid attention to what others were doing, learning from those he met on the road, and those he heard about. He heard about a New York street merchant down on Wall Street who had a poker-playing pig that stood with his hooves propped up on a card table, ready to take all comers. One well-known dark-cloaked vendor gathered a crowd by calling out, “You are dying, Sir! And you, Madam!” mesmerizing his audience with scare tactics until he finally had them, proclaiming, “You are all dying, and you think there is no way to avoid it! But there is, and that is why I am here!” Then he would introduce his lifesaving wares and sell them in splendid quantities.
One highly successful medicine man had perfected the trick of setting out a length of rope, a skull, and a Bible, and spending as much as an hour arranging and rearranging the objects. The moment he was satisfied with the density of the crowd surrounding him, he would turn and smile and pitch his products, never once referring to the rope, skull, or Bible. Others promised drawings for free merchandise at the end of the presentation or gave bonus gifts with purchases. Some vendors set up tents for visits with “doctors” who pulled teeth and diagnosed symptoms for fees, in addition to prescribing and selling their own remedies.
One of the most effective forms of patent medicine promotion was live testimonials by previously satisfied customers. And who better to illustrate the wonders of Keystone Liniment than Jim Key? The Keystone show combined crowd-drawing methods, starting with Doc Key cordoning off a sizable area and then stringing up the hundreds of rabbit feet he had collected, many from Civil War battlefields. As a small handful of the curious gathered, the Keystone minstrel players used their upbeat tunes to pull a larger audience, moving next into rolling rhythms and pleasing harmonies to set the stage for the kindly, confident Dr. Key to begin his lecture. But just as he began to introduce the marvels of Keystone Liniment, Jim interrupted, scampering up to him, doglike, a stick in his mouth.
The bit had the Doc apologizing to the crowd, turning to the gangly, growing young horse to reprimand him, but ever so kindly.
Dr. Key: “I’m talkin’ to the folks now, Jim. Be patient ’til I’m done and I’ll be mighty glad to play fetch with you later.”
Jim Key: (To irrepressible audience laughter and applause.) Shaking his head, he puts the stick in the Doc’s hand, gets him to throw it, fetches it, then obediently sits, lies down, and rolls over on command.
With the crowd continuing to grow, Dr. Key followed this up by explaining that Jim was still somewhat confused, ever since he was born an ugly duckling horse too crippled to stand but who had been saved by the very liniment that the lucky folks were about to have a chance to buy. Taking out a bottle, he demonstrated its uses and gave Jim a rapid rubdown. Suddenly, the hound imitator transformed into a regal, young equine prince trotting elegantly in a circle for all to see, eliciting cheers of delight.
Jim Key was a born actor. Dr. Key recalled to Rogers that as Jim embellished upon his performing role, his willingness to learn new bits led them to adapt the act. “After a while I taught him to give symptoms of bots and colic,” said the Doc, describing how through rewards Jim learned to evoke the subtly different ailments. Colic came in two forms, spasmodic or flatulent, and was known, when left untreated, to become a potentially fatal inflammation of the bowels. Jim soon mastered the ability, by mimicking Dr. Key, to suddenly appear to be seized with pain, moving about in a restless, uneasy manner until, out of apparent frustration, he began to strike his belly with his hind foot. As the veterinary surgeon diagnosed his disorder to the crowd, Jim became increasingly distressed, perspiring heavily, and finally he heaved himself onto the ground, rolled onto his back while madly striking his hooves in the air. Just when it looked as if the horse was beyond hope, Dr. Key would give him a drink of his tonic, and Jim would miraculously recover from his symptoms.
Bots, the larva of the gadfly, also caused intestinal irritation when lodged in the stomach, as well as causing sore throats or nasal congestion when deposited in those mucus membranes. Jim learned to pretend to have the strange array of symptoms associated with bots—everything from turning up his upper lip, to pawing and pacing, from craning to look at his side, to giving the appearance of becoming instantly weak and fatigued. Here too, just as the otherwise handsome, tall bay stallion began to stagger to the ground, Dr. Key would bring out both his tonic and his liniment, recommending a course of treatment that used both. No Shakespearean actor in a death scene coming back to life for his curtain call could have outdone Jim Key’s onstage transformation. Needless to say, the Keystone products often sold out before the troupe could make it back to Shelbyville for more stock.
After that, Key said, “Jim learned to make believe he was lame and act as though he were suffering with other kinds of troubles, the general symptoms of which he would reproduce.”
Since Jim had been such a quick study as a performer in the medicine show, Rogers assumed that learning to read and spell came to him rapidly as well.
Not at all, Dr. Key admitted. At first, the process was slow and unpromising. “The hardest thing I had to teach him was to learn how to eat sugar.”
Really? Rogers looked surprised. Jim Key, listening, gave a small neigh of amusement.
“Yes, sir,” recalled the Doc, “I tried every way, and had it tied to the bridle, but Jim would always spit it out. One day I saw him eating apples in the orchard and I got the idea that if I put a piece of sugar in the apple he would eat it. I fixed an apple and then watched Jim. When he picked it up and munched it, I thought he would go crazy with satisfaction and delight.”
Doc Key tried again to feed Jim the sugar by itself. No success. For the next six months, the Doc experimented with different techniques. “If I covered the apple with sugar, he would eat both with great relish,” he remembered. “So I gradually reduced the quantity of apple over the sugar, and then he would have a piece of apple laid over the piece of sugar in my hand, and when he would reach for the apple he would get the sugar. In this way he learned that sugar was sugar and apple was apple.” By that time, Jim loved both rewards equally.
Albert Rogers had to ask, “Why were you so intent on having him learn to like sugar?”
William Key probably milked this moment and gave Rogers a sideways glance, as if to suggest that the answer was obvious. After all, how else was he going to teach Jim the alphabet?
This was the story Rogers had been waiting for. How had that come about?
