WALTER WILLIAMS

For most of his long life, Walter Washington Williams never fussed much about his stint as a Confederate forage master in the Civil War. He occasionally mentioned it around his rural Texas community, and his neighbors understood him to be a veteran of that war. But rarely did he attend a Civil War reunion, a Soldiers’ Day parade, or a Confederate veterans’ encampment. He never joined fraternal organizations dedicated to honoring the Lost Cause. He did seek a Confederate pension and he did fly the Stars and Bars, but in the postwar South that hardly set an old man apart. In truth, it was not until he was a long retired farmer and cattle herder that the world sought out Williams as the last of the soldiers in gray.

By that time he lay crumpled in a bed in his daughter’s house in Houston. He was blind, deaf, and barely able to speak, a shriveled old body that could eat or drink only when his daughter fed him from an eyedropper or a bottle. There was little more for him to say by then, anyway. His time foraging with John Bell Hood’s fabled brigade in the Confederate army was a distant memory. He said he had only served for eleven months, and for a man who in the end claimed to be 117 years old, those eleven months seemed like a mere trickle of time. It was all so long ago.

Unlike Albert Woolson, the last of the blue veterans in Minnesota, Williams never abandoned his country roots nor moved to the big city—at least not until he was forced to in old age. Rather, for nearly seventy years he quietly spooled out his retirement in a three-bedroom cabin with a porch out front and a garage around back. He built his home at the end of Shiloh and Eaton roads, deep in a patch of woods outside Franklin, Texas, and he set the wooden frame structure up on bricks to keep the floors dry when it rained. For years he made do without electricity, a telephone, or running water.

He had been born before Texas became a state, and he died at the dawn of the space age. “Uncle Walt,” most called him. He was bright, blue-eyed, and cheerful, an elf of a man with a friendly chuckle. When attention swerved his way, he preferred to tell stories about herding cattle on the Chisholm Trail rather than stealing food for Hood’s Brigade. But even still, some of the farmers and townspeople around Franklin remembered him as an old Confederate, and it was that memory they held when in the mid-1950s Williams was driven down to Houston to be cared for by his daughter. By that time he was far too old and feeble to fend for himself. Twice a widower, he required constant care. Yet even during those last years as his body was shutting down, he still hung on for another birthday and another birthday and then another. He clearly enjoyed living beyond the span of a century. “I’ll be around when you are all dead and gone,” he liked to chuckle to visitors from Austin, Washington, and Hollywood too. “I’m just sticking around to see what will happen.” He said that over and over until he could no longer speak, and then he just lay quietly in the bed in the house on West Twenty-Third Avenue in Houston.

Williams said he was born November 14, 1842, in Itawamba County, Mississippi. According to family history, he was the son of George Washington Williams and Nancy Marcus Williams. He claimed his father lived to 119—or maybe it was his grandfather, as he changed the story often. Yet even as a country boy Walter told friends he was going to live even longer than his forefathers. He was going to top 120, he said.

The Williamses were a farm family, and Walter and his brothers shared the chores. In 1862, when he said he was twenty, he joined Company C of the 5th Regiment of then-Colonel Hood’s Texas Brigade. As a forage master, it fell to him to scrounge for cattle, fresh crops, and anything else to eat as the brigade took on new enlistments and scurried about the state.

John Bell Hood had been to West Point. After Fort Sumter fell and his native Kentucky could not decide whether to fight for the North or secede with the South, an exasperated Hood abandoned the Union army and embraced the Rebels. With a reputation for dash and daring, he distinguished himself at Antietam. He was wounded at Gettysburg when an artillery shell blasted his left arm, and he lost his right leg at Chickamauga. He was promoted to general in 1864. He was desperately trying to make it back to Texas to rally another brigade when Lee surrendered in Virginia. Hood himself was cornered in Mississippi. But all those exploits came after Hood had earlier swung south through Mississippi and plucked up young men like Walter Williams from their farms in the Delta to get to Texas and organize that first brigade. Walter never took any credit for following Hood up into Maryland and Pennsylvania and the hotbed of the war. In fact, the most Walter Williams did—according to what he said—was to forage for food as Hood and his men passed through Mississippi and headed for the Lone Star state.

