Last Person to Receive Civil War-Era Pension Dies

https://www.wsj.com/articles/last-person-to-receive-a-civil-war-era-pension-dies-11591141193

by undefined1 • 6 years ago

214 104 6 years ago

A friend of a friend married his carer or nurse instead of paying her wages. He was not expecting to live long and needed 24/7 care.

It was agreed that she would be written out of the will, so his children got all the inheritance which was not diluted due to years of a full time carer. She got a lifetimes worth of pension payments, in exchange for a few years work (and forgoing other romantic relationships). She lived with him so I assume her living expenses were covered.

Risky for both sides, she could contest the will or the pension provider could find a loophole or accuse her of fraud.

seibelj• 6 years ago

My uncle got engaged to his carer when he had cancer, but he thought it was genuine love even though she was 20 years younger. He wound up recovering and she dumped him, and then he fell into alcoholism for a year. He did eventually pull himself out of the hole and lived another 15 years before another cancer got him.

purplezooey• 6 years ago

That's quite a story. I guess you never really know when your number is up.

SamReidHughes4• 6 years ago

I think this might also be a way for any two people, not too closely related such that the marriage is illegal, to dodge estate tax.

stormdennis8• 6 years ago

Civil partnerships, brought in for the purpose of giving the same legal rights for gay couples as married ones had, presumably also granted these rights. Since then gay marriage has rendered these redundant for their original purpose but they still exist. Some overtly non-romantically involved, long term, co-habitees are now using civil partnerships to protect the surviving person from estate duties upon the other's death. The anomaly now is that the people have to be of the same sex and there is pressure to allow people of the opposite sex to form them.

clarkmoody• 6 years ago

The "line marriage" concept from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes to mind here.

pembrook• 6 years ago

There’s no estate tax in the US anymore up to $10 million after the most recent tax bill passed.

I’m not sure there’s much need to “dodge” anything anymore for 99.9% of people.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan2• 6 years ago

Wild.

Especially now, it's important to remind ourselves that American slavery isn't a thing of the the distant past - there are old people alive today whose fathers literally fought in the war to keep slavery legal. And the last former slave died in 1971 [1], which means there are probably tons of middle-aged people going about their lives who personally knew and had conversations with ex-slaves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Magee

ghettoimp• 6 years ago

That is a pretty wild Wikipedia page.

WalterBright2• 6 years ago

I heard that the last Civil War soldier died in the 1950s.

pfranz• 6 years ago

I know someone (born in 1951) who said they remember a school announcement that the last Civil War soldier died. That matches what you had heard.

ponker• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson

throwaway0a5e2• 6 years ago

If I remember correctly the "why we fight" series of WW2 propaganda films opens with elderly American Civil War veterans participating in the 1940 Washington DC memorial day parade.

lsh123• 6 years ago

I would be curious to find out how many Americans today have ancestors who lived in America during Civil war. Even more detailed question is with percentages cohorts based on how many ancestors were in America vs somewhere else during that time.

hodgesrm• 6 years ago

There's a lot of us, especially in the South. My great-grandfather was a child in the siege of Petersburg. My mom still tells the story of how the family house was struck by a Union cannonball as they were sitting outside it. She heard it directly from her grandfather when she was a child herself.

mleo• 6 years ago

Possibly a lot, given the potential exponential descendants 1 person could have. I have several ancestors and their relatives that fought for the North. My kids could trace 5-6 generations back to the civil war, meaning 32-64 ancestors to consider.

irrational3• 6 years ago

My earliest ancestors came over in 1620, the last came over in the 1850s. So during the civil war, all my ancestors were already on this continent. However, none of them participated in the war since they all lived out west, beyond the boundaries of the USA, throughout the war.

Izkata• 6 years ago

Through census and immigration records, it looks like every branch of my family tree came over between 1890 and 1910.

Thing is, only one of those branches was even well-known among my family, the others are all lost history. Out of curiosity I've asked some friends and co-workers and several have said similar things - they don't know when their ancestors immigrated, their personal family history just doesn't go back that far.

adventured• 6 years ago

~31 million Americans in 1860, so it's likely to be a large number.

