OF THE DEAD, SPEAK NO EVIL

Walter Williams went to his grave never knowing that he had come under fire as a Confederate imposter. But the Texas State Senate was enraged, and when the part-time body met for the first time a year after his death, it immediately set out to right the wrong done its “distinguished son of Dixie.”

In January 1961, just after the Civil War Centennial Commission had held its first commemoration at the tombs of Grant and Lee, the senators in Austin unanimously approved a special resolution titled “In Memory of Walter Washington Williams.” Then they signed the document and sent copies to all the governors of the former Confederate states.

They first declared the South’s secession from the Union a just and noble act: “With saddened and sorrowful hearts, and with deep humility, the sons and daughters of the South were compelled to defend their honor and to protect themselves and their homes against the further encroachment and imposition of unconstitutional measures and from the divestiture of their guaranteed rights.”

They then hailed Williams a hero: “It is a matter of significance, as well as coincidence, that the last soldier of that conflict should reside in the Lone Star State.” They insisted that “as a young man, Walter Williams donned the gray of the South,” that he had served as a forage master until the war’s end, and that he did indeed live to be 117 and “remained so until he was called to rest on ‘Fame’s eternal camping ground,’ and be there consecrated to the ‘bivouacs of the dead.’ ” And when he died, “his casket covered with the Stars and Bars of Dixie, the honors accorded and the tributes bestowed on the mortal remains of General Williams exemplify the love and high esteem in which this warrior, of a century past, was held by an admiring and grieved nation.”

The senators attacked the critics and the press, singling out reporter Lowell K. Bridwell, for daring to question Williams as an authentic Confederate veteran: “Unable and helpless to defend himself, he became the victim of one of the foulest and most dastardly assaults which only an evil, diseased and venom-filled mind could conceive, less honorably than a rattlesnake—without warning—as the viperous diatribe—‘the foulest whelp of sin.’ ” They dismissed the press accounts as “venomous slander,” stemming directly “from North of the Mason-Dixon Line.” They said the press was guilty of “utterly ignoring historical facts” and adopting “the wolfish grin of Fagin.” No sin was worse than to “humiliate and embarrass, if not destroy, the record of gallantry and the reputation of an old soldier, soon thereafter to be committed to fadeless and deathless immortality.”

The resolution covered a full page of the official Senate journal, and the Senate saved its bitterest vile for Time for leveling its harsh attacks upon Williams’s credibility. The magazine was “a strumpet of scandal and a harlot of untruth.” It should be ashamed that it had “poured its cup of venom on the grieved hearts of those left to mourn his passing.”

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” warned the Senate. (Of the dead, speak no evil.)

The Civil War was 100 years old. The veterans from both sides had all been laid to rest, as were the imposters who sought to steal a piece of fame, a pension check, and their own corner of history. Some were soldiers, some were not. The flags of the Grand Army of the Republic were stored away in museums. The great Confederate picnics and sunlit parades down Canal Street in New Orleans, swords gleaming, drums beating, echoed no more.

The families of the veterans were dwindling too. At the time of Williams’s death in 1959, federal pension rolls show that only 3,600 Union widows and 792 children still lived to retell the old tales of battle. In the South, fewer than a thousand widows and only four children survived.

But Civil War veterans, North and South, were honored separately as the heroes they had become. In Washington, D.C., Missouri Rep. Champ Clark remembered visiting retired Union Gen. Daniel Sickles, and how Clark’s son would leap upon the old man’s lap, the lap missing a right leg since Gettysburg. “Frequently he would go over to the old soldier’s seat,” Clark recalled, “climb upon his lap and toy with his spectacles, crutches and watch-chain. He generally came back with his pockets bulging with candy, apples, oranges and other gimcracks.”

On Memorial Day 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., once an officer with the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment and who still carried the scars of war—he was wounded at Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and the Second Battle of Fredericksburg—spoke before a gathering in Keene, New Hampshire. By then he was an associate judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In two decades he would be elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. Holmes spoke of the “memories of love and grief and heroic youth,” and how today “we of the North and our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.” He said they all held just as strong a conviction, and that “every man with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.” Let the reunited America commemorate the war and honor the dead in statues, monuments, and courthouse squares.