Dr. Key had no story to tell. He simply had gotten it into his head that his eager, able performing equine could be trained to recognize and select the letter A from a grouping of other letters. “When I began I had in my mind only to teach Jim to pick out the letter A. I got some cards with the letter A on them, and put sugar on those cards.”
Albert now understood. “You had to teach him to eat the sugar first and this was after Jim had grown to have a passion for sugar?”
“Which he has never lost,” the Doc echoed. “I held the card up and would say, ‘A, A, A.’ And while I was doing this I would let nobody in the stable, and I would keep him away from other horses. I said A a good many times, and Jim used up many cards, as he would lick the cards so much.”
Realizing he had sent Jim the wrong message—that letters of the alphabet were edible—Dr. Key adapted his methodology. Instead of paper cards, he used pieces of tin with the letter A painted on them, sprinkled with sugar, and mixed in with pieces of tin that had other letters painted on them without sugar. “It took months and months, a half year, before I was satisfied that he would know the letter A when he would see it. Then, I thought that if Jim could only be made to bring the card to me I would have just what I wanted. I at once began to train him for this end.” For this process, the Doc put a piece of an apple in a handkerchief and taught Jim to bring it in his mouth to him, giving the handkerchief to Dr. Key and receiving the apple as his reward. “I soon had him tugging at the card with the A on it and then bringing it to me.”
Further questions led Albert Rogers to see that the lessons for learning the letter A occupied hours of the day, requiring extraordinary patience. What, then, had possessed Key to continue with other letters? Why wasn’t he satisfied?
“Of course, I thought I had my fortune made when one day I happened to think if the horse knew A when he saw it he could be taught the entire alphabet, and in this I was right.”
From the answers to these questions, Rogers put to rest his concern that skeptics would be suspicious of a man and a horse whose act grew out of a medicine show background. In his way of thinking, having two seasoned salesmen would be an asset for the humane movement, not a deterrent. The plan was simple: Bill and Jim would draw the crowds and then, instead of selling a product, sell an idea, albeit the socially challenging idea that all cruelty toward animals was abhorrent and unacceptable.
Rogers also felt that the story of how Jim learned the alphabet was simple and logical enough and would sway at least some cynics. But there was one other thorny area of questioning that had to do with how Northerners might feel about a slave who had chosen to align himself not with the Yankees but with the Confederate States of America. The answers that followed were not simple and had nothing to do with logic.
On June 12, 1861, Young Doc Key, age twenty-eight, made haste to Camp Trousdale in Sumner County, three counties north of Bedford, with the intention of preventing twenty-year-old Merit and eighteen-year-old Alexander from enlisting to fight for the Southern cause. Too late. On June 11, the two sons of John W. Key had been mustered into service with the Eighteenth Tennessee Infantry Regiment, Company F, under Captain Benjamin F. Webb. Dubbed the Festerville Guards, the unit was made up of men from Bedford and Rutherford counties organized earlier in the week in Bell Buckle and in Murfreesboro under General Palmer.
How had it happened? What speech in which town square or which neighbor had goaded the two boys, peace-loving scholars that they were, to take up arms against the Union?
Madness. For six months the divided house of Tennessee had refrained from secession. “When the War clouds began to gather,” Key recalled, the signs were mixed, boding both that the impossible could never happen and that it was inevitable. Lincoln—vowing not to end slavery where it existed, but only to arrest its spread—had instantly become the mortal enemy of every slave state. The first to secede was South Carolina, in December 1860, then within a month Mississippi seceded, followed by Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.
Would Tennessee become the seventh state to secede? The question was put to a vote on February 9, 1861. Predictably, the majority of East Tennesseans voted emphatically against secession, while most West Tennesseans voted to leave the Union. The decision came down to Middle Tennessee, and the winning margin was helped in Bedford County where the count was 1,656 to 828, two to one against secession.
But despite the “no” vote in February, with Tennessee’s strategic importance, too much was at stake to too many forces to allow her to be left on the sidelines. Pressure mounted from within and without.
Texas seceded in March, and then, on April 12, the president of the fledgling Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, ordered a preemptive strike on Fort Sumter, which gave the South an almost bloodless victory. The sole casualty was a horse, whose death unceremoniously marked the first of an estimated one and a half million horses and mules that would be killed or wounded in battle and the resultant marauding, or would die from starvation and disease over the course of the next four years.
With the slaying of a single horse in its opening battle, so began the bloodiest war in American history.
For many wavering Northerners, the assault on Fort Sumter was cause enough to put aside ideological differences over slavery and states’ rights, and to take up arms. But for many Southerners, Lincoln’s subsequent call for 75,000 troops from each state in the Union had a similarly galvanizing effect, setting into motion like dominos a string of three more secessions: Virginia, Arkansas, and North Carolina.
In Shelbyville, Young Doc Key could feel the pendulum swing of local sentiments shift as mercurially as a wave of bad weather. Again, on June 8, the question was put to the Tennessee voters. For weeks the matter had been pushed back to the polls by the slave-holding class and the politicians. Bill Key knew that not many of those who wanted the war would actually serve. It was going to be mostly the poor and middle-class soldiers—few of them slave holders—who were going to fight and die in the widening conflict.
That was one point made by Parson William G. Brownlow, the fiery antisecessionist from East Tennessee, who raced across the state to bring his message to the Shelbyville public square, where he boomed it from the steps of the courthouse. A favorite of the ladies for his passionate oratory, Brownlow preached loyalty to God and nation, begging the end of slavery’s abomination. Heckled by a man who accused him of abetting the Yankee devil to defile Southern women, he thundered back, “I am an unconditional Union man and advocate the preservation of the Union at the expense of all other considerations!” as the women waved their handkerchiefs in support.
