ALBERT WOOLSON

Albert Woolson said he went to war because his father had gone to war and his grandfather before that. The boy who lived past 100 and became the last of the blue soldiers hailed from a family steeped in military service. Well into the 1950s, as he lay in his room at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, his thoughts could drift back to images of Civil War horror and gallantry and the turbulent decades that followed. He remembered bright parade uniforms and veterans marching bent and stooped, and the glory that once was the Grand Army of the Republic. Nothing excited him more.

But by his own account, Woolson never fired at the enemy or fought them with raised bayonet. Rather, he said, he was but a blue-eyed teenager when he enlisted in the last year of the war, seeking a paycheck to help his mother. He was mustered into an adult man’s army and served safely behind the front lines. He did not carry a rifle but instead hoisted the company’s drum and bugle; he woke the soldiers in the morning and sometimes helped bury them at dusk. One of his greatest thrills as an old man was delighting schoolboys and Civil War historians with tales not about the whirl of combat but how one day an officer let him practice on the company cannon.

“The colonel handed me the end of a long rope,” he would recall at school assemblies in Duluth and veterans reunions around the North. “He said, ‘When I yell, you stand on your toes, open your mouth, and pull.’ First time the cannon went off, I was scared to death.”

Woolson said he was born on February 11, 1847, the same day as the inventor Thomas Alva Edison. James K. Polk was president, and the country was more focused on Mexican atrocities and Manifest Destiny than on the fracturing of its sacred Union.

His mother’s family was English and Scottish and they settled in upstate New York two years after American revolutionaries published the Declaration of Independence. His grandfather farmed, cut timber, and grew apples. They built a large eight-room house and four barns, and dug a cement-floored kitchen. David Baldwin, his grandfather, lived to be 103; his grandmother, Betsy, 100. They were buried in the cemetery at Antwerp, New York, near the little brick school house young Albert occasionally attended. As he remembered and recorded in a brief account he called “My Reminiscences,” in those days “there were panthers, or what they call mountain lions out west nowadays. They used to scream in the night … and were very destructive to cattle.”

David and Betsy’s daughter, Caroline, married Willard Woolson, and they became Albert’s parents. Willard’s father was William Woolson of New Hampshire. William had served as a private in the War of 1812, and his oldest son, Roswell, served with him as a drummer boy. The other son, Willard, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his marriage to Caroline Baldwin in 1839 almost never came off.

“He was employed as a cabinetmaker, painter, and builder of fine furniture,” Albert recalled of his father. “He was a violinist before he was married and had been a member of Allan Dodsworth’s Military Band and Orchestra, a highly popular, largely brass ensemble of up to 100 members based in New York City.” But, Albert wrote, “my grandfather [Baldwin] did not approve of him because he was a fiddler and a rover and a no account. But my father had many good qualities, just the same.”

His father often left the family for long tours with a military troupe or a traveling circus. Sometimes he amused audiences by claiming to be related to naval hero John Paul Jones. During other long absences he managed a combination hotel, horse barn, and tavern on the old plank road to Carthage, New York. The stopover, which included a large ballroom and banquet area, was popular in the winter, mostly for sleighing parties.

Growing up with just one younger brother, Albert saw little of his father. He even was away when word first reached him from Felts Mills, New York, that Albert had been born. “The nurse sent word up to my father, who, with his orchestra, was furnishing the music for the dance,” Albert wrote. “They and a large number of visitors came down with wine and congratulations to mother and the new citizen, Albert Woolson.”

In the spring of 1859, his mother sent twelve-year-old Albert to live with her cousin, William Warren, in a community near Oswego, New York. “They had a beautiful fruit farm where I was installed as chore boy to feed the chickens, collect the eggs,” Woolson recalled. “This family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Warren and two daughters who were a little older than myself. Here I spent two happy years.”