“Such hearts—ah me, how many!—were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories,” Holmes told the Memorial Day crowd. “Every year—in the full tide of spring—at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life—there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.” It falls to the living, then, to remember the dead and teach those who were not there the lessons of “honor and grief.” The veterans, he said, were “us who stand almost alone, and have seen the noblest of our generation pass away.”

Yet when the next conflict came—the Spanish–American War of 1898—Northerners fretted over transporting U.S. troops through the cities of the South to bases in Tampa for shipment to Cuba. In fact they bypassed Richmond, Virginia, altogether. Emotions and confusion were flying in every direction. Maj. Gen. “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, a decorated former Confederate officer now helping lead the U.S. forces in Cuba, was overcome with emotion when the Spaniards turned in retreat on the Caribbean island. Lost in the moment, suddenly transported back to an earlier war, he shouted, “We’ve got the Yankees on the run!”

A dozen years later, in August 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt, a veteran of that Cuban campaign, was surrounded by an audience of thirty thousand for an address in tiny Osawatomie, Kansas. The event was to dedicate a new John Brown Memorial Park, at the site of some of the Bleeding Kansas border warfare that had foreshadowed the four years of national slaughter to come. The air was hot and steamy, yet the audience poured in on foot, bicycles, autos, buggies, and wagons. Women opened their parasols to deflect the harsh sun. Roosevelt, in shirt, tie, coat, and vest, waved from the back of a train as it huffed into the Missouri Pacific depot. By the time he moved to the center of a grove and climbed atop a large kitchen table to be seen and heard, the skies opened and torrents of rain fell.

Roosevelt was out of office but soon to campaign again for the White House. His theme that day was a “New Nationalism.” And he repeatedly spotted old men in the waves of the hot, drenched crowd who fifty years earlier had gone to war as soldiers, most of them from the Yankee North. “You men of the Grand Army,” he said, “you men who fought through the Civil War, not only did you justify your generation, not only did you render life worth living for our generation, but you justified the wisdom of Washington.”

Roosevelt had been a boy leaning from a window of his family’s New York brownstone when in 1865 the funeral cortege carrying Lincoln’s body passed by on its return to Springfield, Illinois. “It was you who crowned Washington’s work,” he told the veterans, “as you carried to achievement the high purpose of Abraham Lincoln.” He said it was all those from the Civil War who had made the nation not just whole again, but stronger. “We can admire the heroic valor, the sincerity, the self-devotion shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray.”

Five years later, Army officials announced that the last Union soldier from 1861 would be retiring. Maj. Gen. John Lincoln Clem, a drummer boy at Chickamauga and Shiloh, whose drum was smashed by Confederate artillery, retired fifty years after the end of the war. As a young orphan, he had snuck off from Newark, Ohio, to join the Union army. After the war he was promoted from first lieutenant to captain, major, and colonel. Upon his departure from military service, a special act of Congress elevated him one last time to major general. He also had married the daughter of a Confederate veteran. That alone, he often said, made him the most “united American” in the United States.

The old fire, anger, and sectional hatreds slowly burned off. Not long after the end of the war, a Union veteran who had lost a leg spoke at a United Confederate Veterans reunion in Richmond; he was roundly applauded. In Washington, the North’s Grand Army of the Republic escorted a parade of United Confederate Veterans down Pennsylvania Avenue.

But mostly these relics of a long-ago war spent their afternoons on park benches or under the shade of town squares. They often were sad, lonely figures. Nothing in their long lives could surpass what they had accomplished in their youth. As the world changed so dramatically—a world becoming louder, faster, and uproariously egocentric—they replayed in their thoughts perhaps a night standing guard in a lone wood or the rush of fear with bayonets fixed, none of it ever undertaken for individual glory.

Henry Adams recalled how he and his friend John Hay often looked out of their windows above Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., “to notice an old corps commander or admiral of the Civil War, tottering along to the club for his cards or his cocktails. There is old Dash who broke the Rebel lines at Blankburg. Think of his having been a thunderbolt of war!” Now these brittle, stooped, and uncertain characters were carefully maneuvering through the park. Yet, “there they went! Men who had swayed the course of empire.”