Young Doc Key’s friend, lawyer, and state legislator William H. Wisener also took to the steps of the courthouse to beg business owners to think about how their stores and wares would be co-opted by the demands of the Confederate government. Likewise taking a stand against secession was the prosperous Lewis Tillman. Though he was a slave holder, Tillman believed the city had too much to lose and little to gain from leaving the Union. But for many area farmers, Brownlow, Wisener, and Tillman were unconvincing. These Bedford countians were much more moved by the stirring military airs played by the staunch “secesh” advocates. In contrast to the gloomy Unionists, many Southerners were practically giddy with the “glorious future” promised by Jefferson Davis, as if to remain with the Union would be to miss out on the festivities. To them, the reality of bloodshed was remote, especially if the noble Volunteer State was willing to take the battle north to the enemy where Southern fire in the belly would vanquish foes of the South in short shrift. In ninety days, the maximum amount of time most reasonable Southern strategists believed the war would take to win, life would return to normal, the better for all not to live under the yoke of Lincoln.
From the back of the gathering, Young Doc Key heard all this through the loud hum of the crowd, like a mill wheel powered by Southern bravado, churning its grist into fear and loathing. Mothers recounted their children’s nightmares of being stolen from their beds by invading Yankees, of their husbands and sons murdered; fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers readied themselves to do their duty. Those who disagreed began to hold their tongues.
Hardly mentioned was either the right to own slaves or the wrong of owning slaves, in part because slavery was not the main fuel that drove Tennessee’s economic engine, and partly because Lincoln himself, still almost two years away from declaring an end to slavery, denied that it was the central issue of the dispute. And yet it was a blaring subtext, the only one, igniting throughout the political and regional strata the tinderbox it had always been.
Around the periphery of Shelbyville’s town square, standing in the back of the crowds—tending to horses and buggies or other tasks, ignored as though invisible—were representatives of Bedford County’s nearly seven thousand Negroes, fifty-two of whom were free. Blacks were a full third of the total population of the county, but no one spoke for them. Without words, William Key knew many of them shared the same fears and hopes. In a war, life could only be harder for black people. But, despite Lincoln’s haltering steps to be the deliverer whom history demanded he be, freedom was coming, war or not.
The Tennessee ballot on June 8, 1861, asked voters two questions, to vote for or against “separation” (whether or not to secede) and to vote for or against “representation” (whether or not to join with the Confederacy). In most counties where the vote was against secession, it was also against joining the rebellion; most who voted for secession also voted to join the Rebels. But in Bedford County a strange thing happened. In a reversal of the numbers from February, the count was 1,544 for secession and 727 against. But on the question of representation, 1,544 voted against joining the Confederacy, and 737 voted in favor. What the net result of the vote really showed was that residents of Bedford County had a profound desire for neutrality. For this, the Middle Tennessee haven would be alternately rewarded and punished, almost continually occupied by all manner of invading armies.
Despite divisions, by day’s end Tennessee became the ninth and last state to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. East Tennessee remained a Union stronghold while Middle Tennessee and West Tennessee, with some exceptions, stayed true to the Southern cause. Bedford County continued to be split, contributing troops to twenty-three Confederate units, while also sending soldiers into twelve Federal units. The Volunteer State’s war of neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother had begun.
Three days later William Key arrived, one day late, at Camp Trousdale. He found Merit and Alexander, already looking hungry, worn, and somewhat bewildered as to how they had been recruited. Being not far from the Kentucky border, Young Doc Key realized that he was closer to freedom than he had ever been before. He could take the Keys’ horse; he would go with their blessings. But instead he chose to stay and follow John W. Key’s two sons.
Rogers didn’t understand.
Bill Key explained it simply. “I loved my young marsters. I was afraid they would get killed or not have anything to eat, so I went with them.” His choice had as much to do with his stubbornness as with his humanity.
This put a different twist on his partisanship, making the answer to the question a more complicated one. Yes, he had been with the Rebels, Key told Rogers, but he had also helped the Yankees, served as a guide on the Underground Railroad, acted as a medic and surgeon for soldiers and horses from the gray and the blue, operated as a spy, military strategist, architect, diplomat, thief, and hero. To survive and to ensure the survival of the Key boys, he had stubbornly decided he would need to belong to every side, and to none.
Through the summer and into the fall of 1861 the early Confederate victories had kept spirits high in Company F. Then ninety days passed and the war was not finished. Winter set in, bringing storms that overshadowed memories of celebratory parades and political bravado. In January 1862, the rain turned to sleet and snow as Captain Webb and his unit slogged west through mud toward Dover, Tennessee, just below the Kentucky border.
It was here at Fort Donelson that Company F prepared to face its first battle. Bill had been relieved when, thanks to their reading and writing abilities, Merit and Alexander had been selected for communications duty, mainly for protecting important papers and sending dispatches. Bill hoped these responsibilities would keep them off the front lines as much as possible. The way things were shaping up at Fort Donelson, however, that didn’t look likely.
Ulysses S. Grant, now launching his campaign into Tennessee, had easily taken nearby Fort Henry and was now headed for Fort Donelson. Less of a fortress and more of a stockade, Donelson covered fifteen acres that overlooked the one-hundred-foot bluff above the west bank of the Cumberland River. With a garrison of 15,000 troops, a dozen heavy guns arrayed to meet Grant’s gunboats, and three miles of trenches along the river, the strategic advantage appeared to belong to the Confederates, despite their being outnumbered by Grant’s 27,000 troops. But the Young Doc saw two glaring problems. The first had to do with disagreements among the generals—Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner. The second and biggest problem he saw was that their focus was on defending the fort from the boats, without any planning being given to defending against a siege by land. In a worst-case scenario, even if the assault by water was stopped, Grant’s attack by land could still trap and pin the Confederates against the river. Off the front lines or not, the Key boys would be captured.
With the Battle of Fort Donelson ranking as the tenth most costly engagement of the war—resulting in more than 19,000 casualties, 80 percent Confederate—Bill Key’s strategic assessment turned out to be correct. There had been bizarre shifts in the weather—from being so unseasonably warm one day that many of the Northern boys threw off their coats, to a sudden bout of freezing rain and heavy snow the next day, to a wind so bitter later that a dying Yankee crept into the Rebel rifle pits to warm himself by their campfire, where his enemies shared their ration of coffee with him before he died.
