FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1871. CONFISCATION OF POLICIES BY THE NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY [caption title]

Buckner, Simon Bolivar

Published by [New Orleans, 1871

About this Item

Broadside, 17 1/2 x 12 inches, printed in four columns. Light edge wear, scattered faint stains, two small holes in the sheet, touching a couple letters of text. Very good. An unrecorded broadside printing a lengthy diatribe by former Confederate General Simon Bolivar Buckner against the New York Life Insurance Company. While the company had initially promised to honor the policies of Confederate soldiers, by 1870 they had begun using methods both open and discreet to avoid payments to policy holders "who had taken up arms against the Government." Buckner himself was not a customer, but many of his friends had fallen prey to the company's new policy on policies. He wrote public letters in support of his friend, one General R.M. Gaines, in the NEW ORLEANS TIMES, in which he denounced the company's duplicitous tactics and offered to review their documents himself in an attempt to expose their shady practices. The company ignored his letters, instead responding indirectly by paying their local agent (Dr. Joseph S. Copes) to run an article attacking Buckner personally. This broadside is primarily a response to that attack, although it also outlines the case in general. Buckner is incensed by the company's actions, and more particularly by their attempts to justify them in the name of "equity": "I stated, in my letter to Gen. Gaines, that your conduct in withholding his money and at the same time rejecting his claims, was a violation of equity. You could not controvert my position. But you flew into a passion; got Dr. Copes to call me names in your joint anonymous advertisement, and said that my notions were not actuarial. I said that your action was not equitable.strangely confounding the 'letter of the law' with 'equity'.You seem to think it your highest duty to sit in your marble palace, watch when the hands of your confiscation dial point to the moment when you can sweep the hard-earnings of some poor man's life into your swollen coffers, and then insult the God of the orphan by boasting such conduct to be 'equitable.' Shame on such cold and calculating hypocrisy. Your theories would place the great business of life insurance, in dignity and pretension to respectability, even beneath that of a common gambler or thimblerigger." Buckner continues to list other examples of misconduct and enumerates the company's lies before reiterating his request that they submit to an examination of their records. He concludes by ever so courteously asserting that even though "I find you so 'wedded to a circuitous way of doing things,' [and] it would probably be cruel in me to ask you to do such violence to your nature as to answer even so simple a question in a direct and straightforward way.I have the right to ask that your response shall not be like your last one - anonymous and printed at the expensive of your policy holders; but as nearly straightforward as your character and habits will admit." Simon Bolivar Buckner was the son of a Kentucky iron smelter, distinguished himself in service in the Mexican-American War (where he befriended Ulysses S. Grant), and became a General in the Confederate army after Kentucky's neutrality fell apart. He is primarily remembered as the first Confederate general to surrender an army in the war, giving in to Grant's demands for unconditional surrender at Fort Donelson, although despite the harsh terms imposed by Grant their reunion at the surrender was apparently a warm one. Buckner would go on to become a pall bearer at Grant's funeral in 1885 as well as the thirtieth Governor of Kentucky in 1887. Not in OCLC. A rare, interesting, and colorfully-worded broadside written by a significant Confederate general in defense of his former comrades, exposing yet another facet of the hopelessly tangled situation in Reconstruction-era America. Seller Inventory # WRCAM57533

Bibliographic Details

Title: FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 4, ...

Publisher: [New Orleans

Publication Date: 1871