Charles B. Thompson and his wife, both university teachers, enjoyed winter and summer breaks with the Warrens too, and “they established a school for all of us young folks, with Divine service on Sundays,” Albert remembered. “During this period I obtained about all the important education I ever received. I was busy at that time reading the immortal book entitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

His father did stay with the family in 1860. He worried over Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the South’s threats of abandoning the Union for a renegade form of government. Lincoln left his home in Illinois and headed east, determined to reach Washington and keep the Union whole. To garner support along the way, he visited various state capitals and addressed state legislators. When he stopped in Albany, New York, Woolson and his father rode over to see the president-elect.

“There was a meeting there,” Albert wrote, recounting the trip many years later, when he had reached the age of 107. “One man was tall and had large, bony hands. It was ‘old Uncle Abe,’ and he talked about human slavery. What he said I was too young to comprehend.”

Lincoln was inaugurated president and the war came. By the spring of 1861 Albert was hearing stories spread by “loads of men” headed south. In his hometown, Charles Thompson Jr., the son of Albert’s teachers, had enlisted as an artillery captain and hurried off to Manassas. “He was sent home in a pine box,” Albert remembered. “I thought his mother would lose her mind.”

The boy’s father, Willard Woolson, left for Minnesota. He settled around Lake Elysian, hoping the war would blow over with the Union restored. But the fighting tore through the summer, and in November 1861 he enlisted and joined Company I, a unit out of Warsaw, Minnesota. They were sent to the Benton Barracks near St. Louis. In May 1862 they marched through the streets of the city and at sunset boarded a steamboat headed down the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. Plans were to join with Union armies moving south, but just before Brown’s Landing on the Tennessee, their boat the Gladiator ran hard onto a shoal and splintered. One man died, and fifteen others crowded on the two decks were injured. A shattering staircase smashed Pvt. Willard Woolson’s knee.

His family heard nothing of him for more than a year. Then startling news arrived that he was hospitalized in Windom, Minnesota, and may actually have been wounded during the Battle of Shiloh. Alarmed, Albert, his mother, and younger brother Frank hurried to Minnesota by Great Lakes steamer and coach. “His left leg had been amputated,” Albert wrote. “That was the condition we found him in, on crutches.” Eventually the wound would take his father’s life.

The family united in Minnesota, and the Civil War seemed far away. Closer to home were the Sioux. “We began to see unusual lights in the sky west of us at night,” Albert remembered. “This continued for a short time and we were told that the Sioux Indians, 70 miles from us, had gone on the warpath against the white settlers.” He recalled military forces rounding up 320 Sioux and marching them to nearby Mankato, for trial. “Thirty-eight of these big chiefs were hung by the neck. I was a witness to this.” Another three thousand Winnebagos were confined on a reservation along the Blue Earth River. Albert said one of them named Winneshake taught him to shoulder and fire a rifle.

After two more years passed and the fall of 1864 arrived, with the Woolson family still struggling, Albert decided it was his turn to take the uniform. He said he signed up in early October of that year, just seventeen. Attached to the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery, Woolson fell in with a 1,800-man call-up of soldiers requested by Lincoln and the War Department to defend the fortifications around Chattanooga. He came into the army asking for a rifle, explaining that he had learned to handle the weapon from old Winneshake. But his commanders decided he would roll on a snare while the older, trained soldiers engaged the enemy.

Southward they marched, first to Nashville, then to Chattanooga. He served, he said, through April 1865 and then some additional months beyond the Confederate surrender. In his rakish blue forage cap, lined up with other drummers, he beat out the march step and learned to blow the bugle too. He pounded his drums for assemblies and company marches, he said, and played “Taps” at night and at burials. He returned home tired, sweaty, and hungry from war, and thankful he had never hurt anyone.

Woolson repeated his stories over the years, stretching his adventures to dazzle his listeners. In later versions he claimed he was acquainted with some of the North’s legendary leaders, including Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga,” and Col. William Colville, who had organized the Minnesota volunteer regiment. In a radio interview late in his life, he told the following tale:

One day we was marching by General Thomas’ headquarters. He was sitting out on the porch with a companion. We found later that it was Col. William Colville.