They could also be seen in small towns such as Bedford, Virginia, where, years earlier, William Henry Lafayette Wells had gone off to join the Old Dominion Rifles and a light artillery battery at Bull Run and Gettysburg, and saw some fifteen skirmishes. He attended the great Gettysburg reunion in 1938 as a skinny invalid in a wheelchair, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, his chest in appropriate gray and slathered in Confederate medals. That was the final highlight of his long life. If the Civil War had a second act, it was that reunion. It plucked him off the park bench and carried him back not under the flare of cannon but into the limelight of history. He died a year later, two years short of 100.

The splendid reunions at Manassas and Gettysburg were difficult to stage, and as the national centennial approached, many in the South still worried that the North would use the anniversary to laud their victory over them and stress the divide between the two regions. States in the South chose to celebrate the creation of the Confederacy rather than to remember a bloody struggle that had ended in their defeat. In many ways, both sides initially ignored the efforts of the Centennial Commission to bridge their differences and bury the old hates.

In early January 1961, just as the Texas Senate was signing its resolution condemning Walter Williams’s detractors, Montgomery, Alabama, began preparing for a parade, a ball, and a reenactment of Jefferson Davis’s taking the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America in 1861. The city established its own Centennial Commission and urged women to sew hoopskirts and merchants to encourage employees to dress in antebellum costumes. Werth Roberts, chairman of the Confederate Colonel Council chapter, promised that every man who grew a beard would be addressed as “honorary colonel.” Young women competed in a “Belle of the Confederacy” sweepstakes. The top prize was a new car; other awards included a mink stole, new luggage, and transistor radios.

W. J. Mahoney Jr., the “As I See It” columnist in the Montgomery Advertiser-Journal, wrote that, while the Civil War Centennial Commission in Washington hoped for a new national unity, most of the celebrations “for geographic and historic reasons were centered almost entirely in the South” because most of the war was fought in the South. With this focus on Dixie, he feared that the South would once again be branded as traitorous and portrayed as the “nation’s whipping boy.” “So what are we about to celebrate?” he asked. “The centennial of the Confederacy’s birth or the start of a war we lost and are still paying for?”

Grover C. Hall, the newspaper’s editor, contributed a front-page column saluting his fellow sons of the South, stressing a new era for Alabama. “Southerners are reconciled to the result of the war, and they are too busy marching to prosperity in their gracious land to brood over the crime of Reconstruction,” he wrote. “The South had the highest standard of living in the country before the war and has it in mind to regain that status.”

Many, however, could not let go of the old bitterness. In a pubic letter to the editor in February, William Martin of Pike Road, Alabama, complained that Southerners confronted the same harsh conditions their great-grandfathers faced a hundred years ago. “Federal dictatorship is literally being stuffed down our throats,” he wrote. “Integration is now a major issue, not just a rumor. The battle is not solely one of segregation versus integration, anymore than the Civil War was one of slavery versus freedom of slaves.”

Meanwhile, Montgomery mounted its show glorifying the Confederacy. An attorney, T. B. Hill Jr., was chosen to portray President Davis. He was escorted from the railroad station by horse and carriage through a rainstorm, passing seven thousand waving, shouting, drenched spectators. He climbed up Dexter Avenue and the statehouse steps, recited the oath, and read part of Davis’s 1861 inaugural address.

Bobbie Gorman, a twenty-two-year-old housewife and secretary in the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board office, garnered enough votes to be crowned “Belle of the Confederacy” and given the new car. “I’m so happy I don’t know what to do,” she said. At a “Man of the Hour” celebration that ran for five nights in the State Coliseum, she was escorted by Hill playing Davis to the sounds of more cheers.

In another procession, Hill led hundreds of people from the Exchange Hotel through the streets of downtown, carrying torches provided by the fire department. He repeatedly doffed his stovepipe hat to the well-wishers. Women twirled their umbrellas in response. Smoke from artillery cannon powdered the air. In all, fifty thousand people took part in the festivities; the Centennial Ball alone drew five thousand. Said Paul B. Fuller, general manager of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, “I have never seen the people of Montgomery join in anything so wholeheartedly.”

