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Not Politically CorrectAs memories of the Civil War faded and time began to take its toll on the ranks of the aging Confederate veterans; the state and the people of Alabama spared no expense in venerating the men who were the living symbols of the Lost Cause. Parades were held, reunions organized and a special tax was enacted to pay pensions to these veterans and their widows. Strange as it may sound, this tax has never been repealed and the citizens of Alabama still pay a 1 mil ad valorem Confederate Pension tax. In one recent year the state collected over 30 million dollars from this tax but still could not pay the medical bills for Alberta Martin, the last living Confederate widow. Alberta’s husband, William Jasper Martin, was born in 1845 in North Georgia. His family were typical pioneer farmers, with the only source of cash coming from the yellow gold that Martin’s father occasionally found while prospecting the mountain streams. Emigration was moving westward and it wasn’t long before the Martins heard tales of the rich land in Alabama that could be had for next to nothing. In 1855, after selling their land and everything else that could not fit into the wagon, they loaded their personal belongings and began the trek to Alabama. The family settled on a small piece of land in Covington County, where they immediately began clearing the land in preparation for the next year’s cotton crop. The Martins were an average Southern farm family before the Civil War. They owned no slaves, depended on the land for their livelihood and generally kept to themselves. William Martin was sixteen when the war began in 1861. While many young men rushed to enlist, others stayed home and worked the fields hoping the war would pass. Such was Martin’s case. For the next three years he watched as more and more of the young men in the community disappeared to become cannon fodder on far-away battlefields. Finally it was Martin’s turn. On May 26, 1864, Martin was sworn in as a private in the 4th Alabama Regiment, Co. K of the Confederate States of America. The 4th Alabama had already earned its laurels on the battlefields of Manassas, the Wilderness, and numerous other places. It was the most respected regiment in Robert E. Lee’s fabled Army of Northern Virginia. Although his pension papers have him as enlisted, his wartime records list him as a conscript. Most likely he was "conscripted" by a roving band of "recruiters" who persuaded him to enlist. By this time the Confederacy was suffering from a lack of manpower and any able-bodied man not in uniform risked being labeled a traitor and being shot or hanged. He was immediately sent to Camp Watts, near Auburn, for basic training. Matthew Galoway, another new soldier at the camp, described it in a letter home as "...constant soldiering activities with much shouting and whistle blowing. The tents are in a field of mud, made worse by men marching to and fro." Martin’s training was cut short within days of arriving at Camp Watts when they were ordered to board train cars for Richmond. Yankee troops were threatening Lee’s army at a place called Petersburg and every man capable of carrying a gun was needed at the front. So great was the haste that most of the men had not even been issued uniforms or weapons before they were ordered to board the train. After days of hard travel they were greeted by frenzied military activity upon their arrival in the Confederate capital. Immediately after leaving the train they were formed into columns, issued rifles and marched to the front, many still wearing the same clothes they had left home in. Twenty-four hours after arriving in Richmond they were engaged in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. The next two weeks were scenes of constant marching and fighting for Martin’s unit. "We were so hungry," remembered Martin years later, "that we would pick up potatoes out of the field and eat them raw while marching." Its ranks thinned during weeks of constant battle, Company K was ordered back to Richmond for regrouping and on June 25th, Pvt. Martin was finally issued a uniform. Years later, in one of the few instances when he talked of the war, Martin recalled the screams of the wounded men as musket balls and cannon fire cut a swath through the gray ranks, and of the horror of the great explosion that detonated within the midst of his brothers in arms. He didn’t talk much about his experiences during the rest of the war, except to say that when the fighting was over, "I laid my gun down and started walking home." He returned home to a land devastated by war. Rich fields lay neglected and overgrown and many, once elegant, homes had only chimneys still standing. Martin’s father had died in the war, his younger brother was killed in the fighting at Richmond and many of his neighbors were still unaccounted for. Sadly, the ex soldiers returned to the cotton fields. Many of them, after facing the horrors of war, found the solitude of working in the fields strangely comforting. The next half-century passed rapidly for Martin. He had married and raised a family of five children, only to see his wife fall ill and die. Time had also taken its toll upon his friends and now there were few people left who could remember the days when Martin wore the Confederate gray. The few left were old and