OLD MEN IN BLUE

The snow falls early in Duluth. Anchored along hills that shiver up from Lake Superior, the cold turns ashen white, the sky gray like iron. The mercury drops to zero and below, and it lodges there for months. The freeze hangs on so long they call it the “Air-Conditioned City.”

The cold did not deter Albert Woolson. Early each February he was out on his ten-foot sidewalk, cigar in his teeth, shovel in hand, clearing a path for the mailman. He would put on heavy wool pants and a Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) cap, and head out the front door. He was especially diligent in the days before February 11, his birthday, because that meant the mailman would be hoisting a large satchel of cards. Woolson liked to keep the path at least a foot wide, large enough for the postman to maneuver to the mailbox at 215 East Fifth Street, where he lived with his daughter and her family, just blocks from the water, the wind, and the winter freeze.

“He’s worried about the mailman having to walk through the snow to deliver birthday cards,” explained the daughter, Mrs. John Kobus. “He plans to keep the walk cleared at least until his birthday.”

Woolson appeared as strong and as hardy as a man half his age. Little dulled his spirit, nothing dampened his grit. He showed no sign of slowing down, even at 105, 106, and 107. He was so robust that nearly every afternoon on his birthday, when the cards and letters filled the parlor and the dining room table, he dressed formally in shirt, tie, and vest and settled into a favorite chair. Pen in hand, he would start answering the well wishes and tributes, though his hand at times shook a bit. To keep pace with all his letter writing, he often whistled a tune he remembered from the battlefields in Tennessee, the music of the Civil War still pulsing through his hardening arteries: “The Girl I Left behind Me.”

Though many a name our banner bore

Of former deeds of daring,

But they were of the day of yore

In which we had no sharing.

Other times he devoured histories of Minnesota and stories of the American Indian tribes that for centuries had roamed the Lake Superior hills. The Ojibwas called the area “the little portage” after they rousted the Sioux from the bay and drove them out, less than a hundred years before Woolson was born. He could recall the names of some of those warriors, and he knew their descendants well; one had taught him to fire a musket.

Among his well-thumbed volumes was Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars. With a small slip of paper he had bookmarked the page where he was listed as a member of the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery.

At family dinners he led the prayer, a Divine blessing he called it, as his children and grandchildren gathered around the table. His face was deeply wrinkled, but that highlighted his sparkling blue eyes. His white hair had thinned somewhat, but it still covered most of his head. His appetite remained as strong as his muscles, and while he required no special diet he did usually avoid fatty foods. Whenever a plate of sauerkraut and spare ribs was served, Woolson dug in eagerly. “We can’t stop him,” said his daughter.

If the weather was fair, he would step out with his cane for a short stroll, maybe try a block or two. Or he might find a ride to a friend’s house to pass an afternoon. Most evenings he was in bed by 7 p.m., and each morning he rose with the sun, usually around 6:30 a.m. He shaved with a safety razor, bathed himself, and then dressed for the day. Without any help he clomped down the stairs from his upstairs bedroom, read the morning paper through shell-rimmed glasses, and waited for breakfast. He always took his eggs scrambled and his bacon crisp. Then he was comfortably back in his chair and armed with his books, in the front room with the floral wallpaper and the burgundy carpet, and he passed the rest of the morning until he heard the steps of the mailman. On most days throughout the year he received up to twenty-five cards and letters. Most of them dealt with GAR matters or inquiries from Duluth school kids wanting help with history projects. Many letters came from curious strangers. At birthday time, thousands of pieces of mail were delivered to his door. When he turned 106, an avalanche of eight thousand cards and letters arrived. He stayed up then to near midnight, just trying to keep ahead of the correspondence.

“Dear Rob and all,” he wrote in September 1950 to his son and his family in Dayton, Washington, “just a line to inform you I am still alive and kicking. We all and the Johnsons packed up our lunch [and] went up the north shore some 45 miles from here to what is called Gooseberry Falls, a most beautiful park of some 35 acres right near the Big Lake. We had a jolly good time.” He told his son that “my hearing is improving and usual good health much better.” He said there was “quite a sum of cash in the GAR treasury,” and “I hope I get some of it.”

In February 1951 he again wrote to Rob: “This has been a very hard cold winter. It’s still with us.” He described being feted as the honorary guest at an American Legion banquet, with nine hundred members and their wives in a Duluth ballroom. “I have received a very large number of greetings from all parts of this country. $5 from an old man in Kentucky. Another old chap in Indiana, he sent $2.”

