LAST IN GRAY

Remarkably, Walter Williams recovered from the colds and pneumonia of July and August 1959. Three weeks after all the furor, Willie Mae Bowles raised the volume extra high on his radio in the back bedroom, hoping that her father might be able to hear a bit of the old-time hillbilly tunes.

The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, in a feature story headlined “We’re Catching up with Methuselah,” devoted a couple of pages to the Texas Rebel and the phenomenon of old age. “Medicine now is helping the longevity climb of bedridden Walter Williams of Houston, Texas, last Civil War survivor,” it noted. “Perhaps he could live even longer than he will if he had had the benefits of medical knowledge all his life. Again, perhaps not.”

By his account, Williams was about to turn 117. His family was planning another party, and he signaled that he wanted spareribs. But he looked far too weak for hearty fare, given the pneumonia that now had settled in his chest again. Dr. Wolfe said that Williams would probably be too frail to join in the festivities but that “he wants lots of people to come see him.”

On his birthday, Saturday, November 14, Willie Mae woke him at five in the morning. “When are all the people coming, and where’s the music?” he rasped. He wanted scrambled eggs and coffee. To calm him down, she cranked up the radio some more and fed him a drop of coffee on a spoon. She waited a half hour, ground up some eggs, and fed him those through a bottle. Thirty minutes later she gave him another spoonful of coffee. Then he was quiet. “Otherwise,” she reported, “he didn’t have anything to say about his birthday.”

Death approaching, soon to usher out the last of the Civil War era, Walter Williams lies near comatose in the back room of his daughter’s Houston home in December 1958. Dr. Heyl G. Tebo, commander of the Houston chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, presents him with a citation proclaiming him an honorary lifetime member of the organization. (Courtesy of the Houston Chronicle)

It rained most of the day. The mailman arrived with several bundles of letters and birthday cards. The president sent birthday greetings, and so did First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, who shared the same birthday as Williams (though she was fifty-four years younger). The Fourth Army headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, quietly preparing for his eventual military funeral, wired their congratulations.

The next day Willie Mae woke him again before daylight. This time she fed him a few sips of juice and a taste of spareribs. Soon his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren began dropping by. “Lots of people are coming,” she tried to tell her father, billing it the largest Williams family reunion ever assembled. In all, some three hundred people were on hand, including the twenty-member local Garden Oaks American Legion Band and a group of high school ROTC cadets.

But Williams did not seem to notice much, neither the crowds nor the noise nor the five-tier cake topped with two Confederate flags and his photograph, arrayed in gray, in his Confederate general’s uniform. Red, white, and blue candles were embedded in the white icing.

The rain had blown off, so the band performed on the lawn, under the scent of the still dripping cottonwoods, sycamore, and oaks. They played “Dixie,” of course, and some other Southern standards. “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” proved a particular favorite. A group of Houston florists sent 117 red roses. Inside the bedroom, Williams napped most of the afternoon. Once when he was awake, his son B. W. Williams of Houston talked about their old deer-hunting trips. That seemed to perk the old man up. “I’m tired of staying here,” he growled in a low whisper. “And I don’t feel bad.” B. W. looked around at those crowded into the room, scrunched in next to the bed, and at the oxygen tent folded up in the corner. He said his father had still hunted at 101. “He rode a horse until he was 103,” he remembered.

Dr. Wolfe was on hand too. He declared it remarkable that Williams kept beating his pneumonia and other illnesses. Birthday parties and other celebrations seemed to give his patient new vigor. “I suppose that the next thing we’ll have to work on is Christmas,” the doctor quipped.

When the day grew late and the party had thinned out, Ira P. Cox, manager of the American Legion Band, recalled how Williams always had said he would still be around at his 117th birthday, and he was right. Now Cox hoped that Williams would live long enough to see 118. “I want you to promise to be a good boy and be here for next year’s celebration so I can bring my band back,” he told Williams.

The old man did not answer.

He only worsened. By December 10 he was in critical condition, fighting another assault of pneumonia. Dr. Wolfe visited the next day and ordered the oxygen tent lowered over the bed. “It may be only forty-eight hours,” he predicted. “He has no reserve. Respiration is shallow, pulse irregular. He is very weak. He tries to speak but is incoherent.”

On Saturday, December 12, Williams was wheezing and gasping under the tent. The doctor feared his patient was dying. Willie Mae thought her father might have slipped into a coma. “But it’s hard to tell,” she said. “He’s so weak.” The visiting nurse started an intravenous line with a mixture of sugar and water; he had not taken the bottle or the eye dropper or a tablespoon of liquid since the day before.

On Monday he rallied. Dr. Wolfe noticed a slight improvement but for good measure kept Williams under the oxygen tent.