“I stole food,” he would explain, trying to describe how, atop his horse Willie, he had scoured the town depots and farm fields for something to feed the men. “I never fired a shot at Yankees, but I heard a few bullets whine when Unionists fired on me once while I ate breakfast.” He later would claim he was part of a battle that killed 100 Union soldiers. Another time, he said, “thirty of our men was killed. A bunch of Yankees come ridin’ round a mountain right into us. We fired into ’em. I remember one Yankee horse bolted, and he run smack through the middle of us. Didn’t get a scratch.”

Other times he insisted that he only had fired his rifle when he was sent out hunting for stray cattle. “I had to kill twenty of them a day,” he said of the cattle. “I killed them all along the road when I could find them.”

He also bragged that Willie was the best horse in the outfit, and that he had trained his mount to halt whenever he raised his rifle as if to fire at something. He said that after the war he rode Willie home.

When Williams’s eleven months under Hood clocked out, he was “free to go home,” he said. But he claimed he also rode briefly with Quantrill’s Raiders. “I wasn’t discharged,” he maintained. “We just broke up.” It seemed an odd assertion, given that Quantrill and his guerrillas spent their part of the war far away in the Kansas and Missouri region during the border conflicts there. But, like Hood, the name Quantrill in the years of defeat and Reconstruction became quite a legend. Maybe in his later years the old Confederate forage master Walter Williams simply was mistaken. Memories lose their hold after a while.

Soon after the surrender, Williams married his first wife, Florence Humphries. As he told it, they moved to Texas in 1870 and settled in Brazos County. They raised seven children, and he opened a meat market. But Florence died, and in 1888, when he said he was forty-six, he married Ella Mae Holliday. She was just eighteen, yet he outlived her too. Together they raised twelve children of their own, and for nearly seventy years the family planted crops and gathered eggs on their twenty acres of woods and flatland next to the cabin outside of Franklin in Robertson County—largely isolated from the rest of the increasingly modern age. Williams loved to fox hunt, and he kept a passel of twelve hound dogs. He raised a pet deer in his cabin. Occasionally he hired himself out as a cattle herder on the Chisholm Trail, he said. But other than that, the world outside of rural Texas spun busily along without any thought of Walter Williams, the old Confederate.

In August 1932, during what proved for many to be the leanest year of the Great Depression, Williams applied for a Confederate pension. Under a Texas state law passed in 1889, pensions were paid to any “bona fide” Confederate veteran who lived in the state. And while for more than forty years he had never raised his hand as a Confederate veteran and asked for the money, Williams evidently thought some state assistance would see him through the hard times.

In his application, written in longhand by a friend, Williams mentioned Hood’s Brigade and Quantrill’s Raiders. He was eighty-six, he reported, and he needed help. “My occupation is a farmer but I am unable to farm or do any of this kind of work at this time,” he told the pension office in Austin. Unable to read or write much himself, he signed the application with his “X.”

A county judge in Franklin, Joe Y. McNutt, mailed his own letter to the state capitol supporting the application. He told George H. Sheppard, the state comptroller of public accounts, that he completely vouched for Williams. “I believe Mr. Williams is a very deserving old Confederate soldier and trust that you will grant him a pension at your earliest convenience.” He also identified two longtime citizens and merchants around town who had known Williams for years and also were ready to testify to his good character. “Both of the witnesses swear upon their oaths that Mr. Williams is a creditable [sic] person and that they believe the statements enabling him to a pension are true.”

The application arrived in Austin, state officials read it over, and the pension was granted.