Half of my family, of German Dutch ancestry, dates along the east coast to before the Revolutionary War, and spent the better part of 200 years as farmers in the northern Union Appalachia region (the last generation that were farmers is almost gone now; the family farm land - which isn't very valuable land - has been gradually sold off over the past century; the area is difficult land to farm, it's a rough way of life, and it's nearly impossible to compete with modern corporate farming). The other half came over during one of the large immigration waves toward the end of the 19th century.

pmiller22• 6 years ago

I have ancestors living in America in the 17th century.

bitbckt• 6 years ago

Some of my ancestors arrived as early as the 1620s. There have been several books about them. Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1333427255

My Civil War era ancestors were in Nevada at the time, where we've largely remained since.

danieltillett• 6 years ago

I have serious doubts about Sylvester’s claims - people just don’t live to 130.

duckMuppet• 6 years ago

I think Russ Roberts of econtalk went into this pretty in depth.

EconTalk: John Cogan on Entitlements and the High Cost of Good Intentions http://www.EconTalk.org http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2017/Coganentitlement...

Ironically, everyone here seems to be angling at the political angle, not the fact that pensions can be easily survive well beyond what they were intended, especially public ones.

smt88• 6 years ago

That seems completely irrelevant to GP's point.

If a Civil War veteran were born in 1845, served in his late teens, and died at 85, then anyone older than 90 could have spoken to him.

Play with assumptions a bit, or go back a few decades, and the numbers become much less extreme.

lsiebert• 6 years ago

I'd also point out that while slavery may have supposedly ended after the civil war, crimes were created and applied selectively to black people.

Combined with racial violence, sharecropping that kept black people in constant debt, and other policies, many black people were still forced to labor against their will.

Even now, prison labor is still regularly exploited. For example, low level offenders in California are a big part of the fire fighters that fight wildfires, but they are paid below minimum wage (like a dollar an hour), and then, despite that training, they typically can't work as firefighters after release because of their criminal history.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4928680/Haunting-pi... https://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the... https://listverse.com/2017/06/21/10-ways-american-slavery-co...

DrBazza• 6 years ago

The past isn't that far away:

"Samuel James Seymour (March 28, 1860 – April 12, 1956) was the last surviving person who had been in Ford's Theatre the night of the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. "

"Two months before his death, Seymour[4] appeared on the February 9, 1956, broadcast of the CBS TV panel show I've Got a Secret."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_J._Seymour

ThinkingGuy• 6 years ago

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

xwdv• 6 years ago

How is such a pension delivered? A direct deposit? Is there somewhere in an interface or a check where the words “Civil War pension” would be displayed?

RobRivera• 6 years ago

Its a line item via direct deposit labeled "VA Payment" or something along those lines.

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

Agreed, I think this is such a good reminder that slavery wasn't that long ago. There are many people alive today who grew up under legal segregation. In fact, it's not hard to see how today's modern Republican Party grew out of the "Southern Strategy" of the late 60s.

irrational3• 6 years ago

The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?

mehrdadn• 6 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_...

Spooky233• 6 years ago

The solid south flipped in the 1960s. LBJ through force of his will basically betrayed the senate democrats and pushed through significant social legislation. (Voting, civil rights, great society, etc)

The solid south types saw the writing on the wall and started breaking away. The “Southern Strategy” as implemented by Nixon and perfected by Reagan basically started as a collaboration of conservative southerners (“rehab Democrats”) and western resource extraction interests. Eventually they took over the GOP and you have the circus that we see today.

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

dataflow's link will have more detail. Besides the Southern Democrats you had the machine democrats in the urban cities whose power block was representing working class immigrants and minorities. Except blacks who were Republicans up until the late 1920's. Blacks broke for FDR in 1932.

0823498723498722• 6 years ago

Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on party flipping: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce....

dragonwriter4• 6 years ago

The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?

They started flipping with the New Deal Coalition, which gave the Democratic Party a new but not yet unifying working class national agenda.

The splitting off of the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (“Dixiecrats”) in the late 1940s was a response to this and the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights at the time.

