New York, and later at New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended a private school. His grandmother, Betsy Plant, who hoped to make a clergyman of him, offered him an education at Yale College, but, impatient to begin an active career, he got a job as captain's boy, deck hand, and man-of-all-work on a steamboat, The New York, plying between New Haven and New York City. Pre Civil War Among his various duties was the care of express parcels. This line of business, hitherto neglected, he organized effectively. After marrying Ellen Blackstone in 1843, Plant decided to stay ashore and took a position with Beecher and Company, an express company located in New Haven which was taken over by the Adams Express Company. Plant was transferred from steamboats to railroads. After a few years he was put in charge of the old York office of the company. In 1853 his wife, Ellen Elizabeth (Blackstone) Plant was ordered South for her health. After a journey of eight days, the Plants arrived in Jacksonville in March and spent several months at a private home near Jacksonville, Florida, then a tiny hamlet. Plant was impressed with the possibilities of the future development of Florida. The next year, after it became necessary for his wife to again travel south for her health, he requested and obtained the responsibility for all Adams Express Company's interests in the territory south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers. In the face of great difficulties, he successfully organized and extended express service across this region, where transportation facilities, although rapidly growing, were still deficient and uncoordinated. At the approach of the Civil War the directors of Adams Express, fearing the confiscation of their Southern properties, decided to sell them to Plant for his promissory note of $500,000. With Southern stockholders of the company he organized in 1861 the Southern Express Company, a Georgia corporation, and named himself president. Because he had built a reputation for providing reliable and efficient express service, the cabinet of Confederate president Jefferson Davis made Plant's company the agent for the Confederacy in collecting tariffs and transferring funds. In 1863, claiming a serious illness, he left his home in Augusta with a safe passage document signed by Jefferson Davis and sailed to Bermuda. After spending a month there, he traveled to Canada, Connecticut, and then England. When in France, he was informed that his Confederate passport