The outside world continued to know little of Walter Williams until 1949, when Frank X. Tolbert Sr., a feature writer for the Dallas Morning News, drove down to the cabin in the woods. Williams told the reporter about his daily mundane tasks of milking cows and chasing chickens, and his more adventurous years of herding cattle. This was the year of the last GAR convention in the North, but up to now Williams had spoken little of the Civil War.

“I never et much,” he said in his southern drawl, the newspaperman taking it down in his spiral notebook. “I get up for breakfast, turn around for dinner, and go to bed for supper. When I was riding up the Chisholm Trail, the range cooks sort of held it against me because I was a light-eating man. I’ve always drunk lots of coffee, chewed plenty of tobacco, and haven’t tried to avoid any of this good Texas weather.”

Sometimes he ventured out, if just to take a peek at what was happening outside his cabin door. In 1937 he showed up in Corsicana, Texas, for what became the last state reunion of Texas Confederate veterans. It was his first and last formal outing among soldiers in gray. Six of the old warriors convened in the town square, all in their nineties, and they took rooms at the Commercial Hotel. Confederate veteran M. H. Wolfe proudly fingered a long scar across his face. He told a Corsicana reporter it was a souvenir from “a Yankee saber thrust.” The reporter also briefly met Williams on the square, but the encounter left him perplexed. Williams, the reporter noted, “did not look as old as the other veterans.”

“He has been living in the neighborhood of Franklin for more than 60 years,” Franklin’s Texan newspaper reported in November 1950, just after Gov. Robert Allan Shivers, an army major in World War II, knighted Williams as an honorary colonel on the occasion of his 108th birthday. By then, the paper noted, Williams had over a hundred descendants spread across five generations. “Most of these years were spent farming and raising cattle, and he still lives on his farm and directs the work on the place.” Williams attended a short ceremony at the courthouse in Franklin to receive the honorary title and accept a testimonial accompanying the military commission. He looked at the papers and studied the words, but he could not read them.

A year later, he made the cover of the September 1951 United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine. The photograph showed him with sunglasses and a broad grin, accepting a large cake from one of the Daughters at a get-together in his cabin. The story said he was born on November 14, 1843 (a year later than he had claimed), and in another county in Mississippi. It reported that he had been twenty-two rather than twenty when he joined Hood’s Brigade. But otherwise the feature was quite positive about Walter and his wife, Ella Mae.

“Mr. Williams attributes his long life to hard work and clean living,” the story read. He “stated his most enjoyable pastime was fox hunting, which he has had to forego for the past two years. The Williams are taken to prayer meeting occasionally, when weather permits. The Colonel and his wife still think that many of this world’s problems could be solved, if people would attend prayer meetings and turn for guidance to the Lord.”

“At 77,” the magazine added, “Mrs. Williams milks the cows, tends the chickens and horses, does her own planting and still finds time to raise flowers. If she needs help, she blows a few blasts on a cow horn, and a son who lives near or some of the neighbors come over and lend a hand.”

Two years later a photographer for Life magazine knocked on the cabin door, and Williams posed for him on the porch. He sat in a small rocker, a fedora hat slanted atop his head. He was dressed quite formally for the occasion, in a white shirt and black jacket and pants. He wore black-and-ivory cowboy boots and a stick pin in his right lapel. His thin eyebrows and narrow moustache had long ago turned gray. He had rather large ears for his small head. He did not smile or chuckle. Ella Mae stood behind him, leaning her hand on a large covered chair to steady herself, dressed in a bonnet, striped dress, and wool sweater. She did not smile either.

He started every morning “with a toddy of whisky, a chew of tobacco and a cup of coffee,” he said. The porch floor was fashioned out of splintered wood planks, and the roof was made of tin. Most days he sat there in that rocker and snuggled in until the sun dropped beyond the trees. His plan, he told the magazine, was “to live until everyone else is gone, just to see what’ll happen.”