Like the weather, the battle’s momentum shifted radically, first favoring the Southerners when the brunt of the assault came from the gunboats. From close range, the cannonballs overarched and missed their targets while the Rebel big guns pummeled and overpowered the boats. But as Bill predicted, when breastworks were being hastily built along the water’s edge, few were erected to stave off the land assault that came after all. Ultimately the victory went to the North, providing the occasion upon which Grant refused any special terms except unconditional surrender.
From this battle, the initials “U. S.” of Grant’s name came to be known henceforth as “Unconditional Surrender.” A year earlier Grant, a washed-up military man, had been a clerk in a harness maker’s shop; now he had given the North its first meaningful victory of the war. The Battle of Fort Donelson would eventually not be ranked as a major battle. In fact, when Albert Rogers described it in the pamphlet, he mistakenly referred to it as Fort “Donaldson.” But many historians would also argue that the loss was catastrophic for the South. With it, the Union had corralled Kentucky and had made the breach into Tennessee—up two of its rivers no less. For those on both sides who had never seen combat before, though there were worse images to come, nothing would ever be as haunting as the sight of the bodies in blood-soaked gray and blue that littered the icy snow, the faces of the dead said to be literally frozen, with eyes and mouths gaping wide.
Fewer historians preserved a fascinating piece of history about the Battle of Fort Donelson, which began before the shooting started as Bill Key, accidental military strategist, set about to assess the gaps in the line of defense while also making mental notes for any possible escape routes. A noncombatant, he then looked for a spot to build some sort of fortification to hide himself.
“Yes, sir,” Key told Rogers, “that became the famous fort that the soldiers called Fort Bill.”
Fort Bill? Albert was dubious until this story was confirmed to him later by Nashville’s Mayor Richard Houston Dudley, Bill’s childhood friend. The lives of many of Bedford County’s sons were saved there.
“It was only a small place dug in the ground and covered with logs to keep the bullets out,” Doc Key told Rogers. He was able to stay out of the line of fire, as did Merit, Alexander, and several of the other Festerville Guards, once he was able to coax them in with him. Initially, when he tried to wave them in to take shelter, the soldiers refused. But the carnage soon changed their minds.
“When Fort Donelson was captured in the night,” Doc Key went on, “I stole out and found a place unguarded and took my young masters out, with important papers, and we escaped.”
As the three forged on foot through ice-encrusted streams and into gullies of waist-deep mud, they made their way south and caught up with Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. The brash cavalryman had been at Fort Donelson and had been furious when his superiors chose to surrender. Ironically, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a native of Bedford County, from which he took his middle name, had scouted the same gaps in the Union line that Bill Key had found. When Forrest argued for retreat, he was allowed to lead out a column of 700 men, through the same route that the Young Doc had navigated, only an hour or so afterward.
Nathan Bedford Forrest had been one of the richest, most notorious slave traders in Tennessee. Now on his way to becoming a general, he was also earning a reputation as one of the most brilliant cavalry officers of the Confederacy. Forrest was said to be two men: a kind, soft-spoken gentleman away from the battlefield who, at the flip of a switch, could be transformed into war mode and the embodiment of a fighting machine. His own mother described him as having, while a child, a terror-inducing voice when angered. Yet under stress, he had a decision-making ability that was uncannily prophetic, his own form of mother wit. But brilliant as he was, it turned out that Nathan Bedford Forrest was nearly illiterate. Bill Key knew this and didn’t hesitate to inform him that Merit and Alexander were at college level in book learning. When Forrest found out that Alexander had been able to withhold important papers from the enemy at Fort Donelson, he made A. W. Key an officer, assigning both Key sons to jobs as scouts and guides.
Shelbyville historians later boasted that William Key served as caretaker for Forrest’s own horse, while the Young Doc was also allowed to be an unofficial guide along with the Keys. He earned enough favor with General Forrest that he was given a pass to go home. For a man of color to possess such a piece of Confederate paper was highly unusual.
Without being found out, the Young Doc exploited this gift by spending the next period of the war assisting fugitive slaves through the lines, a job that enabled him to go home to Shelbyville and discover why it had come to be called Little Boston.
Like Bill Key, the folks back home were doing what they could to survive and get along, both with their occupiers and one another. John and Martha Key described how feelings that had once been only friendly disputes between neighbors were now growing more acrimonious by the day.
After the defeat at Fort Donelson, Confederate troops were temporarily stationed in Shelbyville under the command of General Hardee, which coincided with widespread foraging of farms and the disappearance of 30,000 head of hogs and many numbers of beeves. John’s tanyard had been heavily looted, and though some merchants were paid for the stocks and goods taken, the Confederate paper money was as yet of little value.
With resentment against the Rebels percolating, Shelbyville got an added shot of antisecessionist venom when Parson Brownlow was brought through as a Confederate prisoner, causing an uproar among the ladies in town. Before he could cause too much trouble, the Confederates pulled out in time for the arrival of incoming Yankees, led by the Fourth Ohio Cavalry. The reception was so warm for the Northerners that Harper’s Weekly soon ran a sketch of “Shelbyville, the only Union town in Tennessee.” The accompanying article proclaimed, “The names of such men as Wisener…and others deserve to be perpetual in history for their unyielding fidelity to the great republic.”
Not everyone shared pride in the new nickname “Little Boston.” Nor did all the citizens of Shelbyville prefer occupation by Yankees any more than by Rebels, especially when food supplies ran short and the Northern boys helped themselves to livestock and grain stores. For his part, the Young Doc got on splendidly with many of the Union officers he met during his sporadic visits home, sometimes helping some of the Yankee boys through the lines. He figured his help would be remembered, and the fact that he was protecting Confederate sons of Shelbyville wouldn’t be held against him. But he was soon to be wrong about that.
At the end of March, when William had been away from the front for almost two months without word from Merit and Alexander, a grave foreboding came over him. Inquiries brought back information that they were with General Forrest heading toward Pittsburgh Landing, in southwest Tennessee, not far from the Mississippi state line. The Young Doc rode there at top speed, not sure what he’d find.