Jackson, Mississippi, went next. A lead editorial in the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, next to a drawing of a smiling Confederate soldier marching with the Dixie flag, warned that the South had been “healing” just fine until the North became jealous that the region was strong and prosperous again. “Once again,” the paper opined, “South-hating image makers started to work. It has become just about a full-time job of loyal Southerners to hold the ugly-picture takers in check.”

In a spirit of goodwill, however, the people of Jackson invited Northern representatives to Mississippi to help honor all the men who fell at Vicksburg, now a national military park. The editors of the Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, readily accepted, hoping it would ease tensions from the “Brothers’ War” that continued to fester. “It is always fitting, of course, to pay tribute to brave men who gave their lives for a cause,” the New Hampshire paper noted. “The men of the North and the South who died at Vicksburg cannot be held responsible for the actions of those who precipitated this bloody and unnecessary war.”

Jackson had its own cast of reenactors, and they focused on the secession. They mounted a gallant parade on Capitol Street before thousands of people flashing carnival-like smiles, munching on peanuts and candied apples. The largest Confederate flag ever woven was carried for two hours by Central High School students down the center of the parade route, winding past a giant reviewing stand at the Governor’s Mansion. Three thousand men flashed by in Confederate uniforms. Belles from Delta State College at Cleveland, Mississippi, waltzed along in yellow-checked gingham dresses and matching parasols.

Another march, though smaller, was under way that day too. Some fifty African American students decided to protest the arrest of nine black youths for staging Mississippi’s first civil rights sit-in. Marching to the city jail, the protesters were met with tear gas canisters, police dogs, and scores of deputy sheriffs who chased them off Pearl Street.

The issue of segregation nearly ruined the next Confederate celebration, this one in April in Charleston, South Carolina. The plan called for a reenactment of the firing on Fort Sumter to commemorate the opening volley of the Civil War, and officials from the national Civil War Centennial Commission and state centennial groups were invited to attend.

Madaline A. Williams was a member of the state commission in New Jersey; more significantly, she was the first African American woman elected to the New Jersey state legislature. Her husband served on the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After her invitation to Charleston, she unexpectedly received word that she could not stay at the Francis Marion Hotel, the elegant, waterfront location where most of the meetings, meals, and festivities were to be held.

The manager of the hotel, J. William Cole, said he had never received a specific reservation request for accommodations for a black woman. But, he argued, the hotel would have to deny anyone of color because that was the law in South Carolina. If Williams had asked for a room, Cole said, she would have been told there were no more vacancies. She could attend luncheons and a banquet at the hotel, and the business meetings too. She just could not spend the night.

So Williams and New Jersey balked at attending; so did Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Missouri, and California. Then President Kennedy intervened, announcing at a Washington press conference that the official events would be moved to the U.S. naval base near Charleston harbor. “The Centennial is an official body of the United States government,” Kennedy said. “Federal funds are contributed to sustaining it. There have been appointments made by the federal government to the commission, and it is my strong belief that any program of this kind in which the United States is engaged should provide facilities and meeting places which do not discriminate on the grounds of race or color.”

His words inflamed South Carolina officials. “Neither the president nor the governor can dictate to a hotel who it may or may not receive as guests,” said Gov. Ernest Hollings. Sen. Strom Thurmond called Kennedy’s decision “high-handed interference.” The president, he complained, had no authority “to enforce a policy of racial integration in connection with” the Fort Sumter commemoration.

Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant III attended the Charleston observances at the naval base, telling local critics that he could not disobey the White House and stay at the Francis Marion. “I’m sure you realize we cannot just pay no attention to the president,” he said.

At a dinner during the commemoration, Ashley Halsey, a Charleston native and associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post, blasted the New Jersey delegation for making a public fuss over the hotel incident and marring the festivities. He said those from the New Jersey delegation were two-faced, and that New Jersey had its own hotels “where members of one race find it impossible to register.… Racial prejudice and discrimination in New Jersey are such that it takes amazing effrontery for its politicians to rebuke any other state or community upon any circumstance or pretext.”