Cora Gillis, secretary at the national GAR headquarters in Washington, wrote to Woolson a month later. She told him that Union veteran Hiram Gale of Washington State had just died. “This cuts us down to 7 members now,” she noted, “and our colored comrade [Joseph] Clovese of Michigan is now in the veterans hospital in serious condition so [I] am looking for a message about him most any time. They had a big public celebration on his 107th birthday and I guess it was too much for him. I wonder if people will ever realize that men past 100 cannot stand these things any more. I read in the National Tribune about your birthday and am glad that you spent it with your family and not a big public affair. We want to keep you with us as long as possible, and these public appearances take so much out of men of your age.”

Gillis bragged a bit about Route 6 in Nevada being renamed the Grand Army of the Republic Highway. And she complained that some state GAR organizations had not closed their staffs and sent their files to Washington once their last member had passed on: “I have just this morning been writing to the Kansas lady and told her if she didn’t complete her records and turn them over that I would have to come and do it myself. Her last man died three years ago, and there is no excuse for this delay in closing.” She added: “Hope you are keeping well and that soon you will be out of your terrible winter.… I think of you every time I hear of a new storm out there.”

Woolson wrote to his son about the weather, too: “This has been a long cold winter and very much snow. Drifts 7–8 feet high all over the city.” The American Legion had invited him to another banquet, he said, and “I have very many requests for my autographs on postage stamps recently. It has kept me quite busy. I am as well as usual. My hearing improving lately.”

He wrote to Rob again after his birthday in 1952, what he called “another milepost in life’s long journey.” He delighted in all the gifts—twelve boxes of cigars, six quarts of “fine liquor and wine,” and $100 in cash. “I was about tired out,” he said. He always signed his letters “Father.”

A. B. Kapplin, an admirer in Washington, D.C., wrote to Woolson: “Time moves on, as another year rolls by and another birthday. This must be a great day in the Woolson household.” He closed with a wish. “May the good Lord spare you for many more years to come and that I may have my often-mentioned dream come true, that Albert Woolson of Duluth would someday be the last living veteran of the Civil War in America.”

Woolson wrote to Rob that Union veteran James A. Hard in upstate New York had just turned 111, making him the oldest of the Yankees. As for himself, he boasted about a recent country outing in a “Nash car that makes the trip 52 miles in one hour.” But he added, rather ominously, “If I live until Feb. 11 next, [I’ll] be 106, which I think doubtful.”

But the old drummer boy did make it, and on that February 11 came a letter from President Eisenhower, congratulating him at 106 and wishing him “many birthday anniversaries in the years that lie ahead.”

By 1954 Woolson’s letters to Rob were short, his handwriting scrawled, his thoughts often scattered. “Still alive,” he scratched in one message.

Cora Gillis continued to write from Washington, warning Woolson of internal squabbles among competing Sons and Daughters organizations that honored Union veterans: “The Sons have the idea that because they are the men in the family that they should run everything, and we don’t agree with them.” She also spoke of a third generation: “Still getting many requests for records from folks who had grandfathers in the Civil War. It seems strange to me how little so many know about their grandfathers. Mine died when I was but five years old, but I still know about his service record.” She closed with: “Hope you will be careful and not get a bad cold this year. We want you to stay with us for several years yet.”

Too often over these years the mail brought sad news to the little house in Duluth. Theodore Augustus Penland died in September 1950. At 101, “Daddy” Penland had been the GAR’s national commander in chief. He had attended more than eighty encampments; he missed only two. He enlisted late in the war, and years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had tried to re-up for a spot in World War II at the age of ninety-two. When Woolson learned of Penland’s death, he dashed off a note to son Rob. He always thought Penland had joined too late and missed the fighting. “Mr. Penland was a kind old man, but it has been proved that he entered in with an Indiana regt. in 1865. That was when I was mustered out of U.S. Service. He never was an enlisted man in U.S. Service and never claimed the war.”

Four days later, Woolson read of the death of James M. Lurvey—the last soldier from either side to serve at Gettysburg. There the young drummer boy had silenced his snare and assisted with amputations. “I guess that was the day I became a man,” he would say. At his death at 104, Lurvey was living with other ill soldiers from other wars at the Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts. “Physically I’m a wreck,” he complained. “I’m older now than I ever wished to be.” To feel young, he poured a stick of brandy into his morning coffee, stirred it about, and pronounced it his “Oh Be Joyful!” But the toddy could not beat back the pneumonia.

Woolson’s mail in September 1951 brought news of Lansing A. Wilcox, the last veteran from Wisconsin. Born to a New York shoemaker, he had served as a corporal and scout and later farmed and taught school in Wisconsin. At 105, after four wives and several broken ribs from a fall, he was near deaf and confined to a wheelchair. He could no longer remember his age. “I feel very weak, and soon my Master will call me home,” he wrote to his fellow GAR members. He dreamed of “beautiful eternal camping grounds” and of someday meeting “my comrades who are waiting for me and the great Grand Army.” On the night he died, he left a half glass of milk on his bedstand.