We was going by this mansion … playing buffalo drums out to the cemetery to bury one of our comrades. On the return we come back playing “The Girl I Left behind Me.” And a colored lady, an elderly woman, come out and held her arms in front of us.

“Why, that’s tasteless,” she said.

Finally Major Lewis said, “Why lady, what does this mean?”

She said, “I just want to know, when you go by just a while ago playing so sorrowful, and now you come back playing … like the devil.”

“Why,” he says, “we go out in respect for the dead and then return in respect for the living.”

Woolson loved telling his stories. He shared them whenever a crowd drew near in school uniforms or battered old veterans’ jackets. He would work himself into quite a lather, feeling young and full of grit all over again, delighted that he could find a lighter side to the suffering in war.

Thomas called us in, [and] give us a glass of lemonade.

Colonel Colville says, “Who, what organization is this?”

John Lewis said, “This is the regimental drum corps, 1st Minnesota.… We know you.”

“Why, really I didn’t recognize you. God bless you boys.”

Woolson would smile broadly and shake with laughter. “We hopped in and drank lemonade! Where they got the ice, I don’t know.”

Another favorite story concerned a doctor near Knoxville, Tennessee. Woolson’s artillery regiment was reduced to half rations with orders to keep their hands off any local livestock or other private sources of food. But that doctor was a Southern sympathizer who “seemed to have it in for us.” So, Woolson would say, “We decided one night to help ourselves to his chickens. The doctor had his chickens in a coop. We decided that to keep the chickens from making too much noise we had better take chickens, coop and all, and we did.”

Now he was grinning. “We dug a hole in the ground and lined it with rock to hold the heat and used the coop for fuel and roasted those chickens.”

Now he was laughing. “Man, that was the best meal we had since we left Minnesota!”

But much of Woolson’s war was monotonous drilling, practicing, and waiting for maneuvers. Bored for days, he often sat idly around camp tired and hungry, sometimes lonely, and often scared. It was not until October 1865 that the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery returned home, a year after Woolson had marched away. His parents still waited in Mankato, and Albert moved back into the home. His father, minus his leg and any heart for more song and dance or another traveling minstrel troupe, died two weeks after Albert’s return. He was just forty-five.

Albert started scouring for jobs. He worked as a fireman for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, still supporting his mother. One day his crew was snowplowing tracks when they hit a drift so high the engines were tossed into a barren cornfield. “That ended my railroad career,” he said.

His mother remarried, his brother Frank died, and Albert was cast on his own. He married Sarah Jane Sloper in June 1868 in South Bend, Minnesota, and they moved to St. Peter. For sixteen years he worked as a wood turner in the cabinetmaking business, much like his father. He labored in the grain mills too. For a while Woolson and a friend, Robert Rhodes, once a bandmaster in a Minnesota company of Union volunteers, formed a twenty-member ensemble. Woolson beat on his old Civil War drum, and he learned the guitar and the cello too. Like his father, he sometimes traveled the circuit. “We played fine lively music,” he recalled. “Nothing sad.” Memories of the war grew distant, but music still coursed through his veins. “Our single young men had a happy time dancing with the frontier ladies,” he wrote after one performance. “We sure had a happy time.”

His wife died in 1901, and Woolson moved to Duluth. Three years later, at fifty-eight, he married Ann Haugen and found work as an electrician for the American Carbolite Company. But he was restless; he kept moving about the city and changing jobs. He returned to woodworking, then hired on at the Scott Graff Lumber Company and helped build the columns supporting the local Crawford Mortuary. He ran machinery for the Clyde Iron Works; then he built washing machines for the Hirschy Company.

And that was his last job. He retired to enjoy his already grown family: in all, fourteen children from the two marriages, minus a child who had died in an accidental drowning. His family was so large and sprawling and many of them lived so long that, when Woolson died years later, six daughters and two sons survived him.

At the eighty-year mark, Woolson suddenly joined the local Gorman-Culver Post No. 13 of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). It was another man’s death that drew him in. Ninety-year-old Henry Theodore Johnson lived just two blocks from Woolson up East Fifth Street in Duluth. He was a former Yankee too, who had enlisted in the 1st Minnesota Infantry in 1864. He served his final months in Georgia as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman swept to the sea. Later he worked as a Northern Pacific Railroad man and was active in the GAR. By 1928 he was the local post’s second oldest member.