He went down to Houston for a medical checkup in August, and Dr. Russell Wolfe declared him “surprisingly good” for a man his age. “Frankly, we were medically curious about him,” the doctor said. “You don’t get a chance very often to study a man that old.” Williams exclaimed that he felt more like sixty, but he needed help sometimes to walk. Yet the doctors said his blood pressure was good, and the cardiogram tests came back “remarkably normal.” They fit him with a truss for a hernia and urged him to take plenty of mineral oil. Take vitamins too, they recommended. Other than that, they saw no need for a special diet.

He told the doctors, “My grandfather lived to be 120”—different from his earlier accounts that it was his father who had lived to be 119. But old age plays tricks. And Williams still was feisty. “I’m going to beat that,” he vowed. Then he hurried home. “I don’t like towns,” he grumbled.

He told reporters around Franklin that “I could hit 120 easy if I keep feelin’ way I do.” He said, “Way I feel now I’ll never die. There ain’t a thing wrong with me ’cept my hearing.” He said the state legislature had hiked his bonus pay a bit, and that he “might get me a new car. If I could see I could drive the thing myself.”

Asked about the Civil War, Williams turned serious. “It was a wide mistake,” he said. “Looks like we’ve always got wars goin’ but they don’t ever seem to settle nothin’.”

In October he toured the Texas State Fair. A wealthy benefactor flew him to Dallas in a private plane. “I like it better than riding a horse,” he said. He also went down to Galveston for a television spot and then to Houston where he stayed at the Shamrock Hotel. He ran into some attractive young women in the lobby. “Wanted to take some home with me,” he said.

For his birthday in November, at 110, he told well-wishers that he started every day with a “big chew of tobacco.” His preferred brand was Beechnut. About a hundred of his descendants, including a brood of great-great-grandchildren, filled the porch and crowded into the cabin. He looked spry and alert but talked little about the past. New gimmicks, especially TV consoles, were what interested him now. “I never have seen that television,” he told his family. “Seen a lot of other things. But I’d like to see television.”

The next year they brought out a five-tiered cake with three candles to mark his 111th birthday. The family feasted on barbecued hog, beef, and venison, all of the old man’s favorites. Asked to speak a few words, Williams talked about the war this time. While before he had always maintained he never came close to any fighting, this time he recalled that one morning he and his fellow Confederates had ambushed some Yankees. He said they killed a hundred of them.

He insisted that Grant’s army had prevailed at Appomattox only because General Lee and the Confederacy were famished, worn out, and tired. They lacked both food and shoes, he said. “We didn’t get beat. We was starved out.” His eyesight was beginning to fail, and his hearing was going too, so he spoke louder. “We quit just five minutes too early,” he griped. “They [the Yankees] was getting ready to stack arms, and we beat ’em to it.” Then he warned his relatives that “I’m still going to be around after everyone here is gone.”

In the spring he climbed aboard for his second airplane ride, flying to Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, where he was named an honorary commander for the day. The band played “Dixie” and the crowd whooped up a Rebel yell. Hollywood was on hand, and actor James Stewart read the orders of the day. Williams was dressed in a military uniform brought from a movie set. He had been asked to bring his old Confederate uniform, but he said that it had been destroyed years ago in a fire. Ella Mae, who said she did not like airplanes, waited for him on the ground.

When Williams turned 112, two hundred relatives and guests jammed into the cabin. He wore a tie and jacket for the affair, and they set him out on the porch in a wheelchair and presented him with another fancy birthday cake. He scanned the well-wishers and repeated, “I will live after everyone else goes.” Ella Mae also spoke up this time: “I just hope and pray the Lord will give me strength to take care of Papa as long as he lives.” She suffered from heart trouble and kidney disease but still managed to milk the cows and tend to chores. A son and daughter-in-law had moved in to help. From Minnesota, the old Yankee drummer boy Albert Woolson sent birthday greetings.