infirm, many still suffering from wounds endured on long forgotten battlefields. In 1895, the State of Alabama passed a 1 mil ad valorem tax to provide pensions and care for veterans and their widows. In order to qualify for the pension, the recipients had to prove they served honorably in the service of the Confederacy and that their material worth was less than $400.00. The amount of the pensions were small, averaging between twenty-five and fifty dollars a month, but they were a godsend to the aging veterans who in many cases had no other support. "I didn’t t know much about the Civil War," recalled his widow, Alberta Martin, "but I knew he was drawing a $150 pension from it every three months. That was a lot of money!" Alberta Martin grew silent as she remembered her early years and meeting the man she still calls, "Mr. Martin." Her family, like tens of thousands of others, was wed to the soil and cotton crops that never seemed able to produce quite enough to pay the bills. At the age of 10, Alberta’s life was suddenly shattered when her mother died of cancer. "Father would work in the fields all day and come home, take care of the house and do the cooking. You could look at his face and tell he was worn out all the time." Alberta assumed the role of surrogate mother to the other children and by the time she was twelve she was doing the household chores as well as the cooking and washing. The area’s economy, always dependent on cotton, was completely devastated by the boll weevil in 1915. Dirt farmers, with no other skills, were suddenly out of work with no way to support their families. Many families began the exodus to northern cities, while others remained behind, hoping the cotton crops would be better in the following years. "I lied about my age," said Mrs. Martin, "and got a job in a cotton mill. You had to be sixteen, but no one really checked. I was working six and a half days a week, 10 hours a day, for $9.50 a week. It seemed like all the money in the world." Although she was spending all of her time working in the mills and taking care of the house, she still attracted the attention of the town’s young men. "We didn’t do much courting back then. We would meet at people’s houses, have taffy pulls or corn shuckings and when it got time to go home, sometimes the boys would walk with us. One of the men that walked her home was Harold Farrow, a debonair young man about town. He was a taxi driver. A few months later he had swept Alberta off her feet and asked for her hand in marriage. Her father, though having reservations about the match, reluctantly gave his permission. "You ever do her wrong," the father warned Farrow, "and I’ll come get her!" Her father’s premonitions proved correct when it was discovered that Farrow was using his taxi business to bootleg whiskey. "My father didn’t have no use for whiskey or for people that fooled with it," recalled Alberta. "He showed up at the house one day and said, "Get your stuff together; I’m carrying you home." Within weeks she was granted a divorce, only to discover that she was also pregnant. "My half brother was growing a cotton crop and I moved in with him, helped take care of my father and did the housework. With a baby to take care of there wasn’t much else for me to do." She began noticing an elderly gentleman who passed the house every day on his way to a nearby store, where he would sit and play checkers all day. In the afternoon he would again pass on his way home. Curious, Alberta began to inquire about the gentleman who seemed to spend all of his time playing checkers. "His name is William Jasper Martin," a neighbor told her. "He’s in his 80s and he was a soldier in the Civil War." "He was a good-looking man," Alberta recalls. "He had golden hair and a mustache, weighed about 150 pounds and was a gentleman. He’d walk by and we got to talking over the fence. We didn’t do no sparking, we just stood and talked. One day he just up and asked if I would marry him. Of course I said yes. You know what they say: It’s better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave. Course I told him he’d have to ask my father." The fact that Martin was sixty some years older than her and forty some years older than her father didn’t seem to matter at the time. Martin immediately went to her father and, as was the custom in those days, asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. "Everybody knew Mr. Martin was in the War, but that didn’t mean anything to me," recalls Alberta. "Onliest thing I was thinking about was what my father was going to say when Mr. Martin asked him about marrying me." Reluctantly, her father gave his blessing saying, "She’s been married before so I reckon she knows what she’s doing." "We went to the courthouse in Andalusia and got married by a judge. People stared, but we didn’t pay them no mind." A soft serene smile played on Alberta’s face as she recalled the marriage in 1927. "I always called him Mr. Martin. From the day we met to the day he died, he was always Mr. Martin to me." "Mr. Martin, he had a bedstead and I had one so we rented a house and set up housekeeping. We didn’t have any other furniture so we used wooden boxes until we could get some." Shortly after the marriage, Martin’s daughter moved in with them. Oddly, Alberta was not intimidated by the fact that her new stepdaughter was forty years older than