On Armistice Day 1928, the holiday celebrating the end of the Great War in Europe, Woolson walked over to visit Johnson. With no answer at the door that afternoon, he peered in the window and then stepped through the doorway. His friend Johnson was dead inside. Duluth and the GAR honored the old warrior with a military funeral, and the pomp and pageantry sparkled in Woolson’s eyes.

The Duluth GAR post had been chartered in 1882 as a place for local Union veterans to gather and reminisce, to support one another in old age, and to relive their shared memories of the Civil War. Nationally the GAR had been founded by Dr. Benjamin F. Stephenson, an Illinois infantry surgeon who served as its first provisional commander in chief. He helped open the first post in Decatur, Illinois, and in April 1866, the first meeting was called to order in a flag-decked Indianapolis opera house. Post No. 1 was christened with just twelve members. But the organization caught on and the ranks grew rapidly, spreading with new chapters around the North and later including a National Women’s Relief Corps and a Ladies of the GAR auxiliary. By 1890 its rolls topped 400,000 members. They staged annual state and national encampments, offering opportunities for veterans in blue to gather, boost civic pride, and swap battlefield stories. After it dissolved with the death of its last member in the 1950s, the group’s records were sent to the Library of Congress. Its flags and official seal were donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

By the time Woolson joined the GAR in 1928, the lists of Civil War veterans were already thinning. Nationwide, a thousand veterans from the 1860s were dying every month. In Duluth a second chapter of the GAR, the J. B. Culver Post No. 128, was so spare it had been merged with another to create the Gorman-Culver Post No. 13. Woolson was elected its last commander in 1929. Six more men died in 1930; two years later, only six others still stood sentry.

Those half dozen, including eighty-five-year-old Woolson, decided it best to cancel any more official gatherings. Only three were strong enough to make it to their last formal meeting at the Memorial Hall in Duluth. W. W. Huntley was appointed for life as quartermaster and post adjutant. Once a group 500 strong, the last three Duluth Yankees adjourned their meeting, furled their banners, and returned home.

Then in 1938 the great seventy-fifth reunion of the blue and the gray descended on the fields of Gettysburg. Only Woolson and Frank Clemmons from the Duluth GAR were able to journey to Pennsylvania. When they returned, Woolson (now ninety-one) told friends how Confederate Gen. George Pickett’s widow, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, had addressed them at Gettysburg and insisted that her husband would have taken that Yankee position across the wheat and peach lanes if he had only been given ten more minutes to prepare.

Albert Woolson, the last of the blue in his hometown of Duluth, then the last in his home state of Minnesota, ultimately became the last in the nation to wear the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic. (Courtesy of Whitman College and Northwest Archives, Walla Walla, Washington)

“Like hell they would!” a Union veteran had shouted back.

Woolson loved that story, but he clearly was confused, embellishing his memories, or just plainly not telling the truth: LaSalle Corbell Pickett was already seven years dead.

He also told of Yankee veterans singing “Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground,” and he recalled the “rather peculiar” dispute at Gettysburg over whether Confederates should fly their Stars and Bars. Finally a group of wives, widows, and daughters from both sides exchanged flags among themselves.

“The old Confederate soldiers, regular Johnnies, had been vindicated in what they believed to be right. Tears were streaming down their cheeks,” Woolson recalled. “I was strangely affected at that spectacle. One of them said, ‘If the women of America from the South and the North had combined and talked this thing over, there would never have been any Civil War.’ ”

When his comrade Clemmons died, Woolson became one of just two Union veterans left in Duluth. When Huntley died, he stood alone. Once a solitary man, he suddenly was elevated to local celebrity, a curiosity to youngsters and a hero to their grandparents. He kept on telling the stories of his war, though many of the tales no longer tracked or made much sense. In a taped interview he claimed that he and his father had visited Ford’s Theatre in Washington a week before Lincoln was assassinated. But Woolson had also maintained he was serving in Tennessee when the president was shot. Nevertheless, he held to his story. “Poor old Abe,” he lamented.