In November 1957 Texas’s Walter Williams celebrates another birthday and another year closer to becoming honored as the South’s last living Confederate soldier. (Courtesy of the Houston Chronicle)

A big Chicago firm with an office in Houston gave Williams a free hearing aid. He slipped it in and said, “You won’t have to holler now.” A box of cigars arrived from Florida, and the shipper promised more for as long as Williams lived. In December he attended Confederate Day ceremonies at the state fair, where they passed around box lunches at the picnic pavilion. He danced—sort of wriggled, really—for a television camera.

At 113 he was presented with a Civil War medal by the Pentagon. By now he was blind, nearly deaf, and often ill. He suffered from dropsy, and his legs and feet were swollen. One of his daughters, Willie Mae Bowles, said “I’m afraid he won’t last long.” But he managed to sit up and take food, and he soon improved. “They are trying to make out that I am a heap worse than I really am,” he complained.

To boost his spirits, a Houston furniture store presented him with a brand-new rocker. He took to it right away, especially enjoying the padded straw seat bottom. “He’s just been rockin’ ever since he got it,” Willie Mae reported. His Civil War pension was raised to $300, but the increase did not immediately kick in because of a legislative mix-up. Willie Mae worried that the household might not make it; she said they were down to just $1.30 in the bank and behind in mortgage payments.

A newspaper reporter stopped by hoping to snag an interview. When the family helped the old man understand that the newsman was at the door, Williams barked, “I’ll be here when you’re gone!”

It seemed that maybe the old man was right. He became ill again in 1957 with a dangerously high fever of 103 degrees, but it was another Rebel veteran who died that year in Florida. “I am sorry to hear it,” Williams said. Told there was yet one more Confederate still alive, 111 years old and living deep in Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, Williams vowed to “still outlive that other one” too.

Then Ella Mae, his second wife for all those years, the mother of his second round of twelve children, the bride who was almost thirty years younger than he was, passed on. Williams was just twelve days short of his 115th birthday when she died. His family moved him to Houston and put him in the back bedroom of daughter Willie Mae’s house. There they thought the old man would soon die peacefully. But Williams hung on stubbornly.

Reporters and Civil War buffs came looking for him at the home on West Twenty-Third Avenue, just as they sought out Albert Woolson on East Fifth Street in Duluth, especially now that the Civil War Centennial would soon be under way. Much of the public hoped that the last of the blue or the last of the gray—both if possible—would stick around for the centennial ceremonies.

MAYBE IT WAS JUST SOMETHING ABOUT the Confederacy itself that kept old Walter Williams going. The Rebels lost the war, but they never surrendered their pride. Each state in the South boasted its own Confederate honor guard, and Louisiana offers a notable example of how the veterans in gray, by their strength and fortitude, helped the region endure defeat and Reconstruction, and pick up the shattered pieces of Southern society.

The national United Confederate Veterans (UCV) was born in New Orleans in June 1889 so that men could shake hands, slap backs, and swap war stories. More important, it helped them deal with the loss of confidence that came with defeat, to struggle against the spreading poverty that followed the surrender, and to support relief agencies trying to heal the stricken South. One of their first efforts, even before they formally organized, was to raise money for a Robert E. Lee Monument in the heart of New Orleans. The symbol would demonstrate that the South had its heroes too. Set atop a giant obelisk in the center of the Crescent City, the statue lifted citizens’ hopes.

Even as local chapters opened in other Southern states, memories of the war were replaced with nostalgia and what eventually flowered into the cult of the Lost Cause. Some 100 ex-Confederate cavalrymen gathered in New Orleans to form the national organization, and the excitement of brotherhood filled the downtown shopping district and the Vieux Carré.

They elected John B. Gordon to be their first commander in chief. He had served as a major general in the Civil War, had afterward gone to Washington and a seat in the Senate, and then moved into the governor’s mansion in Atlanta. Gordon had led a final lunge at Appomattox, and he used his fame to stoke fresh energy in the New South.

The veterans gathered in hotel ballrooms and outdoor tent sites. They played the old tunes, sang the old songs, and raised the old banners. In 1903 a crowd in New Orleans swelled to an estimated half million to applaud some twelve thousand whiskered Rebels who paraded down Canal Street and then bivouacked on the fairgrounds.