Then in March 1953 came the news that made Woolson famous. In Rochester, New York, James A. Hard had died, and that left Albert Woolson the sole survivor of the Union army. In front of his home, reporters already were gathering.

Hard was 111 when he was taken to Rochester’s General Hospital. For eleven days he had hung on. Doctors amputated his right leg above the knee and operated on a bungled spinal nerve. Then he slipped into unconsciousness and died fifteen minutes before midnight.

Hard had been working at a saw mill in Jordan, New York, when he enlisted in April 1861, signing on with the 32nd New York Volunteers. They took the train to Washington, he said, and he met Lincoln: “He gave me a handshake that nearly crushed my hand.” Bull Run was his first test of fire. His “toughest” moment was along the York River, when a bullet whistled through his coat. He saw action at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Antietam, and mustered out a month before Gettysburg. He then worked as a civilian construction boss for the Army and on the railroad, and served two terms as commander of New York State’s GAR. Each Memorial Day he rode in Rochester’s holiday parade. His hearing was gone and he was all but blind, but he smiled at attention.

Rochester’s citizens marked Hard’s passing in a big way. His body lay in state at the Masonic Temple Auditorium. The bell atop the city hall pealed, and his cortege followed the same downtown route of the Memorial Day parades he had ridden so often. They halted at Mount Hope Cemetery, where mourners heard the formal burial service of the Grand Army of the Republic read aloud.

Woolson did not attend. He was too feeble and distraught, and he knew the burial ritual by heart and could recite it by himself. He had been to his share of both funerals and commemorations. Once city officials had held a ceremony downtown and honored Woolson with the Duluth Hall of Fame Award. They had hung his portrait in City Hall, the money for the painting raised by schoolchildren who saved their pennies—27,652 of them. For Memorial Day 1953 he slipped into his serge suit with brass buttons and shined his GAR cap for a city parade. He laid a wreath at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in front of the courthouse, and thirty minutes later he was waving from a convertible as the parade’s honorary grand marshal. Then it was off to a ceremony at the Duluth Armory, where the Lions Cub presented him with a plaque. Officials from the local posts of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars also awarded him special citations.

Now, with James Hard dead, Woolson, the last of the Yankees, could hear the newspapermen outside knocking on his door. He was too troubled to tell them much. But he did acknowledge the “struggle” that Hard had endured, and he said that since he now was the last of the men in blue, he was “ready and willing” to close out the ranks when his time came. “I am proud to be the rearguard of such a gallant group of men,” he said.

He settled back into his parlor room chair, lit another cigar, and started writing another letter. This one would be a note of sympathy to Hard’s family in Rochester. When he was done, he opened the front door again and told the reporters one thing more. “Moderation in all things,” he advised. “And I’ve got plenty of vim left.”

He did. Two months later, in May 1953, the national commander of the American Legion, Lewis K. Gough, tried to hook Woolson up by telephone for a conference call with his counterparts in the South. But things did not go smoothly. Thomas Evans Riddle, 107, was too ill in the Confederate Veterans Home in Austin, Texas, to come to the phone, and he died soon thereafter. William Allen Lundy was impossible to reach in remote Laurel Hill, Florida. In rural Franklin, Texas, Walter Williams still lived in his old cabin, and they could not get a line to him.

So Woolson and a single Confederate survivor, John Salling, a moonshiner from the Virginia Appalachians, agreed to a brief telephone chat. A brief shouting match, really. The line crackled, and both men were hard of hearing, Woolson nearly deaf. Both had to speak up and loudly. Salling had lived his life deep in the hills, and he told Gough that this would be the first time he had ever talked on a phone. He was not quite sure what to say. “But I’ll do it,” he promised with a laugh, “as long as I can say, ‘Hi, you damn Yankee!’ ”

When the line opened, Woolson waited for some of the static to clear and then he went first. “All you members of the Confederacy,” he said, thinking that Riddle, Lundy, and Williams were also on the line, “let us shake hands in peace; let all differences be forgotten by the boys in blue and the boys in gray. God bless you.”

Salling was humbled, and he forgot his damn Yankee joke. “God bless you,” he told Woolson. “I am mighty proud to be able to speak with you. I hope you can hear.”

Gough suggested a joint meeting of the last survivors; hopefully all could attend, Woolson and the four Confederates. Maybe one more time at Gettysburg, he mused, or on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. It would be a grand preview for the 1961 centennial year that was approaching.

Salling liked the idea. “I hope we both live long enough to have that meeting,” he told Woolson. The Yankee did not respond. Either he did not hear, or the line went dead. Or perhaps he simply put the phone down. There would be no last triumphant reunion of the blue and the gray. But out of that conference call, in part, was born new interest in the Civil War and a Centennial Commission to commemorate a nation broken and a nation healed.