Brain, Brawn, and Will

At age twelve, Jeff Ross and two of his buddies lay on the east bank of the Tennessee River and watched the Battle of Shiloh on the other side. The stench of cordite and black powder made their throats catch and turned the sun into a pale disk in a bloated sky. He later told his only son, Morgan Hardin Ross, "The ground shook with the big cannons and the explosions of bombshells. It was enough to knock us down if we tried to stand up. The air vibrated so that I was unable to hear my friends."

"Dad came over here after the battle," Morgan told me in 1968 when we were touring Shiloh National Battlefield. "There were pools of human blood 14 inches deep" near the little Shiloh Baptist Church that gave the battle its name, and "bodies lay everywhere, beginning to rot."

It was one of the deadliest battles of all wars: seven fewer than 24,000 men were killed in a little under 36 hours, that April 6th and 7th, 1862, a rate of carnage seldom equalled since.

Two years later, Jeff’s father, Morgan Hood Ross, was murdered before his eyes at his farm four miles south of Savannah, Hardin County, Tennessee. The old man had been to Corinth, Mississippi, to sell some mules for military use (whether to the Confederate or Yankee side is unclear). On his way home, he stored the money in the Savannah bank’s safe.

A well-known Confederate renegade, Bert Hayes, and his gang of twenty-seven rogues showed up at the Ross house the next morning and demanded the money. Morgan Hood Ross, an elderly Southern gentleman of pride and foolhardiness, half-blind from a congenital defect that blinded his father and several of his siblings and descendants, weakened from his previous day’s travels... this feeble old man raised up from his bed and attacked Bert Hayes and two of his men with a hickory walking cane. Hayes and his confederates, armed with cocked pistols, immediately killed the old man.

Then Hayes turned to "take care of" the spectators, which included Jeff Ross, his mother Lucinda, and his sister Nancy. Lucinda and Nancy stepped in front of Jeff and appealed to Hayes to "spare a mother’s pride." Hayes was said to have gone on his path of crime and destruction after his sisters had been molested by northern soldiers; so he was quick to exact vengeance on Yankee sympathizers. But, knowing the Rosses were southerners and slave-holders, he spared the boy’s life. It was May 29, 1864. Jeff was fourteen years old.

Three years later, a party of about twenty men met Bert Hayes as he got off a river boat at Pickwick Landing, Tennessee, and gunned him down in a fusilade. (Nineteen of Hayes’ gang are known to have met similar fates.) Family legend has it that Jeff Ross carried and fired a pistol in that vigilante party. Jeff was sixteen years old.

Thus, Jeff Ross learned early that violence was an accepted means of solving social and political problems. Most of the rest of his life, he carried a loaded pistol with him everywhere he went. And he did not hesitate to use it.

As a child, Jeff attended "Savannah Academy," where he was apparently a good student. After the Civil War, Jeff matriculated to Central College in Missouri. From there, he went to Cumberland University Law School in Lebanon, Tennessee, and graduated in May, 1872, valedictorian of his class, just ten years after the Battle of Shiloh.

Surviving papers from his school years reveal a young man exuberant with learning, interested in literature, and vigorous in school activities. In a commonplace book, he copied passages from a score or more of literary and philosophical writers, some now forgotten. He joined a debating society and was one of its officers; at the end-of-the-year celebration, he was "first orator" on the program. As "county clerk" of the moot court in his senior year, he kept notes on all the hypothetical cases he and his fellow students argued before the professor, the Honorable J.C. Caruthers, who had once been Confederate Governor-elect of Tennessee.

After graduation, Jeff returned to Savannah, Tennessee, and practiced law for some time. Surviving notes for his briefs show a mind concerned with technicalities. On 28 Aug 1874, he argued at court in Columbia, Tennessee, that certain promisory notes held by the Tennessee River News constituted mortgages, rather than conditional sales, i.e. they were securities for a debt, not an absolute transfer of title. In his defense of a rape case, he noted that the girl knew the fellow and had invited him into the house when she was alone, thus giving a kind of presumptive consent, and the man had not used force. "The offense of rape," he quoted from a legal authority, "can only be perpetrated by the use of force; strategm will not do."

After a couple of years, he was appointed Attorney General to fill an unexpired term in the district of Tennessee that included Hardin County. While prosecuting an assault and battery case, he argued that, normally, "bodily contact is necessary to establish assault"; however, "holding an open knife within striking distance and making threats or gestures can constitute assault," for, "while words alone can never be assault, yet they lend character and definition to actions." These examples show a mind at work, not a fist. This intellectual turn of mind was the other great, shaping influence on his personality and character.

In 1878, he ran for election as Attorney General of his district, and lost. Perhaps in disappointment over the lost election, perhaps because the adventure-bug had already bitten him, Jeff Ross "ran away from home--with a silver quarter in his pocket," according to a family tradition.

His letters show that he did odd jobs around Baltimore, knocked about and travelled for a time with a carnival in the northeastern U.S. and Canada, where he operated a side-show and learned to make and hawk a "magic solder" for mending pots and pans.

For two years, he hitch-hiked (or walked) through Europe, then spent 14 years in South America, where he worked for the railroad industry. He was transportation chief for a while, became an on-the-job Civil Engineer and actually designed and built some railroad bridges ("I had a good knowledge of mathematics, and mathematics was in demand," he explained much later), but it was as a construction superintendant that he found his life’s gift--he was extremely good at ram-rodding work crews in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and a smattering of English; he repeatedly finished jobs ahead of schedule and under budget.

All through his life, he carried two books with him almost everywhere he went, even into the jungles of South America: Robert Burns’s Poems and Shakespeare’s Plays. His letters are sprinkled with quotations from them. He wrote in fits and starts, but compulsively and prolifically, trying to describe the world’s problems as he saw them and proposing various solutions.