Woolson continued to keep busy with GAR activities around the state. Often he dictated letters on stationery from GAR headquarters in St. Paul, addressed to the “family of our late comrade” whenever another Civil War Yankee passed on. “My dear friends,” he wrote in July 1943 to the children of Dr. Albert Sweet, a GAR member in Hopkins, Minnesota. “Please accept the deepest sympathy of not only myself but of the department of Minnesota Grand Army of the Republic also, for truly we mourn with you in the loss of our true and loyal comrade and your beloved father.… As the stars light God’s heavens, so will He give you comfort and strength in this hour of great sorrow.”

He also kept a firm hold on GAR affairs. When renegade member Orrin S. Pierce of Minneapolis was suspended from a local post and tried to attend GAR functions anyway, Woolson locked him out. A former honor guard in Lincoln’s funeral who now was 100, Pierce sued. Woolson refused to budge. The case went to the state supreme court. The newspapers called it “the Battle of the Centenarians.” It was still unresolved when Pierce died in the Minnesota Soldiers’ Home.

Soon Woolson was grappling with larger problems. The statewide GAR moved in 1947 to disband the entire outfit. By then only Woolson and two other Civil War veterans remained as bona fide members in Minnesota. So the trio agreed to surrender their charter to the national GAR organization and close the state posts. But first they paraded through the streets of St. Paul for one last time. Bands played marches, and Woolson rode in a place of honor, his head held high. At the parade’s end he asked the bugler to blow “Retreat” rather than “Taps.” “Retreat,” he said, signals only that day is done and night has fallen. Yet to all in Minnesota, an era was ending. Everyone sensed it. “I feel like I’m going to a funeral,” a city official riding in the last car said.

As the last state commander that last day, Woolson wore his blue uniform with all his medals and ribbons coloring his chest. When they assembled at the St. Paul city auditorium, an audience of three thousand hushed as he stepped to the podium. They could see the tears in Albert Woolson’s eyes. “It is my hope that there will be no more cruel and inhuman wars,” he told them.

In an official letter to the GAR headquarters, Woolson said the Minnesota branch would now be folded in with the national organization. “After due consideration we voted to close the Department of Minnesota and become members at large under the national umbrella,” he wrote. “Appropriate ceremonies were conducted for the closing of the department.” He signed his note, “yours in fraternity, charity, and loyalty.”

On the national stage, the glory days of the Grand Army of the Republic were slowly fading. Yet only a dozen years earlier, 350 ex-Yankees had been strong and hardy enough to march down Washington’s streets in a GAR reunion in the nation’s capital, thrilling a crowd of 100,000 as they traced the same steps Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and his proudly victorious Union Army had paraded for two days after the war was won in 1865.

The Union gathering in Washington in 1936 had experienced a troubled start. The original idea was to draw Confederate veterans to Washington too, convening a joint reunion of the two former adversaries, much like the galas at Manassas and Gettysburg. Many in blue and gray thought it might be a fitting tribute if held in the nation’s capital. But once again the Confederate flag issue irked Northern veterans, and that prompted Gen. Harry Rene Lee of Nashville, adjutant and chief of staff of the United Confederate Veterans, to call it an “obnoxious order that we furl our flags.” The Rebels stayed home.

So that September the Yankees put on their own show, complete with a viewing stand in front of the White House for the veterans to pass one last time down Pennsylvania Avenue. They were called into line when an old drum (once beaten at Lincoln’s second inaugural) sounded “Yankee Doodle.” At the sticks was 90-year-old R. D. Parker of Illinois, who, like Woolson, had served as a Union drummer boy.

And the old men marched.

“This is different from what it was when I rode along here in 1865,” said Ira Wildman of Michigan, sporting the same snappy white hat he had worn while proudly prancing with General Sherman so many years ago. “That was a parade, two days of it. But what a street then—every minute you’d sink up to your knees in a mud hole, and you had to kick sows suckling their pigs out of the way so you could go on. Those were grand days, though. I was in General Custer’s corps. There never was anything like it.”