The major turning point, though, was Johnson's support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican effort to exploit that known as the Southern Strategy. The Dixiecrats hadn't lasted as a breakaway group; the Republicans in the 1940s and into the 1960s had a strong base of support for Civil Rights too, and there wasn't anywhere better than the Democratic Party for white racists to go. But when the Republicans actively courted them, that changed.

The phase of political realignment that started in the 1960s (which was itself an extension of the one starting in the 1940s) completed around 1994-1995, as the last of the Southern conservative Democrats (those further right than the center-right neoliberal faction like Clinton) in office jumped ship to the Republican Party.

thaumaturgy• 6 years ago

Oh gosh, the answers and discussion here so far are quite bad.

First, we have to discard the idea that there was a specific year, or even decade, that the two parties "flipped". The history of politics is absurdly complex and involves lots of different players and there are rarely any discrete points in history you can point to and say, "this is precisely where this big ideological shift happened". It would be a lot like asking, "what year did tea party politics take over the Republican party?"

We also need to address the dog whistle in the air: modern Republicans love saying that they are the party of Lincoln and that it was Democrats that fought for slavery. They count on people having heard of this shift happening but not being well enough versed in it to understand where the lie is hidden.

Let's start with Andrew Jackson. He started as a member of the Democratic-Republican party but he pushed hard for an ideology that would become known as Jacksonian democracy [1]. This alienated a lot of fellow members of the Democratic-Republican party, and they joined forces with the remnants of the Federalists and a handful of others and formed the Whig party. The Democratic-Republican party became the Democratic party, led by Jackson. Neither the Whig party nor the Democratic party had views which exactly parallel any of today's popular political ideologies.

After the Mexican war, the loose coalition of Whigs started to fracture over the issue of slavery. A bunch of smaller groups, including former Whigs, joined together to form the Republican party, which opposed the expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the Civil War, the Democrats started to split into northern Democrats and southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats"). At this time, slavery is the leading political issue of the day, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Lincoln runs as a Republican and wins. There's a Civil War, and Reconstruction begins. The northern Democrats had held a wishy-washy position on slavery, and as a result, they lost all political power. Industrialist political influences in the north became represented by the victorious Republican party, while the Democratic party held on to power in the south.

This is the part where people see a "pro-slavery Democratic south" and an "anti-slavery Republican north", but neither of these parties at the time are all that similar to their modern antithesis. The Republican party at this time has a conservative group and a progressive group, and they fight frequently over things like concentration of wealth (sound familiar?). Southern Democrats meanwhile focused most of their political efforts on fighting any and every expansion of civil rights for former slaves.

Conservative Republicans won the presidency with McKinley, but Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive, was his VP. McKinley gets assassinated, Roosevelt takes office, and proceeds to enact a bunch of progressive reforms. [2] This ultimately results in a lot of friction between Roosevelt and conservative Republicans and that leads to an internal fight, with Taft leading the conservatives and Roosevelt forming the Progressive party.

Along comes Woodrow Wilson. (Bear with me, we're getting there.) Wilson, a Democrat, has been frustrated by his party's inability to tackle any issues other than civil rights. He manages to gather enough political influence to take control of the Democratic party, getting it out of the hands of the Dixiecrats. [3]

The infighting in the Republican party meanwhile leaves southern blacks unprotected, so they get really unhappy with both parties. All of this comes to a head post-Depression when FDR comes along. He's a very egalitarian, populist, post-Wilsom Democrat, and he captures a lot of political power.

So the situation now is this: there is a broken Republican party in the north, with progressive Republicans and conservative Republicans, and there is a progressive Democratic party, and there are a bunch of unhappy Dixiecrats -- the "Southern Democrats". FDR manages to pick up a bunch of the progressive Republicans along with black voters, and then Truman comes along and continues FDR's racially progressive policies, so this is when black voters begin to vote as Democrats.

The Southern Democrats were nearly shut out of national politics altogether at this point, while northern conservative Republicans were kept on life support until Nixon. There's a Nixon-Goldwater fight over the Republican party, but Nixon is an absurdly shrewd politician, and over the course of several years, he's able to build an FDR-like coalition of multiple groups under the Republican banner, including the northern conservatives and the former Dixiecrats, who were thrilled to get some political power again.