Delegates from the North and South held separate meetings and commemorations, not coming together until the final day for the Fort Sumter reenactment. In a show of defiance, the Southern states assembled for meetings at the Francis Marion. They covered the ballroom dais with Confederate flags. Thurmond told the all-white delegates that integration was a communist plot to weaken America. “It is the surest method for the destruction of free governments,” he warned.

The most outspoken firebrand that day was state Sen. John D. Long, who sponsored resolutions to fly the Stars and Bars over the statehouse in Columbia. “Out of the dust and ashes of war,” he thundered, “with its attendant destruction and woe, came Reconstruction more insidious than war and equally evil in consequences, until the prostrate South staggered to her knees assisted by the original Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts, who redeemed the South and restored her to her own.”

When the commemoration week ended and the two sides separately headed home, Joseph Dempsey, vice chairman of the New Jersey Centennial Commission, accused the national commission of “pathetic mismanagement.” He pressed for the removal of Grant and his top assistant, Karl Betts. “There is ample evidence that these two people should not participate in this centennial,” Dempsey said. “They are guilty of gross incompetence.”

Both men eventually resigned, though Grant said he left for personal reasons; his wife was ill. The underlying truth was that the national Civil War Centennial Commission and its planned commemorations had come square up against the civil rights movement and the Freedom Riders in the South. Among the critics was Lawrence D. Reddick, an African American author and educator who spoke before two thousand at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. He said the centennial celebrations were polarizing the opposing sides of the civil rights debate. The centennial was promoting a rash of Confederate flags and other symbols that blanketed the South and were viewed by the North as racially insensitive. They should be “gathered and burned,” Reddick said. The truth should be told, and not “the Confederate myth for the unhistorical romance much of it is.”

The national commission also confronted criticism that summer for its commercialization of a reenactment of the First Battle of Bull Run. All these disputes led Grant and Betts to an early departure, and President Kennedy appointed two historians in their place. Allan Nevins took the top spot and immediately called for an end to any more reenactments. “Above all,” he stressed, “our central theme will be unity, not division. We shall allow the just pride of no national group to be belittled or besmirched.” He said future commemorations would be “instructive and constructive,” honoring “the heroism of the 600,000 men who gave their lives.”

Under Nevins’s leadership the commission held two national programs in Washington, the first to observe the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation at the Lincoln Memorial. United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson spoke, saying “once more we feel as men did in Lincoln’s day, that the future of mankind itself depends upon the outcome of the struggle in which we are engaged.” Nevins addressed the other major Washington event, highlighting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He was joined by a panel of American writers and philosophers.

Around the country, the states acknowledged the Civil War’s anniversary in their separate ways. Connecticut printed copies of all of Lincoln’s speeches and distributed them to schools and libraries. On Capital Square in Richmond, Virginians held a centennial reenactment of their beloved Robert E. Lee’s resignation from the Union army to head the forces that would defend his homeland. New Jersey sent aloft a human-driven balloon, similar to those used by observation scouts in the war. Arkansas opened a new park at the Pea Ridge battlefield. Ohio saved 400 bullet-shredded flags. Missouri served up a Civil War regiment meal that included mess items such as “hardtack and cornpone, buggy rut water and roof drippings.” Two desserts were offered: “Soggy pie or souffléd wild onions.”

In Albert Woolson’s Minnesota, state officials commemorated the Sioux uprising that had erupted in the midst of the Civil War. As a young man Woolson had witnessed the execution of some of those Indian warriors. In Walter Williams’s Texas, they built a $2.5 million archives to microfilm and store all of the state’s Civil War service records. Among the documents saved was Williams’s Civil War pension file, which to this day casts doubt on whether he ever actually served.

And then in Gettysburg, in July 1963, 100 years after the turning point in the Civil War, 50,000 turned out to watch a symbolic reenactment of Pickett’s Charge. Four months later, many returned to Gettysburg to commemorate Lincoln’s address. Former President Eisenhower, in retirement on his farm near the battlefield, offered brief remarks. President Kennedy sent a specially recorded message. “Let us rededicate ourselves to the perpetuation of those ideals of which Lincoln spoke so luminously,” he said. “As Americans, we can do no less.”