In the Ohio line walked Sam Yoho, who had run off on his sixteenth birthday to join the fighting around Nashville. “We’re just a lot of boys,” he said. “Once a man, twice a child, you know. I’m keeping up my pep.”

I. W. Johnson of West Virginia displayed the longest beard in the parade; it swung against his belt buckle. But Bryon Johnson of Ohio stole the spotlight when he noticed some pretty young women standing outside the Washington Hotel; he quickly made a pass at them. The men around him broke ranks for the curb too.

Despite the high spirits, a cloud hung over the festivities. One GAR official from Iowa, John P. Risley, announced that he had conducted a study of pension records and census and insurance data, and had projected that the last Union soldier would be dead within four years—by 1940. It was a dire prediction. “The average age of our survivors of the Civil War now is past 91 years,” said Risley. “Insurance statistics show that by 1940 the last of them should be gone and the Grand Army of the Republic will be mustered out for all time.”

The Yankees were unnerved. They elected a new GAR national commander, C. H. William Ruhe of Pittsburgh, another former drummer boy and a youngster at eighty-seven, who announced more conventions in the years ahead. “Gosh,” he said, “we can’t quit when we’re all feeling so spry.”

Ninety-year-old, white-bearded J. L. Hussey of San Francisco spoke for them all when he mentioned the inevitable. He had loved the parade in Washington, but it left him all the more tired and worn out. “I’ll go soon. That’s certain,” he said. A. O. Williams, eighty-nine, of Toledo was more optimistic. He had been injured in a car accident the year before and surprised his doctor with a speedy recovery. “I told him my time just hadn’t come yet.”

They defied the odds, these hardy old bricks. In 1941 they met again in Columbus, Ohio. “As long as one member of the Grand Army of the Republic remains, there will be an annual encampment,” vowed Katherine Flood, the Washington secretary for the national GAR. “Actuarial figures furnished by insurance companies predict that there will be two Civil War veterans alive in 1952,” she said. And then, after a short pause, she added, “But these men have been smashing actuarial figures for years.”

Only eighty-nine veterans made it to Columbus. Many sat around the lobby of the Deshler-Wallick Hotel, a glazed terra-cotta–tiled building, once one of the world’s largest towers. A fife-and-drum band entertained them. At the Memorial Hall they were presented with a marble sundial and a bronze tablet bearing the Gettysburg Address. They accepted $3,800 in contributions and gifts to keep the nearly insolvent GAR afloat.

They met in Des Moines three years later, but only twenty-five in blue coats and brass buttons came this time. Many of the expenses for the national group were paid by the few state posts still operating. The meeting was called to order with a gavel whittled from part of a wooden banister in Lincoln’s Springfield home. The veterans sat in a small line of chairs at the memorial service, some cupping their ears, others falling asleep. The local Crocker Post No. 27 dedicated a park boulder to the GAR.

In the lobby of the Hotel Fort Des Moines sat ninety-five-year-old Fred Fisher Jr. of Humeston, Iowa, alone and dejected. He had been told he could not wear the GAR insignia, even though he insisted both he and his father had served under fire in the Union army. Amy Noll, secretary of the Iowa GAR, said Fisher’s name had been dropped from the rolls because only a Fred Fisher Sr. truly had enlisted. Junior mistakenly had been allowed at the Columbus gathering, but not this time in Des Moines.

Fisher claimed he had gone to war at eleven, accompanying his father at the first and second battles of Bull Run, and at Chancellorsville and Nashville too. Ray Aten, commander of the local American Legion post in Fisher’s hometown, vouched for him, reporting that Fisher often took part in war memorial ceremonies there: “We always have considered him a Civil War veteran, and he now is the last one in Wayne County. There is not a more highly respected man in the community, and his integrity is above reproach.… We always have heard that he went with his father into the Civil War, that he shouldered a gun, but that there had been some sort of a mix-up about papers.”

