Name Last Confederate | ||
In Lee's Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox, historian William Marvel identified Private Pleasant Riggs Crump, of Talladega County, Alabama, who died December 31, 1951, as the last confirmed surviving veteran of the Confederate States Army. Citing English professor and biographical researcher Jay S. Hoar, Marvel states that after Crump's death a dozen other men claimed to have been Confederate soldiers, but military, pension and especially Census records prove they were imposters. Marvel further wrote that the names of two other supposed Confederate survivors alive in April 1950, according to Hoar, are not on the Appomattox parole lists and one, perhaps both, of their Confederate service claims were faked.
Following the entry in the table below for Pleasant Crump is a list of possible, discredited or unproven Confederate veteran claimants and also several who had verified enlisted documents: Patrick O'Leary, William Joshua Bush, Daniel Townsend, Arnold Murray and William Albert Kiney. Like the others, these five lived on after Crump's death and are ordered chronologically by their exact date of death.
On December 19, 1959, Walter Washington Williams (sometimes referred to as Walter G. Williams), reputed near the time of his death to be the last surviving veteran of the Confederate States Army, died in Houston, Texas. Williams's status as the last Confederate veteran already had been debunked by a September 3, 1959 story in the Scripps-Howard newspapers by Lowell K. Birdwell. In his 1991 article in Blue and Gray magazine entitled The Great Imposters, William Marvel gave further details concerning Williams birth, including census records from before his 1932 Confederate pension application, as having occurred between October 1854 and April 1855 in Itawamba County, Mississippi. Those records showed he was too young to have served in the Confederate Army. Also, he did not identify himself as a Confederate veteran in the 1910 census which included a question about whether a person had that status. Nonetheless, since all the other claimants were dead, Williams was celebrated as the last Confederate veteran after his death on December 19, 1959.
When Williams's status was disproved, attention turned to the alleged second longest surviving Confederate veteran, John B. Salling of Slant in Scott County, Virginia. Marvel also showed that Salling had been too young to have served in the Confederate Army. In a post on the Library of Virginia blog on October 6, 2010, Craig Moore, Virginia State Records Appraisal Archivist, wrote that when Salling applied for a pension in 1933, Pension Clerk John H. Johnson could not find a war record for Salling at the Virginia State Library, which held the records of the Department of Confederate Military Records. Salling received a pension after providing a notarized statement attesting to his service. Moore wrote that Marvel had found census records which put Salling's birth date in 1858. After stating Marvel's finding, Moore concluded that although existing Confederate pension records do not confirm or deny Salling's claim, the Commonwealth of Virginia accepted his claimed status.
In the Blue & Gray article, Marvel wrote, "Every one of the last dozen recognized Confederates was bogus. Thomas Riddle was only five when the Confederacy collapsed, and Arnold Murray only nine. William Loudermilk, who insisted he fought through the Atlanta Campaign at 16, did not turn 14 until after Appomattox. William Bush and a reputed Confederate nurse named Sarah Rockwell were not 20 years old in the summer of 1865, but 15."
The motive for fabrications of Confederate Army service almost always was to support a claim for a veteran's pension during the hard times of the Great Depression.
In his 1991 article in Blue & Gray magazine, Marvel confirmed Albert Woolson's (February 11, 1850 – August 2, 1956) claim to be the last surviving Union Army veteran and asserted that Woolson was the last genuine surviving American Civil War veteran from either side. Woolson was a drummer whose company did not see combat. Union Army veteran James Albert Hard (July 15, 1843 – March 12, 1953) was the last verified surviving American Civil War veteran who was in combat. Later research, however, identified Kiney as the last surviving combat veteran, and also authenticated many of the last claimants. Louis Nicholas Baker (1845?-1957), Chief Red Cloud (1842?-1962), Sylvester Magee (1841?-1971), and Charlie Smith (1842?/1879-1979) all claimed to be Union veterans and outlived Woolson, but Smith has been debunked.