>The VA spokesman could >not tell me if pensions were paid to any Confederate widows and did >state that the woman who is said to be the last surviving >Confederate widow is not receiving a pension. He said he didn't >know why, but presumed it was because she had remarried since her >veteran husband died (but that doesn't mesh with the info you give). > >"Ain't this pension stuff fun!" <g> > >"Richard A. Pence" <richardpence@pipeline.com> Richard, I guess I owe you an apology. In the interests of saving bandwidth I only printed a small part of what was on the Internet. Here's the entire article: By David Lamb | National Correspondent Posted February 9, 2003 ENTERPRISE, Ala. -- A friend of Alberta Martin's came calling the other day to give the 96-year-old widow news of a death. She awaited him at the nursing home in her wheelchair, wearing red beads and her best dress, a Confederate flag spread over her lap. She nibbled on cheese puffs. "Miz Alberta," said the friend, Ken Chancey. "You remember the Yankee widow you met some years back? Gertrude Janeway? Well, she died last week. You're all America's got left now. You're the last surviving widow of a Civil War soldier. Do you understand what I'm saying?" The woman nodded but said nothing. Gertrude Janeway, 93, whose husband fought for the Union, had died in the Tennessee log cabin where she had lived most of her life. Now, 138 years after the war ended and 45 years after the death of its last veteran, there is only Alberta Martin, frail and forgetful, the last widow of the 3.2 million men who fought America's bloodiest war. "Mr. Martin -- that's what I always called him, Mr. Martin -- never did talk much about the war," she recalled. "Except he'd tell me how cold and wet it was up in Richmond, how he'd wrap blankets around himself in the trenches and how when he crossed a field he'd dig up potatoes and eat them raw because he was so hungry." Miz Alberta, abandoned by the taxi driver she had married as a teenager, was 21 when, in 1927, she became the third wife of William Jasper Martin, an 81-year-old former private in the Confederate army. Their courtship was brief, spanning just a few words spoken over a picket fence in Opp, when he'd stopped to chat on his daily amble into town to play dominoes with his war buddies. He was a handsome man with a bushy mustache, a quick temper and a $50-a-month military pension -- a princely sum in those days for a woman stalked her whole life by poverty. He was lonely, and she was needy. The couple were serenaded with cowbells and horns on their wedding night. "Love him? I don't know," she told National Public Radio in 1998. "It ain't the same love that you got for a young man, if that's what you're asking. He slept on one bed and me on the other one. People, when they get old like that, they don't require kissing and hugging and necking and one thing or another. The old saying is, 'Better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave.'" Nonetheless, she bore him a son, Willie, which pleased Martin so much he'd strut through town with the boy on his shoulders. "My life with Mr. Martin was hard, but it was a good life, too. We were happy," she said. He died after less than five years of marriage. Eight weeks later, Alberta Martin married his grandson by a previous marriage, a union that set so many tongues wagging that the local Baptist preacher had to study the Scriptures before deciding she hadn't committed a sin. Mr. Martin died at age 87 in 1932. Shortly after his death, Mrs. Martin married Mr. Martin's grandson, Charlie Martin, making her ineligible to draw her late husband's pension. For most of her 50 years with Charlie Martin, Miz Alberta -- who had a seventh-grade education and was the daughter of sharecroppers -- lived in obscurity and poverty. When Ken Chancey -- a dentist and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans -- found her in 1996, widowed again, she was living at the end of a dirt road in Elba, in a small house without air conditioning where she kept a portrait of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia in which William Jasper Martin had served. "She asked for two things," said Chancey, the widow's guardian. "One, could the SCV get her recognition as the last Confederate widow? She said she'd never done anything all that important in life, but she had married into history and that history was part of the nation's. And two, could we help her get a Confederate pension? I said I'd try." In 1895, Alabama passed a 1-mill (one-tenth of a cent) tax to provide pensions for Civil War veterans and their widows who had a net worth of less than $400. By the 1940s, the fund had grown into millions of dollars and was administered by 17 people, although only a handful of eligible recipients were still alive. Alabama still collects the tax and, with no Civil War widows left except Martin, taps into the $30 million nest egg to support the state's human-resources department, the veterans' administration and a Confederate cemetery in Marbury. In 1996 Alabama agreed to renew her Confederate widow's pension and a supplement, 64 years after she became ineligible for the aid because she remarried. Mrs. Martin, who lives in a small house on the end of a dirt road in Elba, gets a monthly check of $335. The man who made her part of history is buried under a spreading cedar tree in Opp. She will be buried in another cemetery, next to his grandson, with whom she spent half a century. In planning her funeral, she has asked that "Beyond the Sunset" be sung and that the Confederate flag covering her lap the other day be draped over her mule-drawn casket. Martin has been to numerous Civil War reenactments and Confederate grave dedications. She has been a guest of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and honored at the dedication of the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library. She has been featured in every major newspaper in America, including the front page of the New York Times and in People Magazine. Today, when asked why she married a man so much older than herself, Miz Alberta just smiles and says, "It's better to be an old man's darlin' than a young man's slave!" Martin celebrated her 96th birthday Dec. 4, and received greetings from 14 governors all over the country. Please send all cards to: Mrs. Alberta Martin C/O Dr. Ken Chancey P.O. Box 311087 Enterprise, AL 36331 ========== GOD DENIED THEM VICTORY BUT FATE GRANTED THEM A GLORIOUS IMMORTALITY -- Confederate Tombstone, Richmond, Va. ====== --Jim -- Jim Lyons jim@jimlyons.com http://www.jimlyons.com