Nevertheless, Noll and Flood, the Iowa and national GAR secretaries, would not permit Fisher to join the ranks of the blue in Des Moines. “We all have sympathy,” Noll said. “But membership lines must be strictly drawn.”

In the fall of 1945 the veterans were back in Columbus, if just a handful. Only 161 Yankees were believed still alive; only fourteen came to Columbus. It rained and it was chilly, yet the bands played, and twelve men posed for a group picture. They paraded up High Street, albeit in cars. Among them was 100-year-old Fred Pfiester, though he had fallen a few days earlier in his bathtub in Cincinnati.

In August 1946 it was Indianapolis—with just a dozen on hand. Robert M. Rownd of Ripley, New York, at 102 the organization’s chaplain in chief, waved away the microphone and with a deep husky voice roared to the group inside the Murat Temple. “When the last man is gone, the GAR is gone too,” he bellowed.

President Truman had sent them a letter. “Time has thinned their ranks,” he wrote, “but time can never erase their proud record of service to our country.” Rownd held the letter aloft. “Let us look to the future!” he proclaimed.

Off to the far left sat Albert Woolson, in shirt, tie, and vest, shouldering a drum and a pair of sticks, his slouch cap atop his head. He had ridden with them in the parade along the downtown streets. And for the first time he had been elected to a national office as the GAR’s “patriotic instructor.” The honor earned him another badge and ribbon.

At ninety-nine, Woolson had taken the train from St. Paul to Indianapolis. He brought with him his GAR secretary, Marian G. Jewell, who worked out of a small office in Room 321 of the state capitol. Fremont Power, a longtime Indiana reporter, columnist, and executive editor, interviewed him in Indianapolis. To the reporter, Woolson seemed a lot younger than he said he was.

“Albert Woolson was rather the ‘Gay old dog,’ ” Power wrote. “We had a bottle of beer in the Claypool Tavern, and he smoked one of my cigarettes. Some of the others took a bit of shepherding and mothering by the women of the various auxiliaries. But not Mr. Woolson. He was his own man. You didn’t have to yell to make him hear, and his answers to your questions were sharp and concise. He was a quotable man. Mr. Woolson poured himself a glass of beer and stated his views on the atomic bomb.”

Woolson told his war stories again, including one about a lieutenant who had whacked a boy soldier with the flat end of a sword when the youth stood frozen in battle, his hand covering his mouth. The lieutenant had promised the boy’s mother he would look out for the youth. Now, in the thick of the fighting, the boy appeared to have lost his nerve. “Go on there, lad,” the lieutenant called out. “That’s not the way a hero fights.” Suddenly the boy’s hand dropped, and he fell to the ground, dead from a bullet that had torn open his neck.

“Now,” asked Woolson, “what would that lieutenant tell his mother?”

The 1947 encampment was held in Cleveland. A picture of a huge cross was projected upon the west wall of the grand ballroom of the Hotel Cleveland to honor dead comrades. Floral arrangements were displayed to commemorate the nineteen who had died in the last year. “They rest in our hearts,” said the Rev. A. Dale Fiers, the grandson of a Union soldier.

At the dais, Rownd again refused the microphone. “As the years have ripened in my life, the spirit of comradeship is still alive, and will remain forever with me,” he thundered to his brethren.

Only forty-seven Yankees still lived; only five were strong enough to participate in the parade. Eagle Scouts posted along the route checked on them as they were driven past.

Woolson had stayed home, but he joined five others the following year in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at what all assumed would be their last farewell. Two of the veterans brought their canes; one was pushed in a wheelchair. The talk was about disbanding the old fraternity, just letting it go. Too many years, they said.

Then, in the summer of 1949, 102-year-old Woolson headed again to Indianapolis, the site of the GAR’s first national convention and what now would become its last gathering anywhere. Only six made it. Woolson left his home on East Fifth Street for the Duluth depot and the 8:15 train. The Moose Lodge drum and bugle corps performed in his honor. He boarded and flashed a smile. His blue eyes sparkled, much like a seventeen-year-old heading off for another war to win. He chomped on a big stogie, and the smoke filled the railcar.

