The Last Living Soldier of the Civil War
Honor and controversy still surround the claims of several men that they were the last survivor of America’s most terrible war
The last man standing. For every armed conflict ever fought, with every army ever assembled, the laws of mortal man dictate that only one can truly lay claim to being the last warrior left alive. Only one is the last to enter Valhalla, the mythic palace where dead warriors rest.
This is what is happening now with veterans of World War II. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 389,292 of the roughly sixteen million American World War II veterans are still alive as of 2020. However, almost 370 of those veterans are dying every day. The youngest remaining veterans are in their early nineties, while the oldest are over one-hundred years old.
The last living veteran of World War I was Florence Green, a British woman who served in the Allied armed forces and died on February 4, 2012, at the age of 110. Frank Buckles was the last surviving American World War I vet. He was 110 years old when he passed away, on February 27, 2011.
Going back further in time, approximately four million men fought the American Civil War, and the title of the last living soldier in that war precipitated something of a brothers-in-arms conflict in its own right.
The problem stemmed from the fact that official birth and service records from that time were not always reliable.
Albert Henry Woolson, from Duluth, Minnesota, was widely accepted as the last living member of the Union Army. Records show that he was born in 1847 and enlisted in the army at age of seventeen as a drummer boy in the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment. Alongside his brothers-in-arms, he marched his way as far south as Tennessee before the war was over.
Back home in Minnesota, he went on to marry twice and father fourteen children, before dying in his sleep on August 2, 1956, at the age of 109.
In commemoration of his standing as the last surviving Union soldier, a life-size statue of Woolson was later erected on the Gettysburg battlefield.
As for who was the last survivor of the Confederate army, that’s where things get a little blurry. Walter Washington Williams claimed he was born on November 14, 1842, in Itawamba County, Mississippi. Then he said he enlisted in 1864, as a forage master in John B. Hood’s famed Texas Brigade, where he served out the rest of the war.
In time, the man became something of a local, and then national, celebrity as being the lone survivor of The Lost Cause. When Williams died, on December 19, 1959, in Franklin, Texas, President Dwight Eisenhower declared it a day of national mourning and awarded him the honorary rank of General.
Williams certainly did leave behind a rich legacy. In his lifetime he sired nineteen children (with two wives) and left behind sixty grandchildren and seventy-three great-grandchildren. According to the birth date he gave, he lived to be an astonishing 117 years old. (Apparently, longevity ran in the family. He once said his grandfather lived to be 120.)
However, only four months before his death, serious doubts were cast as to his war record when it was discovered that the 1860 census listed him as being five years old that year. That would mean he was actually born in 1854 and thus was only nine years old when he signed up for the army in 1864.
Not likely.
Then there was an issue with the National Archives not listing any Walter Williams from Texas or Mississippi as ever having served in the Confederate Army.
In his book Last of the Blue and Gray, Richard Serrano details what became in essence the last battle of the Civil War — the fight for who was the last living soldier. In the 1950s, no less than five old men claimed to be living legends of the Civil War when, in fact, they were nothing but frauds and imposters. These men never took up arms for their cause, but instead, went looking to seize what false notoriety they could.
To his dying day, Williams stood by his story that he was indeed the last Rebel standing, but the academic doubters remain.
Not that any of this attention to dates and numbers should trivialize the ultimate sacrifice countless men and women have made throughout the history of our country. Quite the contrary.
Unfortunately, when it comes to armed conflict in any era, the ‘fog of war’ comes into play: situations where even the hardest of historical facts can, over time, be lost or turned around enough to make anyone wonder where truth ends and storytelling begins.
To that end, the story of Walter Williams and who was or wasn’t the last living soldier of the Civil War is a fitting allegory for what has been going on throughout recorded history when it comes to war.
As reported in Serrano’s book, in 1953, a newspaper reporter asked Williams for his reflection on all that had happened in the world during his lifetime. From the rocking chair on his front porch, the frail, white-haired man paused to gather his thoughts. Then he slowly shook his head and said:
“Looks like we’ve always got wars goin’ on, but they don’t ever seem to settle nothin’.”
Perhaps, therein lies the only real truth of the matter.