If they could not boast of victory, they could warm themselves in the cherished code of their war: duty, chivalry, and sacred honor. In 1915, with the Great War aflame in Europe, they designated Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s birthday a legal holiday. They called it Memorial Day in Louisiana. “By this observance,” said Confederate Veteran magazine, “we hope so to inspire the children with our love for the Southern cause that they will for all time preserve the memory of the Confederate soldier.”

In 1911 they had gathered in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the half-century mark after the war’s onset, praised by letter from President Taft in Washington. “The men of the Confederate army fought for a principle which they believed to be right,” he wrote, “and for which they were willing to sacrifice their lives, their homes—in fact all those things which men hold most dear.”

New Pension Bureau records now showed Confederate veterans were dying at a rate of six thousand a year. (For those from the larger Union army, it was thirty-five thousand Yankees per year.) Less than twenty-five years after the war, in 1888, W. P. Parks, an Arkansas artillery captain at Vicksburg, had written to Jefferson Davis about how the “many thousands, in the past two decades, have passed over the river.” And Davis, in remarks that same year in Mississippi, urged his former troops to look past the war. “The past is dead. Let it bury its dead, its hopes and aspirations,” he said. “Before you lies the future.”

At a 1928 reunion in Little Rock, no more than three thousand turned up. “The snap and dash of the old men was gone,” lamented Confederate Veteran magazine. “Nearly all of them are hard of hearing and are feeble in body. There was no Rebel yell to excite the people and to quicken their interest.” An elderly veteran was asked how many of his company still survived. “Thirty-five years ago, I could call the roll of thirty in my company,” he said. “But now, I am the only one living. They are all dead, and when a man dies, he drops out of thought or recollection.” In an editorial, the magazine challenged the South to honor its hobbling, doddering veterans. “Let the world know how few remain. Let us keep in mind the glory of their achievement during four years of military struggle against heavy odds.”

In 1933 a mere twenty-seven met for a Louisiana reunion in Baton Rouge. They doled out honorary commissions and new promotions. When one man was mistakenly referred to as a “colonel,” he stood and insisted, “Call me general, or call me nothing!” They sported broad-brimmed hats made famous by General Lee. Veteran J. St. Clair Favrot welcomed them with an inspiring invocation. “The South has remained true to the ideals set by her wartime citizens,” he said. “Out of the crucible of defeat and Reconstruction, the South came back.” At a grand luncheon, the women decorated the tables with small Dixie flags and large baskets of scarlet dahlias. The men bowed graciously to the ladies. After dinner they gathered as usual for cigars and tales of approaching cannon.

At another reunion five years later in Baton Rouge, fifteen veterans met on the roof of the Hotel Heidelberg and clamored for back pay they said was due Confederate pensioners. “They’ve got the money, why don’t they give it to us?” demanded ninety-two-year-old S. T. Seagrave from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Minnie Booth Kernan of New Orleans, assistant adjutant general of the UCV, explained that the state had fulfilled its obligations of $60 a month and cautioned the veterans against agitating for more. It was unwise to keep “touching on any sore spots,” Kernan urged.

Tempers cooled, and soon smiles were flashing again. W. E. “Uncle Billy” Dark of Dodson, Louisiana, pranced a little jig to the strains of “Dixie.” At ninety-one, he had been married three times and fathered twenty-two children. How many great-grandchildren he had, he could not say. “I don’t know them when I meet them,” he laughed.

Only ten veterans convened at the state capitol in Baton Rouge a year later. They dined on oysters and eggs for breakfast, addressing one another as “general.” Uncle Billy Dark stood up to dance again, telling his comrades he still could cut a pigeon wing. All he could manage was one foot off the ground.