Nixon though was still an old-guard Republican and he would barely recognize today's Republican party. But, from here, the remaining dots are easy to connect.

This was the shortest summary of 150 years of messy politics that I could come up with. I'm skipping over a lot of important details and there are probably some points here that can be argued by those better-versed in this stretch of history.

But the important part is that these two modern parties have not existed as constant political entities, and so they didn't "switch sides". They were just labels for loosely-associated smaller political and demographic groups, and those groups changed allegiances depending on the biggest political issues of the day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy

[2]: The excellent u/Samuel_Gompers with a lot more detail on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_w...

[3]: u/Samuel_Gompers again, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_so...

chrisco2555• 6 years ago

That's a lie and always has been. The South was strongly Democrat until after Reagan (who won 49 states by the way, and basically created the modern Republican party), well into the 90s, as evidenced by Clinton and Gore, both southern Democrats. Sorry, the attempt to pin the party "flip" on Civil rights is bogus.

echelon• 6 years ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

The party flip happened due to single-issue voting on the topic of abortion. It became the Republican platform during and after Reagan. They've since co-opted a host of other issues that cater to their base, but abortion is still at the heart of it.

Abortion changed the Republican party.

Donald• 6 years ago

Sorry, if you are pointing towards Presidential politics as evidence, that actually supports the OP's point that the roots of this party flip began in the 1960s.

Goldwater won the American deep south handily in '64 based on his "states rights" rhetoric.

aaronbrethorst2• 6 years ago

There are many people alive today who grew up under legal segregation

Legal segregation never went away, it's just not necessarily Plessy v. Ferguson obvious anymore.

There was a great episode of Why is this Happening about two years ago with Nikole Hannah-Jones, who you might know as the NYT's Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind the 1619 Project, that covered this topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/investigating-school-s...

----

Sidebar: if you haven't seen Nikole Hannah-Jones's 1619 Project, now is the perfect time to familiarize yourself with it.

Here's the main site: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...

And here is the incredible podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.htm... — if you only have time to listen to one episode, try the third one, "The Birth of American Music".

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

The 1619 project has admirable aspirations, but it's maybe worth noting that some prominent academic historians have criticised it for inaccuracy: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians...

Still very worthwhile if you're unfamiliar with the deep and ongoing legacy of slavery in the United States.

stormdennis8• 6 years ago

This reminds me that at least until recently, two grandsons of President Tyler (born in 1790) were still alive.

bishnu• 6 years ago

Here's an interview with one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiL2PgC17A

It seems like a lot of elderly men in the late 1800s/early 1900s married younger women to essentially be caregivers.

stormdennis8• 6 years ago

The grandson comes across as a nice sensible countryman, no airs or graces despite the extraordinary lineage and the wealth he seems to have, judging by his house.

Klonoar• 6 years ago

Huh, they completed a loop in time.

flomo• 6 years ago

Nopay 2016 article about the recipient and other war funds:

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-08/civil-war-ve...

teabee89• 6 years ago

This reminds me that there is video footage online today of a person who witnessed President Lincoln's murder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

uniqueid• 6 years ago

This one is lively. Civil War vets chatting in 1929 https://youtu.be/4qGX0XM84Ck

achow• 6 years ago

http://archive.is/Ksohd

Mary-Jane• 6 years ago

One aspect of this that doesn't seem to be getting much attention is the law of unintended consequences. It's easy to contribute other people's money to an inarguably noble cause, but I wonder how many of the authors of the budget that set aside these funds appreciated that their great great great great great grandchildren, many of them _descendants of slaves_, would be paying for this benefit?

throwawaygh• 6 years ago

As long as pensions aren’t inflation adjusted and we have near-constant low level inflation, it’s just not a big deal. This article is about an approximately $1000/year benefit received by a single person. It’s an extreme outlier and its cost is many orders of magnitude from being even a rounding error.

To your question, though, designers of pension funds definitely do understand that pensions which survive the original recipient can start to look like perpetuities.

dragonwriter4• 6 years ago

The headline is a bit weirdly qualified. “X-War-Era” usually refers to something from the time of but not directly associated with the war. This is, in fact, a Civil War pension.

Last Person to Receive Civil War-Era Pension Dies

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