Why I am a Democrat

My great-great grandfather, Caleb Warren Tate (second from right at bottom),
and 13 of his 17 children, 1873.

My mother’s sister, Betty Jo Tate Rosenberg, died September 27, a few days short of her ninetieth birthday. Aunt Betty was laid to rest next to her husband, Kermit H. Rosenberg, a career army officer who died in 2008, at Arlington Cemetery on Tuesday. A memorial service was held that morning.

Two of Betty’s sons, her granddaughter and I spoke at the service. My brother, Jerry, was the final speaker.

Aunt Betty, to put it mildly, was opinionated, one of those people who loved to argue for the sake of arguing. She argued with everybody – her husband, children, mother, sisters, nieces, nephews, store clerks, you name it. She was never malicious or vindictive about it. It was simply her nature.

She may well have gotten her love for verbal sparring from her older sister, my mother Ruby, who was a state high school debate champion in 1930 and doesn’t shy away from a good argument to this very day.

Ruby and Betty, who loved to argue almost much as they loved each other, spoke three or four times a day by phone. Rarely did a conversation take place in which one of them don’t provoke the other into an argument. Politics was a favorite topic.

Betty was a rabid Republican. Ruby is an equally staunch Democrat. Betty often reminded Ruby there was no way she could ever bring herself to vote for a Democrat. Ruby would shoot back that she could never vote for a Republican … and that Betty should be ashamed for being a Republican given what had happened to their great-grandfather.

Jerry touched on that story at the memorial service. It was a story he and I have heard a hundred times but I asked our mother to tell it to me again today so I could write it down and share it with my readers.

Betty and Ruby’s great-grandfather, Caleb Warren Tate, was a farmer in Callaway County, Missouri during the Civil War. Caleb Warren was the father of 17 children.

Missouri, during the Civil War, was in a precarious position. A slave state, its legislature had voted to secede but Lincoln, a Republican from neighboring Illinois, sent Union troops into Missouri to keep it forcibly in the union. Some Missourians favored the Union cause. Others favored the Confederacy. Both Union and Confederate troops roamed the countryside, terrorizing those they suspected of being sympathizers with the other side.

Caleb Warren owned two horses. He needed those horses to plow his fields, so he could feed his family. But both were seized by Union soldiers and taken to the nearby town of Danville.

Caleb Warren was a Democrat but his neighbor, a Mr. Dutton, was a Republican. Thinking the Union officers might be more sympathetic if he showed up with a man who was known to be a member of the party of Lincoln, the commander-in-chief of the Union Army, he entreated Dutton to go with him to ask the solders to return his horses.

“Mr. Tate,” the union officer said after had had heard him out. “Why should I give you your horses back? Don’t you have two sons fighting in the Confederate Army?”

“I do indeed,” my great-great-grandfather replied. “And they may be Confederates but at least they ain’t horse thieves.”

He did not get his horses back.

And, needless to say, he, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with the exception of Betty, never voted Republican and blamed the party of Lincoln for the loss of his horses.

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It rained as Aunt Betty was laid to rest next to her husband during an impressive ceremony at Arlington.

As I was telling Betty’s son, my cousin Jim, goodbye, I told him I hoped he could find some comfort knowing that his mother was at peace.

“Yes,” he said. “But my father isn’t any more. At least he had five years of it.”

We laughed.

Jim and I hardly ever see each other but it’s good to know our extended family, however far-flung, will go on.

Even if the ones on his side of it are a bunch of damn Republicans.