The Rebel & The Rose – James A. Semple, Julia Gardiner Tyler and The Lost Confederate Gold
By Wesley Millett and Gerald White
(September 2008 Civil War News)

Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index, hardcover, 299 pages, 2006. Cumberland House Publishing, 431 Harding Industrial Dr., Nashville, TN., 23711, $24.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Clint Johnson
Clint Johnson's latest book is The Politically Incorrect Guide To The South. His next book will be Pursuit - The Chase, Capture, Persecution and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis coming in June 2008.

Review:
What happened to the fabled horde of Confederate gold that left Richmond on the night of April 2, 1865, in a train guarded by teenaged boys?

Some of it – maybe as much as $16 million in today’s valuations – may still be buried on the site of an old warehouse in Danville, Va.; some of it was paid out to the Confederate cavalrymen who escorted President Jefferson Davis south to the Savannah River; some of it was spent buying property around Winchester, Va.; and some of it was stolen from the man who spirited it out from Washington, Ga., before the Yankees could figure out who had it.

Authors Millett and White do a credible – if confusing for those of us math-challenged types – job in calculating how much gold there was (in American and Mexican coins), and who last had their hands on it.

It was not Jefferson Davis. When he left Washington, Ga., on his way to being captured a few days later, he didn’t have two pennies to rub together.

The man who left Washington, Ga., with what would be about $2 million in gold coins (today’s value) was James Semple, a paymaster who was married to the daughter of President James Tyler. Semple and another man hid the remaining coins in the false bottom of a carriage and simply rode away with it right through the encircling Yankee lines. They divided and sub-divided the money several times.

The authors are confident they can account for that piddling amount of money. They also believe that dozens of kegs filled with Mexican gold coins were off-loaded in Danville, Va., in the first week of the Confederate cabinet’s flight.

The authors don’t know where the missing gold is in Danville. They just think it must be there as their meticulous accounting of the rest of the coins just does not add up to the number of kegs of coins they believe were loaded onto the train in Richmond.

The book (with a beautiful, striking cover) is well written. But, it is also very ambitious with a lot of true characters and sub-plots that can be confusing to keep straight in a reader’s head.

The book tells a lot of stories: the presidency of James Tyler, the story of his widow Julia (The Rose of the title), her sons and stepdaughter (who never really seemed to love her husband Semple all that much), the escape of the Confederate cabinet, and finally the postwar Fenian movement in Canada.

On top of all those stories, the authors add and subtract to come up with just how much gold there was, how much was paid out, how much was saved, and how much is still buried somewhere.