His vice president did him one better. On Memorial Day that year, Lyndon Johnson spoke at the battlefield, delivering a very short speech, barely two typed pages, much like Lincoln’s in its brevity. His audience included a number of World War I veterans, looking much like the Civil War veterans they had replaced. He recalled the sacrifices of the Civil War, and he defended civil rights. “Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg,” Johnson said. “We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.”

The final assembly of the Civil War Centennial Commission convened in May 1965 in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s home and final resting place. Historians and dignitaries, 800 in all, attended from around the country for five days of readings and programs. Among them was Lincoln’s great-grandson and last living namesake, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith of Hartfield, Virginia. It was his first trip to Springfield.

Glenn H. Seymour, a history professor at Eastern Illinois University, spoke about how different Lincoln’s Illinois had been a century ago. “Very little of the land was still owned by the federal government,” he related. “The telegraph was in use, the railroad system had been built, but none of the state’s ten incorporated cities had paved streets or a sewage system, and livestock ran loose.”

Speaking from the vantage point of Dixie, Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas offered an image of “Abraham Lincoln as a Southerner,” noting that he had been born in Kentucky, that he surrounded himself with Kentucky law partners, and that many of his wife’s brothers and brothers-in-law fought for the Confederacy. “For too long,” Yarborough said, “the South has shortchanged itself by not claiming Lincoln.”

Nevins delivered the keynote at a Saturday afternoon luncheon. He said the Civil War lived on because “more than has been told remains to be told.” Other speakers read Civil War speeches and Civil War fiction. Author Shelby Foote said the best of American literature falls “before” and “after” the Civil War. He singled out Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Still others read poetry. All agreed that Walt Whitman, who had tended the wounded and dying, remained the poet laureate of the Civil War.

“We shall not be the last throng to stand here at this venerated place,” said Adlai E. Stevenson III, an Illinois state representative and son of the UN ambassador, as he delivered the last address of the final program at Lincoln’s tomb. “Countless men and women will, like Walt Whitman, mourn him ‘with every returning spring.’ ”

A month later in tiny Fitzgerald, Georgia, a town founded by an equal number of Confederate and Union veterans, residents held their own “Blue and Gray Days.” Seven local streets were named for Union generals; seven more for Confederate generals. Four more were named for Civil War battleships. Even the sidewalks were painted blue and gray. The town’s roots had been embedded a generation after the war, when Yankee veterans started moving there to show their gratitude to Georgians who had donated food and supplies to Northern cities hit by drought. Beverly M. Dubose Jr., chairman of the Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission, thought it appropriate that the final centennial commemoration should be held in Fitzgerald, honoring those who had fought on both sides. “Their story of peace,” he said of the veterans from both colors, “stands as a living symbol of unity to every American.”

Peace was hard won in the 1860s, and it would be long in coming in the struggles over civil rights in the 1960s. Reconciliation and sacrifice were the overriding themes in a speech by Nevins included in the Centennial Commission’s official final report. He described Henry A. Wise, the governor of Virginia, “kneeling in the moonlight as his boy’s coffin is opened, after the battle of Roanoke Island, kissing the cold brow and crying in anguish, ‘Oh my son, you have died for me!’ ” He spoke of Rebecca Harding Davis, “a poor, thin mountain girl waiting on a train platform in the Pennsylvania Alleghenies.” When the brakeman stopped briefly to unload a pine box, she threw her arms around the coffin “in utter desolation as the train steamed away.” Nevins then mentioned four African American girls recently killed by white racists in a Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing. “The fight still rages, and the line of fire still stretches across the entire American map, North and South,” he said. “A hundred years after Cold Harbor and the Wilderness, the trumpet yet summons all of us urgently.”

What was the centennial all about, after all the speeches and hoopla and fundraising endeavors, if not a tragic hunt for honor in the country’s darkest hour? Foote completed the second of his three-volume Civil War narrative halfway through the centennial period, in 1963, and posed that question. He noted that the writer Edmund White had suggested that, rather than hold a national celebration, “a day of mourning would be more appropriate.” Southern novelist Robert Penn Warren thought the whole thing was like “picking the scab of our fate.”