Every year their numbers dwindled. Twelve were counted in 1940, in hats, ties, and beards. Several repaired to the Heidelberg bar for a morning toddy and then stayed much of the day. “We’re going to get drunker ’n hell,” roared “General” O. R. Gillette of Shreveport. “They ain’t no better way to get drunk than to drink beer and smoke cigars.” He turned to his pals. “ ‘Here, drink up!”

Angry words were hurled around too. The veterans condemned a man who had set up shop outside the front of the hotel wearing the insignia of a Confederate soldier and asking for nickels and dimes. A panhandler and a “fake,” they called him. “No real old soldier has to beg,” scoffed one veteran.

In 1942 only four in gray mustered to Baton Rouge. The business session was brief; they simply elected themselves as officers. The parade was just a few blocks. By 1945, of the thousands of men once listed on the state Confederate pension rolls, only nine were still alive. Finally there was but one: William D. Townsend of Olla, the last of the Louisiana gray.

William Daniel Townsend, also called “Billy-Dan,” “Uncle Eli,” or plain “Grandpa,” said he gave two years to the war. He grew up in Meridian, Mississippi, and the Confederacy took him when he was just fifteen. He said he saw action in Louisiana and that a bullet tore open his right arm at Vicksburg. Captured there by Yankees, he said he was paroled in 1863 because of gangrene from that wound. He settled in Olla, farmed, and married four times: to an Annie, two wives named Frances, and a Maggie.

Like Walter Williams, he could rock for hours in his porch chair. Never having learned his letters, his stepdaughter read him the Shreveport Times. When he neared 100, he could barely walk to the corner; the single block to the town square was too much. But when he felt up to it, he would have someone drive him to the hospital in Shreveport to entertain the patients with a little fiddle playing.

Thinking back to the war, he described standing guard up to thirty-six hours because “there was no turning back.” He had been young and strong then. Food was scarce, and they often ate “old poor beef.” Or they fed on “mule meat that tasted awfully good during the bitter days of the Siege of Vicksburg.” Reporters asked to see the scar on his arm, and he rolled up his sleeve. But it was faint and nearly gone; as a reporter for the Shreveport Times wrote, it was “hardly noticeable except by close examination.”

Over Memorial Day weekend 1951, at a final reunion of Confederate veterans in Norfolk, Virginia, Townsend dressed in a fedora and double-breasted dark suit and got into a squabble over his pension pay. “Yes, I been ailing a long time,” he told the Norfolk mayor. “Didn’t think I could make it. Wasn’t fit fer nothing till I got here.” He invoked the legendary former governor, senator, and populist boss of Louisiana: “Yes, sir. I knew Huey Long’s daddy. I did all I could fer Huey, but you know, Huey never did think of me. In fact, it took me five years to get my pension straight. I believe if Huey had lived he’d have remembered me.” Townsend leaned in to the mayor. “If you see them fellers,” he said, “see if you can do something.… It’s mighty tight on a small pension.”

As with Walter Williams in his rustic Texas cabin, the postwar years were hard on Billy-Dan Townsend. To earn a little cash he once posed for an ad for Southern Maid Cream Mixed Glazed Donuts. He wore a slouch hat and raised a coconut pastry to his mouth, a cup of coffee at the ready. But that kind of money never stretched far. So in 1935, when he said he was a year short of ninety, he applied for a Confederate pension. He claimed he had been captured on the Fourth of July 1863 after the forty days of Vicksburg, when the Confederate garrison surrendered. He identified his commanding officer as a Capt. Gus Cobb.

Louisiana pension officials could not find a Captain Cobb. They also wanted evidence of Townsend’s exact age. So they turned him down. “Evidence of your Confederate service is not sufficient,” pension commissioners told him. They suspected he was trying to take credit for another man’s military record: “One W. or William Townsend was a private in Co. B, 27th Louisiana Infantry, but he enlisted at a time when you were only thirteen years of age.”