Confederate Tennessean John Gumm crawled to shelter in the waning hours of the battle fought on April 6 and 7, 1862, and scribbled in his diary:
I have learned the name of the Battel ground they call it Shiloah…it was…the greatest Battel in modern history…its duration and Bravery never his bin Surpassed Either in ancient or modern history…it was one Continel Charge…. Bombs and Grape Shot fell as thick as hair and Minnie Balls whising round my Years like Bombel Bees.
In a battle named for the whitewashed, log-built Shiloh (from the Hebrew word for “place of peace”) Church, which stood amid peach trees west of the death pond or “blood pond,” where the water turned red from the bodies piled one on top of the other, the strong advantage began with the 45,000 Confederate troops throughout the first day. The weather had been springlike and gentle, as a breeze rustled the peach blossoms and sent them fluttering down on top of the fallen. But a rainstorm that night and then reinforcements on the second day of fighting (which gave the Union as many as 65,000 troops) saw a momentum shift—enough to force the Rebels to retreat toward Corinth, Mississippi, and to give General Grant the muted victory. Between both sides, 3,000 were dead and another 20,000 wounded, more casualties than in all previous American battles.
In this hell William Key found Alexander and Merit with General Forrest, whose mission it was to protect the retreating Confederate infantry from pursuit by the Union cavalry.
As he had before, the Young Doc tried to convince the two Key boys to follow him to safer ground, but only Merit, with the excuse of guarding papers, was in a position to find cover in a clearing called Fallen Timbers. With a thunderous shaking of the ground came the approach of the Fourth Illinois Cavalry, and Forrest lifted his saber to give the order to take the fight to the enemy, galloping like a cannon shot toward the incoming riders. Alexander Key, as part of the rearguard, readied his rifle and started off on foot. William looked after him miserably, here in the shadow of Shiloh. Certain that John W. Key’s secondborn son would die if he didn’t do anything, Bill pulled out his trusty pistol and aimed it straight for the midcalf of Alexander’s leg.
Just before the Doc pulled the trigger, Officer Alexander Key whirled around and stopped him, cautioning, “I’m keeping a close watch on you, Bill. You were going to shoot me, weren’t you?”
Grumbling, Bill admitted that he was, but only so they wouldn’t have to fight anymore. Alexander hesitated helplessly, then followed the last of Forrest’s men off after their leader. Alexander returned to the camp intact, but General Forrest was badly wounded when, after riding into the midst of Union cavalrymen who surrounded his horse, which began to rear and turn, cries of “shoot him” brought a rifle so close to him that it grazed his jacket as its bullet ripped into his hip and lodged in his lower spine. History marked that shot as the last one fired at the Battle of Shiloh.
William Key swore that nothing he would live to see could ever match the bloody nightmare at Pittsburgh Landing. But eight months later, he found himself yet again on the sidelines of a battle that did. From December 31 of that year until January 2, 1863, at the outskirts of Murfreesboro along Stones River, about thirty miles north of Shelbyville, Doc Key witnessed his third and final large-scale battle that proportionally incurred more casualties on both sides than at Shiloh, leaving almost one-third of the total of 75,000 who fought either killed or wounded. The battle had pitted Confederate general Braxton Bragg against General William Rosecrans and should have been won by the Rebels after Bragg forced the Yankees into considerable retreat. But at the Nashville Pike the theretofore overly cautious Rosecrans rallied his Union troops and held the line, ultimately forcing Bragg into retreat.
Stones River was not viewed as so decisive a battle as others in Tennessee, but in a winter following numerous setbacks for the Union, their victory at Murfreesboro was another important turning point.
The end of the battle coincided with news that on January 1, 1863, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. The great, long promised day of jubilee had come at last, except that free status meant little in the seceded states. Yet Bill knew now that the North would win, and that the colored regiments authorized by Emancipation would be the reason why. He was having an increasingly difficult time helping the Confederacy even indirectly, knowing the price to be paid for its victory was to be the loss of freedom. Or as he told the Union soldiers when they captured him and he tried to explain why he had switched affiliations: “I was tired of the Rebels and I wanted to be free.”
Unfortunately, his reputation had preceded him, or someone back in Shelbyville had it in for him. The pro-Union sentiment there had become less pronounced by now, for a variety of reasons. The plight of Union spy James J. Andrews and his Union rangers—who hatched a plot in Shelbyville to commandeer “The General,” a prized Southern steam engine, only to be hung shortly after the plan’s failure—may have had a sobering effect on outward demonstrations by the Little Bostonians. Soon after, Confederate cavalryman John Hunt Morgan came through the area, retaliating against Union sympathizers. There were extensive reports of houses and farms being burned, stores looted, horses and Negroes abducted and assaulted.
The Key family matriarch, Margaret Graham Key, died during this period of the war. It may have been of interest to the Young Doc that in a report of this time a Yankee soldier described an eighty-year-old woman named “Mrs. Graham” strangely reminiscent of the Old Missus. This energetic elderly woman climbed up on a pedestal and, with her own bare hands, tore the flag of the Confederacy down from a post in the town square, raving that her husband had fought for the Stars and Stripes and had given his life to his country. The account certainly matched the family myth of Strother Key. She had family members, Mrs. Graham said, who had been dragged from their home and had been shot for favoring the Union.
The reality was that divided alliances had given way to mob rule that operated differently from hill to hill. The county began to breed guerrillas, thieves, and home guards of many persuasions. Boys were leaving their units and coming home shoeless and starving, only to be shot as deserters. Neighbors pointed fingers at other neighbors; family members turned in other family members. Suspicion and fear spread. No one was safe.
Starting at this period more than 22,000 Negroes from Tennessee, a tenth of the total number of African-Americans to be mustered into Union service, began to pour North to take up arms or to join local colored units being organized. One of the few guides able to navigate the routes leading out of Bedford County for them was William Key, and in the beginning of 1863 he was doing so with increasing regularity. That was when he ran into some trouble with his Union contacts.