When his train chugged into Union Station in Indianapolis, he was the second veteran to arrive, and he found a wheelchair waiting on the platform. In fact, a whole team of nurses and Red Cross workers were at the ready. He reluctantly sat down in the chair. He had brought with him his sixty-nine-year-old son, Robert Woolson, a druggist from Dayton, Washington, and Robert started pushing the old man to the Claypool Hotel headquarters.

The final meeting was understandably somber. All six GAR attendees, minus ten other Yankees too frail to attend, were over 100 years old, which John Mason Brown, writing in the Saturday Review, called “an age which is abnormal.” One of them was blind; some were unable to walk; others could hardly stand. “All of us pass daily, without recognizing them, older people whose presence are forecasts of what our futures will be like, if only we last to their age,” Brown wrote. “We seldom see ourselves in these passers-by. We do not want to. We live nourished by the illusion that each of us is somehow different.”

These six men, who in their youth could have known old soldiers who had fought with George Washington, now were themselves the ancient relics. “They came home from combat full of youth and impatience with the old, only to grow old themselves,” Brown wrote. “Their bodies age, sag, soften, fatten or shrink.… Where once these men of action were capable of scaling walls, charging up hills, or trudging through miles of mud, they dwindle into men of inaction, no longer able to climb stairs. Their rifles are replaced with canes.”

In Indianapolis they formed a decrepit final unit, sporting worn blue coats and dangling brass buttons. The blind veteran said he was a former slave. Another fainted as he tried to step into a Red Cross wagon. Every night they all retired early.

It was raining when Woolson was rolled into the Indiana Roof Ballroom in a wheelchair, guided by a military policeman. The band struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and each veteran was introduced.

But old Woolson seemed confused. He started talking about a recent bear attack in Duluth. He said he had been eating dinner at his daughter’s home when a 300-pound bruin was shot in the street. A group of ladies presented him with a bouquet, and he motioned for a photographer. He wanted his picture taken. “My wife loves flowers,” he beamed. “She’ll think more of that than she would a $20 bill.” Next Woolson was saying that just yesterday he had ridden to Hibbing, Minnesota, to inspect the ore mines there.

The group had little business to conduct; nothing much was left to say. Rownd was dead, so Theodore Augustus Penland of Portland, Oregon, officiated as the group’s last commander in chief. The talk was low, respectful, and brief. They dedicated a new GAR postage stamp in a ceremony at the city’s Monument Circle, one of the nation’s first elaborate Civil War memorials to the common soldier. They rode in a short parade in open cars, and Nancy Baxter, a wide-eyed teenager, watched them from a second-floor window. What she saw, she never forgot: “The old guys rode around in convertibles,” she remembered, “their bald heads with a few white hairs on them, glistening in the late afternoon sunlight.”

The Yankees gathered for a final “campfire” in the hotel ballroom, all six of them pinned with new ribbons and medals. Woolson was promoted from national chief of staff to junior vice commander. They furled their flags and tucked them away. There would be no more parties, no more reunions, no more Grand Army of the Republic. One of them, the senior vice commander, asked to hold the GAR wooden gavel one more time, if only “for just a little while.”

The oldest of them, 108-year-old James A. Hard of Rochester, New York, said he wished that one or two of the last Confederates could have joined them for this roll call. Maybe, he said wistfully, they all could hold one more reunion in Washington to celebrate the blue and the gray. Maybe next year, he thought. He looked around the room, but all was quiet. “It’s just a suggestion,” he said.

These last six Union veterans were as stubborn as they were old. Before they departed, they decided to never officially disband the GAR. Let it live, they said, some of them in tears. As a fraternal organization, let it continue until the last of them passed away. Then fold the tent.

Off to the side, Woolson, wearing a shirt, tie, and vest, picked up an acoustic guitar and started strumming. He flashed a big smile and lit up his bright blue eyes. “Feeling fine,” he said.