Still the old man hung on. On Wednesday night he slept little, and on Thursday he barely made a sound. On Friday his temperature hit 105. “He’s lost quite a bit of strength and is much weaker,” worried Willie Mae. “I don’t see how he can rally this time,” admitted Dr. Wolfe on Friday. “It’s only a matter of hours. I thought he was gone this morning.”

The next day he was. Walter Williams died on the afternoon of Saturday, December 19, 1959.

His son-in-law, Ed Bielamowicz, and a grandson, Sydney Boyd, were cradling him in their arms when he passed away. “He just quit breathing,” Bielamowicz said. “He had done that before, and we just lifted him up and he’d catch his breath and start breathing again. But this time he didn’t start breathing again. There was no struggle, no sound, nothing. He just went to sleep.”

Dr. Wolfe had visited Williams only a half hour earlier. He said pneumonia was not what finally killed Williams; it had cleared his lungs two weeks previously. Death was caused by a blood clot in a large vessel leading to the brain. “He just died from the natural complications from old age,” the doctor said.

Before he was taken to the Jack Carswell Funeral Home in Houston, Willie Mae asked for one last private moment with her father in the back bedroom. “I’m going to miss you so much,” she cried, her face tumbling into grief. “I never did get tired of taking care of you.”

Undertaker Jack Carswell had been hoping he would be chosen to conduct the funeral. He was strongly conservative and, more significantly, a local Civil War buff. So here at the cusp of the Civil War Centennial, with the last presumed soldier from that war now fallen, was Carswell’s moment.

“He knew Walter Williams’ family, and he courted them for the funeral,” recalled one of his employees at that time, Stephen Jones, later to practice law in Enid, Oklahoma. “He and his wife would stop by often to see them. He told me when I worked for him that he anticipated he would handle the funeral for Mr. Williams. Certainly he wanted to.… It was a big funeral, and the newspapers ran the pictures of the pallbearers carrying the casket out of the church. At the front of the casket was Mr. Carswell.”

Tributes poured in. The White House communications center sent an urgent, “operational immediate” message to presidential aide General Goodpaster: “Word just received of death of Walter Williams, last surviving Civil War veteran … Press queries being received here regarding proclamation.”

Arrangements were finalized to fly a presidential wreath on a commercial airliner to Texas. White House military aide Col. Robert L. Schulz asked Lt. Gen. Guy S. Meloy Jr., the commander at Fort Sam Houston, to place the wreath “at an appropriate time during the rites.” He also instructed Meloy against “making any special efforts to promote or avoid publicity.”

Then the president issued a statement. Despite the serious questions raised about Williams’s authenticity, Eisenhower chose to ignore the public doubts. In saluting Williams, however, someone in the White House (possibly the president, as the handwriting is similar to his) crossed out the title “General” Williams in the proclamation and inserted “Mr.”

“With millions of Americans throughout our land, I pause in respectful silence to honor the passing of the last surviving veteran of the War Between the States, Walter W. Williams,” Eisenhower’s statement read. “The wounds of the deep and bitter dispute which once divided our nation have long since healed, and a united America in a divided world now holds up on a larger canvas the cherished traditions of liberty and justice for all. With Mr. Williams’ passing, the hosts of Blue and Gray who were the chief actors in that great and tragic drama a century ago have all passed from the world stage. No longer are they the Blue and the Gray. All rest together as Americans in honored glory. An era has ended.”

The president set aside a national day for mourning and ordered the U.S. flag lowered to half-staff “until the body of Walter W. Williams is laid to rest.” Such a national tribute was owed Williams, said Eisenhower, because he “served in the Army of the Confederacy for the last eleven months of the War Between the States as a forage master, Company C, 5th Regiment of Hood’s Brigade, on active duty in Mississippi and Texas.”

Nevertheless, most newspaper and magazine obituaries recalled at some length the controversy of three months earlier, citing the scandal that had touched the dying Williams and questioned his honesty. Time magazine’s coverage by far was harshest, deriding Williams as all but phony and ridiculing Texas officials for buying into the lies. They summed up the whole affair as “The Unquenchable Legend.”

“By the time old Walter Williams passed away at a self-reckoned 117 years,” Time’s article began, “just about every official in Texas knew that he had spun a tall tale about his days as forage master of Hood’s Texas Brigade in the War Between the States. But for a long time they had believed him and showered him with Confederate honors; then, when a too-enterprising reporter proved in the records that Williams could have been only five years old when Hood was marching, they decided to go right on believing just the same.” The magazine mocked both Williams and the president: “Recent investigations have indicated that Hero Williams was only five years old when war broke out, but his fame is secure. President Eisenhower, pursuant to a July act of Congress, declared a day of national mourning, and Fourth Army units will lead a parade to Franklin, Texas, where Williams will be buried with full military honors.”