In February, he related to Rogers, “I undertook to get another darkey through the lines but was caught by the guard, the Sixth Indiana Regiment, and accused of being a spy.”
The Indianans were willing to accept his explanation that he was finished with the Rebs. But one of their officers became wary. He remembered hearing something, maybe from one of the Ohio officers who had been in Shelbyville, about a mulatto horse surgeon associated with the detested Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Ohioans were summoned, took one look at William Key, and began to smirk. Doc Key recognized them, he told Rogers, as “Union men that lived at my home.”
“That’s him,” said one of them to the Indiana officers, “the worst Rebel in the South.”
Doc Key’s justification of being compelled to serve his master’s young sons didn’t wash with the Yanks. They decided he was a dangerous prisoner and clamped him in jail somewhere between Murfreesboro and Nashville under the command of General James Scott Negley, with the plan to hold him there until they caught Officer Alexander W. Key, another presumed spy, and then hang them together.
“I staid in that prison six weeks,” the Doc recalled. At that point he overheard some grousing from his guards about the demands being put on them by General Negley. A reputed taskmaster, he had ordered his men to find him a decent cook.
The Young Doc beckoned a guard with whom he was on friendly terms. “They call me the best cook in Tennessee,” he whispered. “If you don’t believe me, ask anyone from my home.” A Shelbyville Confederate prisoner was located and when asked he ventured, “Best cook in Tennessee? Bill’s the best cook in the country.”
General Negley, accompanied by Captain Allen Prather, came to interview Bill.
“Negley and Capt. Prather both wanted me,” Key told Rogers. “I liked the looks of Capt. Prather, and I knew he was a great poker player.” With a bit of hedging, the Doc was able to have Negley order his temporary release into the custody of Captain Prather, for whom he would serve as cook, with the implicit understanding that the general be invited to dine regularly.
Key may have waited a day or two before offhandedly mentioning to Prather, after cleaning up from the evening meal, that he sure would love to play some cards.
“You any good?”
“Never found a man could beat me.”
This was enough to pique Prather’s interest, and he was eager to discover how much of a bluff that had been.
Albert Rogers understood Dr. Key never lost at cards, having, as Key had told him, an occult ability to know what cards his opponent held in his hands at any time. So how did this work out?
William Key was happy to report, “In six weeks I owned everything Capt. Prather had; he owed me over a thousand dollars. He gave me a pass to go home for the debt.”
During these weeks and months Shelbyville had its own jailed spy, a Major Pauline Cushman, an actress turned Federal secret agent who was caught attempting to smuggle Confederate papers out of town and sentenced to hang by General Bragg, whose troops were having an extended stay in Bedford County.
Fending off the winter’s cold, hunger, illness, and lice, Rebel soldiers were ordered by Bragg to be respectful of the occupied townspeople, with instructions, for example, not to enter a store unless invited in. This led to some goodwill between the townspeople and Rebels, despite some resentment after the courthouse was badly burnt when the Rebel high command took up residence in it, allegedly from an accidental fire caused by Confederate soldiers just trying to warm up.
During the six months that followed, while Major Cushman’s execution was continuously postponed due to her illness and fatigue, with the excuse that she was not well enough to walk to the gallows, Bragg played a cat-and-mouse game with Rosecrans that finally erupted in June 1863 at the Battle of Hoover’s Gap.
Of the near constant skirmishing that took place in and around Bedford County, the Battle of Hoover’s Gap was the largest battle to occur in the area. Rosecrans won it by bluffing and starting his approach from a different direction and then turning at the last minute to the less reinforced position, taking Bragg by surprise. Occupation of Shelbyville traded hands yet again, leaving Pauline Cushman to be liberated by Federal authorities as the Union took control once more and loyalists crept back out of hiding.
The Battle of Hoover’s Gap and the hasty evacuation of Shelbyville had a different significance for Young Doc Key. It seemed that in their hurry to get supplies safely out of town, a handful of Bragg’s officers had forgotten the stash of Confederate money they had left hidden under the floorboards of a certain store run by a known Union man. Attempts by any one of them to return to retrieve the money would be disastrous. But there was one person, they decided, who could do the job and get away with it.
When the officers first informed the Doc that they wanted him to retrieve the money, he was shocked by the amount: $500,000. Their proposition was that he would be given $100,000 in return for getting through the Union lines, going to the store, finding the money, and bringing it back to them.
Dr. Key admitted to Rogers, “I didn’t like this job, but there was so much money in it that one night I stole out by the camp.”
Bill’s strategy had been to wait behind the store until its early opening. If he could get in and out without running into anyone who recognized him, he was sure it would be easy to have a friendly conversation with the storekeepers and distract them long enough to get the money before slipping away and back past the camp.
He made it past the camp without a problem, but on his way into the store, the first person he encountered, and the last person he ever hoped to see, was the one he had described to Rogers before as his worst enemy. He was that certain slave driver who had tried unsuccessfully to buy young Bill Key and had sworn one day to get him and lick the blood out of him, a memory that made the Young Doc whirl around and attempt to run—straight into a group of Union soldiers. Though the slave driver had no allegiance to the Yankees, he insisted that the mulatto horse doctor was a convicted Rebel spy who had escaped once from their jail, and he demanded that Bill be walked across the square, clapped into prison, and hung before daylight the next day.
“Well,” Dr. Key said to Rogers, “they would have, if not for W. H. Wisener, the lawyer who knew me and knew that I had money.” For the one thousand dollars that Wisener knew Doc Key had in his shoe, he promised to get him off.
“My case was put off time and time again by this lawyer,” Dr. Key recalled, “until one day the inspector said he wanted a good whitewasher. I told him that was my regular business, and that my brushes were at a certain store in town. He sent me there with a guard. I went behind the counter and pulled off the sole of my shoe and gave the money to the lady who run the store, and she gave it to Wisener.” Then, in a feint to go collect his brushes, he went to find the elusive 500,000 Confederate dollars. Someone had beaten him to it.