Townsend did not give up. John Coats, a politician in Townsend’s home parish, wrote to Baton Rouge that there must be some mistake, that a government clerk must have made a “typegraphel” error in Townsend’s birth date, that he actually was fifteen when he enlisted, and that “from his size could easily have passed for older. He ran away from home to join.” Coats added, “The old man has no edication [sic], and after talking to him I sincerely believe that what he states is true. Of course all dates are given from memory, and [with] a man of his age his memory is not always good.”

Townsend tried to clear up the discrepancies. But he stuck to his story about Vicksburg. “I was sick at the time I was captured and wounded,” he wrote to the pension commission. He gave five witnesses as former Confederate comrades—John Orr, Jim Orr, Lum Knox, B. Russell, and Dave Seats. But the commission could not find any of them, and Baton Rouge rejected him again: “The evidence of your service in the Confederate Army is not sufficient.”

Townsend persisted. A ninety-two-year-old veteran, Alf Fuller of Dubach, Louisiana, signed a notarized affidavit swearing that he remembered a Willie Townsend from Company B of the 27th Louisiana Infantry Regiment. At long last, probably well beaten down, the state awarded Townsend $60 a month. But first they instructed the state Public Welfare Department to drop his name from the relief rolls. They did not want him double-dipping.

That did not satisfy Townsend. Now he demanded all the pension money he would have pocketed had his application not been held up. “You promised to pay us old soldiers our back pay,” he insisted. The state denied him any back pay. So his wife, Maggie, wrote to Public Welfare officials and requested that they put him back on the relief rolls. She complained that Billy-Dan was squandering his $60 a month and not sharing it with her. “When he get [sic] his check he will get mad and leave and just waste [it], and leave me without food and anything and never give me a penny,” she wrote. “I want to no [sic] if there would be any chance for me to get a part of it as I feel I am due half of it.”

When that did not work, she wrote to the Veterans Administration in Washington. “I would furnish [our] home with a cow for our milk if he would give me half of the check to carry it on. He could do as he wished with his part … [but] it is winter time. I haft [sic] to buy wood [and] feed and food.” The VA officials said no. “Would [it be] possible for you all to grant enough money to buy Mr. Townsend a suit of clothes [and] a pair of shoes for his birthday?” Maggie then asked. No again.

Townsend died in February 1953. The governor praised him, and they lowered the flag at the state capitol. At his burial in Shreveport, they blew “Taps” and fired twenty-one rounds in salute. “Dixie” was played as they eased him into the red clay. He returned to the earth in an ash-gray uniform with polished brass buttons. A badge with the seal of the Confederacy was pinned to his coat.

And Maggie finally received some compensation. Every sixth day of the month, the postman brought her a widow’s pension check for $48.39. She collected it for another fifteen years.

THAT IS HOW IT GOES SOMETIMES, when men age, memories blur, and stories get stretched. Sometimes the state can be cold and unforgiving when records are lost or incomplete. Were many of these old men truly veterans, or just warriors in their own minds? Those were the questions soon raised about Albert Woolson in Minnesota and Walter Williams in Texas, the last of the blue and the gray. But as symbols of honor and bravery, no one dared ask them directly.

“I’m so glad, Mr. Hoar, you haven’t forgotten Dear Dad, Gen. Williams,” Willie Mae Bowles wrote years later about her father, Walter Williams, to Jay Hoar, a writer who devoted years tracking down descendants of Civil War veterans. She described how each day she had cared for him in those last years in her home in Houston as her father lay slowly dying in her back bedroom:

5:00 a.m.	Coffee.
9:00 a.m.	Two soft scrambled eggs and milk.
Noon	Strained baby food, usually green beans or peas.
4:00 p.m.	Applesauce or custard.
9:00 p.m.	Strained peaches or pears.

“He got vitamin shots every Tuesday and Friday,” Willie Mae wrote. “A night nurse made it possible for me to rest. So many people want his things, but I just can’t turn them loose. How nice of you to seek my remembrances of him while I yet may share. What I have of Dad’s I love and everything of his makes me feel he is closer to me. I have blood clots and am not over well myself these days. It was my privilege to be his daughter.”