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4 chapter one Bedford Blood Twenty-six-year-old Marcellus Alexander Johnson paced through the dimly lit rooms above the grocery store in the grimy working-class neighborhood . Outside, a cold wind was blowing sleet through the streets, weather which normally would have distressed the young merchant because it was bad for business. However, on that gray morning of January 10, 1891, the storekeeper had more important things on his mind. He was anxiously waiting for his wife, Katherine Leftwich Arthur, to give birth to their ¤rst—her third— child. Fortunately, the labor did not last long, and Marcellus soon learned that he was the father of a big healthy boy. As he and Katherine, who everyone called Kate, had previously agreed, the baby was named Louis Arthur.1 The boy would bring pleasure and pride to the young couple. He would be hugely successful in law and government, he would be rich, he would befriend presidents, and he would be driven to become president. Yet at the same time he would be overbearing, arrogant, and imperious. Although he was a child of Marcellus and Kate Johnson who ran a grocery store in Roanoke, Virginia, Louis Johnson’s roots lay deep in the soil of Bedford County, Virginia. Bedford County Bedford County is a stunningly beautiful piece of the Virginia piedmont. It is bordered on the north by the majestic Peaks of Otter in the Blue Ridge. South from the mountains the rich rolling farmland ripples and unfolds until it reaches the Staunton River. Along the eastern border,north of the old Lynchburg-Salem bedford blood 5 Turnpike, Thomas Jefferson built his second architectural masterpiece, the magni¤cent octagonal retreat called Poplar Forest.2 Louis Johnson’s mother, born on August 10, 1861, in Bedford County, was the product of two very prominent county families, the Leftwiches and the Arthurs. The Leftwiches trace their ancestors back to the Norman Conquest. Kate’s great-grandfather, Thomas Leftwich, the sheriff of Bedford County, was a captain of the Virginia Militia in the Revolutionary War who was later promoted to colonel andcommanded the rearguardofGeneralGates’sdivision at thebattle of Camden.3 In the War of 1812, he was colonel of the 10th Regiment of the Virginia Militia. The Leftwiches settled in the southern part of Bedford County at a home called Mt. Airy near Leesville, where Thomas was buried in 1816.4 The Arthurs, the other prominent family from which Kate descended, settled along Goose Creek and Craddock’s Creek not far from Leesville. The Arthurs are lineal descendants of Lord William Russell, the Duke of Bedford. Kate’s father, James Lewis Arthur, who inherited slaves and landholdings in his early twenties, was ¤rst lieutenant and then captain of Company C (the Big Island Greys) of the 58th Virginia Infantry. Under Stonewall Jackson, James Lewis Arthur and the Big Island Greys fought in the Valley and Seven Days’ Campaigns of 1862 and at Cedar Run, Second Manassas, Chantilly, Harpers Ferry, and Sharpsburg. On May 12, 1864, Kate’s father was wounded at the “Mule Shoe” during the Spotsylvania Court House battle, one of the most savage and legendary engagements of the entire Civil War.5 After the war, James Lewis Arthur returned to his family in Bedford County. In addition to his daughter Kate, James and his aptly named wife America raised ¤ve sons and six daughters on their family estate. Although the war had devastated the Bedford County economy and his farmlands lay in shambles, James Arthur was able to make his family comparatively comfortable as he tried to pick up the pieces and resume his career as a successful planter. He had plenty of acreage to sell, and the Bedford County land records con¤rm that he was an active buyer and seller of Bedford County farmland in the years following the Civil War. Captain Arthur entered public life, serving two terms in the Virginia Senate, one term as county treasurer, and ten years as justice of the peace.6 Louis Johnson always remembered his grandfather telling him that “no man is worth anything unless he is a Democrat.”7 While Kate was coming of age in Bedford County, Marcellus Johnson, her eventual husband and the father of Louis Johnson, was working on his mother’s small family farm near Union Hall in Franklin County not far from the Bedford County line. Marcellus’s father had died when he was only three, leaving his mother, Elizabeth Haynes, to raise eleven children.8...

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