William Key was disgusted. If Wisener didn’t manage to have his case dismissed, or if he wasn’t able to escape his sentence while whitewashing, he was going to be hung for no crime at all.
Albert Rogers was eager to know what strings the lawyer pulled or what Houdini-like escape Doc Key masterminded next. Neither was responsible, as it turned out. “The next day the Rebels raided the town and captured the place and I was let go.”
Rogers assumed he had to have been grateful for that bit of providence.
Yes, Dr. Key agreed, except for the fact that after his lawyer was locked up, his own money was gone too.
The Confederate raid that rescued Doc Key from the gallows the second time was followed by a brief stint of Rebel control. That soon yielded again to the Yankees as Shelbyville became a Union garrison town for General William Tecumseh Sherman, subject to intermittent skirmishing, ongoing attacks by guerrillas, home guards, and bushwhackers, and general lawlessness.
When Sherman began cutting a swath of devastation across the South in his March to the Sea, some Tennesseans believed he spared much of the Volunteer State from greater destruction on account of the pockets of support for the Union he had observed in places like Shelbyville. Others simply felt that there was nothing left to destroy.
Such was the scene of death and ruin that met William Key when he returned Merit and Alexander, alive, to their parents. A few weeks before their return, the surrender of General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia had ended the Civil War. Five days after Lee’s surrender, while attending a play with his wife, President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. As cataclysmically as it began, so it concluded.
The world changed, as though altered on its axis. Three million Americans fought, 600,000 died, while many times more were left disabled, homeless, widowed, orphaned, sick, and impoverished. And four million Americans who had been slaves were free. Of those former slaves, 275,000 had been from Tennessee. She had been the last state to leave the Union, and the state that, with the exception of Virginia, had been scarred by more destruction than any other state in the nation, and so plummeted from former economic stature. But Tennessee was to be the first Confederate state to return to the Union.
Racism would find some of its greatest foes on Tennessee’s home soil, but also its greatest perpetuators—including the KKK, which was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, the same year as the war ended. On the other hand, only a month after Lee’s surrender, black and white activists opened schools for African-Americans across the state. In May 1865, a Texan Confederate soldier named Samuel Foster was heading home through Greenville, Tennessee, and he marveled in his diary that he had that day seen Negro children going to school. He stopped a little girl “about 12 years old dressed neat and clean,” and asked her to show him what she was studying. “I opened the Grammar and the middle of the book and asked her a few questions—which she answered readily and correctly. Same with her Geography and Arithmetic. I was never more surprised in my life!”
The power of education was radically made evident to Foster by a radical change in his thinking:
It seems curious that mens minds can change so sudden, from opinions of life long, to new ones a week old. I mean that men who have not only been taught from their infancy that the institution of slavery was right; but men who actually owned and held slaves up to this time,—have now changed in their opinions regarding slavery…to see that for man to have property in man was wrong, and that…“all men are, and of right ought to be free” has a meaning different from the definition they had been taught from infancy up…. These ideas come from not the Yanks or northern people but come from reflection, and reasoning among ourselves.
The famous and not-so-famous individuals whose journeys had intersected Bill Key’s, if only peripherally, met varied fortunes. Grant became the only general of the Civil War to accept the surrender of three separate armies after three major battles and, of course, went on to be elected to two terms as President of the United States. Parson Brownlow’s fiery antisecessionism didn’t hurt him at the ballot box, and he became governor of Tennessee in the years immediately following the war and later a United States senator. Major Pauline Cushman enjoyed celebrity status for a while but eventually fell from the public eye and died penniless. Shelbyville Unionist Lewis Tillman became an advocate for Negro suffrage and went on to serve as a U.S. congressman. W. H. Wisener prospered in business, but his radical Republicanism in his fight for racial equality proved unpopular during the turbulent Reconstruction era. David Key, a first cousin of John W. Key, made a name for himself when, in 1877, he was appointed postmaster general of the United States under President Rutherford Hayes.
Though William Key didn’t boast to Rogers how he had helped John and Martha, the story was subsequently recounted by Nashville mayor Richard Dudley, Bill’s childhood friend. The mayor noted that Dr. Key had remained with John’s sons for the duration of the hostilities and that “upon their return found the tanyard and everything else belonging to the family destroyed.” An invalid by this time, John W. Key lived long enough to see his boys come home. Unable to pay the heavy mortgage hanging over his property, he tried to raise the money by selling a large portion of it to his nephew, J. M. Minter, along with the last of his livestock: one bay mare and colt, and six hogs.
But the money didn’t cover their debt, and when John died shortly thereafter, Martha could do nothing about the $5,000 still owing for the mortgage. Mayor Dudley recalled that it was Bill who went to work to raise the capital, paying off the note and tearing it up when he was through. Apparently the Doc had accumulated some substantial poker winnings after spending much of the last year and a half up north. Descendants of townspeople and relatives confirmed they had heard accounts that Dr. William Key not only paid off the mortgage but also supported Martha and her offspring for the remainder of her days, paying for her kids’ education and starting them in business. Some claimed that Bill even paid for Merit and Alexander to attend Harvard, partly as a vicarious experience he would have prized for himself, and partly because that would have been the education that John would have most wanted to provide for them.
Many of the Doc’s friends of color went north during and after the war. He had thought about joining them and had apparently been on trips to look for a place to settle. His idea was to open a hospital for horses and mules wounded in combat, something he assumed might be better received in Northern cities—where the first themes of the humane movement were now being sounded. But by September 1865, he changed his mind about leaving, bought his first piece of Bedford County property—spending $650 for two and a half acres bordering North Main Street, also known as the Shelbyville and Murfreesboro Turnpike—where he established his horse hospital and veterinarian office.
Within five years Doc Key was known as one of the more prosperous, prominent men in town. He had received the blessing of reuniting with his mother, Caroline, with whom he had stayed in close contact in earlier years, though he lost her soon afterward, much to his sorrow. Free to legally marry, Bill wasted no time making his longtime sweetheart, Lucy Davidson, his wife. Similarly, his sister Nancy got married right after the war was over, becoming Mrs. Henry McClain.