One hundred years earlier, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia had disassembled; the soldiers went home, and the veterans grew old. For years their ghosts haunted the ever-changing land, and they still do today—in statues in courthouse squares and in the mouths of rusting cannon in city parks, where spiders spin webs and boys poke their heads. Many of the ancient warriors met at fraternal encampments and marched down confetti-filled city streets; after long lifetimes they put away their swords and their differences and sought to embrace one another before the last of them passed on.

That, Nevins maintained in the commission’s final report, was what the centennial had hoped to demonstrate—that the struggle for peace can be just as challenging and difficult as the necessity for war. “Peace has its battles no less than war,” he wrote, “and its demands upon valor no less than the field of exploding shells.”

There was no word spoken about the imposters, of course—those who had acted for money or fame, or from the confusion of old age or senility. Not until another Civil War historian, William Marvel, a Virginian who had moved to New Hampshire, began studying the old pension records and census data some years later. He concluded that the last authentic Confederate had been Pleasant Crump, the Alabama veteran and preacher who spent his postwar years rocking on his porch, reading and rereading his Bible and watching a water oak grow tall. Marvel determined that Albert Woolson of Duluth was not only the last Yankee but the last of either side when he died in 1956. Marvel suggested that Gettysburg should modify the plaque on Woolson’s statue and honor him as the last of them all.

The records debunked most of the “great imposters,” Marvel wrote, although “the trail of deceit seems never to end.” While acknowledging that many continued to insist that Walter Williams of Texas was the last Civil War soldier, Marvel argued otherwise in a brief 1991 article for Blue and Gray magazine. “Williams was a fake,” he declared. “The only records lacking are those proving he participated in the Civil War. There are plenty to prove he did not.”

Then why the lies? Why the charades in a land where truth and honesty were presumably as cherished as God and country?

Some of the deceivers loved the pageantry, the adulation, and the gallant uniforms that sparkled at formal dinners and fraternal reunions. Some were desperate for money to pay the rent on the farm, to purchase new clothes, or, in one case, to buy a new cow. Some perpetuated their myths for so long that, in the twilight of their lives, they could not possibly own up to the lies and admit they had disgraced their family, their country, and themselves. Most of them lied because they could.

And few if any challenged them. While some snickered at the impossibility of someone this old and this heroic, and others shook their heads, most never questioned the old tales of the Civil War. Why would they? America has always loved a myth and adored a hero. Even today, many of the descendants of the dubious heroes insist that their stories were true. No one dares speak ill of the dead.

Mark Twain tried to figure it out. America’s premier humorist took a stab at explaining the phenomenon of clouded memory and outright deception. In his 1924 autobiography, published before the lean years of the Great Depression that prompted many of the imposters to step forward for Civil War pensions, Twain wrote, “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter.” Twain’s hero Huck Finn called them “stretchers.” “I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another,” Huck said.

Down in Texas, Willie Mae Bowles did not care what anyone said. She was not upset by the critics, the records in Washington, or the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose members still doubt that her father was the last of the men in gray. But even the state of Texas had second thoughts. In 1963 the Texas Civil War Centennial Commission began reviewing census records and other material and could not tell whether Williams was who he said he was. The state debated placing a Texas Historical Marker in front of the Franklin cemetery and finally went ahead despite the objections of one family that did not want their ancestors dishonored by sharing the same plot of ground as Williams. The state planted the black-and-white marker with one significant caveat. The inscription begins by stating that Williams was only “reputed” to have been the last surviving soldier of the Civil War. “There would be historical value in the marking, for future generations will seek the grave, authentic or not be the last survivor’s claim,” the commission’s research director, Mrs. D. M. Parmelee, advised local officials in Franklin. “That is the way of the world.”

The Guinness Book of World Records also changed its mind. In 1968, after reviewing census records and researching other material, it formally withdrew Williams’s claim as the last living survivor of the American Civil War. He was “too young” for the war, it concluded.

None of it ever bothered Willie Mae. She had cared for her father all those years as he lay dying in her small home in Houston. She loved him dearly; her devotion was endless. And when she followed him in death, they buried her in Texas too. “Willie Mae Bowles,” reads her light brown, granite-and-bronze headstone, “Confederate Daughter.”