Others praised the man who had outlived all other Civil War veterans. Robert D. Price, an Associated Press authority on Civil War history, penned a lengthy elegy. “Now the Civil War belongs to the ages: the last veteran is dead,” he wrote. Walter Williams “was the last living of four million men who wore blue or gray in 1861–65. He gave his age as 117 and thus had lived some 94 years since he doffed the uniform that was his badge of honor in history. Thus passes a brave and hardy breed.”

More tributes marked not just the death of Williams but the end of the greatest upheaval in American history; his death was viewed as a prelude to the upcoming centennial to commemorate a stronger, united country. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the Senate majority leader, said Williams’s death “seals the door on a great but tragic era.” Texas Gov. Price Daniel, borrowing a line from Confederate martyr Stonewall Jackson, said, “General Williams has passed over the river to rest in the shade of the trees with hundreds of thousands of soldiers in blue and gray who went before him.” Texas Congressman Albert Thomas declared that Williams would live forever in American history, hailing him as “one of the great historical characters of the nation and the Southern Confederacy.” Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough soared in his praise of the final Confederate: “He was the last warrior of a lost cause, the sole remaining soldier of a whole civilization.” Houston Mayor Lewis Wesley Cutrer issued a singular honor, declaring that December 19 would be observed as “Walter Williams Civil War Memorial Day.”

Best-selling Civil War author Bruce Catton, writing in Life magazine, sought to sum up the last of the men in gray, whoever they truly were. “An aged man named Walter Williams died in Houston, insisting in the end that he was the last Confederate soldier. Although his claim has been challenged, one thing is certain: with his death the rebel army has gone forever.” Catton’s epitaph was written more for the Confederacy than Walter Williams: “There is some question about whether or not he actually served in the Confederate army, but this does not really matter, for, whether it was he or somebody who died earlier, the last veteran has been laid away. What matters now is that the army itself is gone.”

Williams’s body lay in state for two days, dressed in the gray and gold of a Confederate army general. His specially designed coffin was tinted gray. Five white velvet stars were sewn into the inside lining. A tailor-made Confederate flag draped the lid.

The bier was placed in the rotunda of the Civil Courts Building in Houston; five thousand people paid their respects, twenty-five of them slowly passing the casket every five minutes. Men doffed their hats, children hung onto their parents. An old man in a tattered coat knelt. A young boy asked his mother, “Why is he wearing that gray uniform?”

Willie Mae stood next to the coffin. George W. Hill, director of the Texas Civil War Centennial Commission, told her they hoped to erect a monument at his grave. She reached inside the coffin and patted her father’s head. She could not stop crying.

At a separate tribute in the Houston Music Hall, Governor Daniel and officials from ten other Southern states, along with various administrative and military dignitaries, sat quietly to the strains of the old fife and drums. The songs included old favorites such as “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and the “Yellow Rose of Texas.” But “Dixie” stole the evening.

In the late morning of Wednesday, December 23, Williams’s body was carried to the South Main Baptist Church downtown. Five hundred mourners attended the hour-long service. At the pulpit, a retired minister, the Reverend S. Stephen McKenney, preached the eulogy. “He has achieved an honor to which each of the millions of veterans of our War Between the States earnestly aspired but never achieved, and never can,” McKenney said. He alone in the providence of God has survived in the vast multitude that has gone down to the silent chambers of death before him.” The reverend added one final salute to the departed warrior: “It is safe to say that no name among our nation’s citizens has come to be better known than that of our distinguished friend whom we honor today. Tens of thousands of our school children have learned to call him reverently by name.”

A soloist sang “No Night There.” The choir offered “My God and I.” Out on the church lawn, dozens of Civil War reenactors from the Confederate 2nd Kentucky Cavalry could hear the organ bass and the lifted chorus. They stacked their rifles and bowed their heads.

Pallbearers, all gray-clad members of the Albert Sidney Johnston Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, carried him out of the church. A thirty-car motorcade started off shortly after the noon hour, and a crowd estimated at 25,000 pushed the edges of Main Street, straining under the city’s hanging Christmas decorations to catch sight of the hearse, the limousines, and an eight-man military honor guard.

The procession turned north out of Houston, and four hours later, late in the afternoon, it reached the outskirts of Franklin. By then it trailed a mile long, with hundreds of Fourth Army troops, police cars, and motorcycles shepherding the old man toward the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church and the parish cemetery. They stopped atop a small hillside, where Williams was to be buried near the grave of a Civil War veteran who had died nearly forty years earlier.

Two bands, one comprising descendants of Yankee veterans, the other from the South, played softly. The Yankee fife and drum corps from Mount Vernon, Ohio, present as promised, performed “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Twenty-one rifle shots shattered aloft. “Taps” floated into the coming winter dusk.

The dirt already was turned, the grave awaited, but first they all paused. The family asked that the lid be lifted once more, and they each took one last look. Then the Confederate flag was folded, and the flowers gathered up. The last of the gray was gone. The last of the blue was gone. All the tired soldiers lay peacefully dreaming; all was quiet along the Potomac.