The fact that Bill and Lucy had no children was probably for the better, considering that the household couldn’t have accommodated one more individual, what with Lucy’s mother, Arabella, living there, along with Bill’s uncle Jack, various nieces and nephews, stable hands, and with the Doctor’s nonhuman patients staying over more often than not. Before long, Doc Key built a second home on his property for the overflow.
In short order, William expanded his operations to include a blacksmith shop next to his horse hospital, then opened up a wagon wheel and harness-making business at a separate location. With these revenues he raised the capital to manufacture Keystone Liniment on a scale large enough to market it through his traveling medicine shows across the South. In turn, Dr. Key’s restaurant, hotel, and racetrack were enterprises launched with profits from the liniment sales.
A quintessential entrepreneur, Bill Key had mastered the ability to parlay one success into the next one. His gambler’s sensibilities guided him to take calculated risks and to know how to fold when he was losing. A scrupulous businessman who took goods in place of money when poorer folks couldn’t afford to pay in cash, he had also learned, from John W. Key’s excessive borrowing and loaning, to avoid both. Friends and relatives told stories about what a hardcore capitalist he was. A sister-in-law later claimed, “He would walk a mile to collect a nickel.”
Rogers asked if gambling had continued to help fuel Dr. Key’s financial success after the war.
“When I ran my restaurant,” the Doc admitted, “I won a peck of onions from a farmer I beat playing poker.” Although the farmer made threatening remarks, Bill didn’t see cause for worry. But he was wrong. “Sure enough, the farmer had me arrested and fined forty-five dollars. That slowed down my gambling.” Dr. Key grinned cryptically, letting Rogers come to his own conclusions.
Most of the black citizens who stayed in Shelbyville after the war, like Dr. Key, had a pronounced entrepreneurial determination that was all the more remarkable, considering the problems of a backlash against freed Negroes that increased during Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau assessment was that although former Unionists and former Confederates generally approved of black schools, whites were united in bitter opposition “to any action looking to what they are pleased to call equality.”
Bill Key managed to stay above the fray, maintaining warm personal and business relationships across color and class lines. Even so, he was very much rooted in the black community. He was inducted as a member of the Colored Masons not long after lodges were chartered in Tennessee, and he belonged to an African-American Episcopalian congregation.
It was not surprising to the much younger Rogers that a man who had lived so many lifetimes had also suffered his share of setbacks and losses. He had been crushed by the death of his mother-in-law, Arabella Davidson, in 1882, followed three years later by the death of his wife, Lucy, to whom he had been married almost seventeen years. When asked what he wanted inscribed on Lucy’s gravestone, William could hardly speak and mumbled the reply that eventually read: “She was but words are wanting to say what think, what a wife should be, she was that.” Less than two months later, his sister died. Nancy McLain’s headstone was inscribed: “Erected in token of love and affection by her brother William Key.”
The Doc remarried, making Hattie Davidson (Lucy’s younger sister) his second wife. Known for her cheerful temperament and exceptional singing voice, Hattie brightened Bill’s home and stables with her presence. But less than two years after their wedding, sudden illness took Hattie’s life. Brokenhearted, the Doc swore never to marry again. Family and friends attempted to change his mind. No one had any luck until his friend George Davis, a much respected area blacksmith and father of eleven younger Davises, encouraged Bill to consider his eldest daughter as a prospect. Twenty-seven-year-old Lucinda Davis was a beauty and a scholar, who refused to marry anyone until she found a way to attend medical school at Howard University. Such stubbornness would have scared off most men. But William Key was not most men. In fact, he leapt at the opportunity to sponsor Lucinda’s education. She was not only a strikingly handsome woman, but she also had a curiosity and boundless energy that made the Doc, at age fifty-five, feel like a young man again. Besides that, after the two were married in April 1888, she went on to tolerate and then encourage her husband’s unconventional tutelage of Jim Key.
In his stables at 75 Maiden Lane, Albert Rogers concluded the interview for the morning. He had covered the Doc’s extraordinary war stories as well as his extraordinary creation of a life after the Civil War. These notes also detailed the extraordinary manner in which Jim Key had honed his performing talents in the medicine-show business and had then learned to recognize the letters of the human alphabet.
Oddly, the more Rogers learned about man and horse, the more mystified he was by them. He remained incredulous that Bill Key had spent seven years creating a daily classroom for Jim, even when they were out traveling, just to be sure his smart horse didn’t miss out on his education, as the trainer slowly and deliberately taught his equine student to recognize all his letters and his printed numbers from 1 to 30. Only someone as stubborn as Dr. William Key could have had such patience.
The Doc shrugged. Maybe. But once he had finished teaching the basics, he said, “From that time on my work was comparatively easy.” Soon Jim Key could demonstrate an ability to add and subtract, and in reading he showed that he could successfully select words and names that the Doc printed on cardboard. Dr. Key then started him on spelling (using a system of phonics), along with lessons in multiplication, division, writing, and the Bible.
Rogers observed the small, well-worn Bible that William Key kept close at hand. Was Jim receiving religious instruction? The Doc explained, “We’re studying the places and quotations where the horse is mentioned in the Bible, for horses were mighty prominent animals then.” On a scrap of brown paper he had transcribed in pencil a question-and-answer session with his horse:
Jim, how many times do words boy and girl appear in the Bible?
Answer: One time.
Where?
Answer: Job, 3rd chapter, 3rd verse.
In contrast, so far they had counted fifty-four biblical passages with allusions to horses. Doc Key related that he was going to teach Jim to cite chapter and verse upon hearing the quotations spoken aloud.
Albert Rogers, still not ready to shake his amazement, left the dutiful scholar and his kindly professor to carry on. Their stories had given him much to write in his pamphlet and much to think about. As he contemplated how a former slave and a once crippled colt had come so far, it occurred to him now that the survival of the fittest was strangely less relevant than the survival of the smartest.