she. If the neighbors were surprised by the strange union, they were even more surprised some months later when they learned that young Alberta and old Martin were expecting a child. "Mr. Martin, he liked to have spoilt that child to death after it was born. I remember Mr. Martin walking to town, all dressed up, with his little boy at his side holding his hand. He was prouder of that boy than anything that ever happened to him in his life." By 1932 there were few men left alive who could lay claim to being a Confederate veteran. Martin had always shunned veterans’ reunions, even refusing to talk about the war much, except in an occasional reflective mood. But he reluctantly agreed to attend the one in Montgomery. Everyone knew it would possibly be the last one. The reunion lasted three days. It was a somber affair, attended by a mere handful of survivors clad in old Confederate gray uniforms. A reporter wrote: "... the veterans seemed lost in thought, as if remembering their fallen comrades and wondering how long it would be before they joined them." Upon Martin’s return home from the reunion he would sit on the porch for hours and stare into space. On July 8, 1932, feeling tired, he simply laid down on the bed and died. "Mr. Martin was good to me," said Alberta in a soft voice as she remembered the day she buried her husband. "He was good to the children and I missed him terribly after he was gone." After Martin’s death, his widow Alberta continued to draw a pension until she remarried. That union lasted fifty years until 1982, when she was again widowed. Like so many elderly widows who had lost their sole source of support, Mrs. Martin’s financial situation grew almost desperate. She was vaguely aware of the fact that the Confederate pension bill had a provision in it to allow widows who had remarried to draw the pension if their second husband died also. At the time, this provision was almost a necessity. Many widows had remarried, and once their second husbands died, many were left destitute and oftentimes in worse straits than before. Over the years Mrs. Martin made several inquiries about applying for the pension. She never got a reply. Strange as it may seem, although the state of Alabama was collecting millions of dollars in taxes for the fund, there was no system set up to actually pay the pensions "The paper work to fill out for a Confederate pension," said one state employee, "just didn’t exist." In 1996 Mrs. Martin was "discovered" by the news media who declared her "the last living Confederate widow." Fame does not guarantee riches, however. People would stop and take pictures, and maybe ask for her autograph. Some people would even leave a dollar or two to help her out. But when all the excitement was over she still had to worry about saving pennies to pay the bills, or putting off doctors appointments because she didn’t have the money to pay. Many people asked if there was anything they could do for her. She always replied with the same answer. "Help me get my pension." When people began making inquiries in Mrs. Martin’s behalf, the results proved almost as unbelievable as her story. Yes, there was a Confederate Pension Tax, but there was no money to help the last living Confederate widow! As the veterans and their widows had begun to die out, the state continued to collect millions of dollars every year in their behalf. Several administrations used the fund to finance their pet projects and to provide jobs for friends. In the 1940s, when there were only a few people drawing Confederate pensions, one source claimed there were seventeen people employed administering the fund. In the 1970s the bulk of the tax was diverted to the Department of Human Resources with another part going to Veterans Affairs. Ironically, although millions of dollars were collected and dispensed to the Veterans Affairs Administration, Mrs. Martin did not qualify for any assistance from them because her husband had fought for the wrong side! Apparently, the state justified the continuing of the "Confederate" tax by contributing 1% (out of almost thirty million dollars) to the upkeep of a Confederate cemetery in south Alabama. Almost even more unbelievable is the fact that, once the state diverted the money, it actually applied for, and received, Federal matching funds. This, in effect, makes Alabama the only state in the Union to receive Federal matching funds for a Confederate pension tax! After tremendous pressure was applied from different groups, the State of Alabama reluctantly agreed to pay Mrs. Martin a pension from the Department of Human Resources. Even this proved controversial when some people tried to label her husband as a deserter from the Confederate Army in order to deny the payment, despite the fact that the state of Alabama had granted him a pension almost a hundred years ago. The small pension she recieved allowed her to enter a nursing home where she requires constant medical care. Unfortunately, once the nursing home bills are paid every month there is no money left for doctors or medicine. These bills are being paid by friends, and in many cases, complete strangers who have heard of her plight. State officials, when asked to consider paying her medical expenses, replied, "If she would go on welfare, then we could pay her doctor bills." Mrs. Martin refused welfare, saying "she was not going to beg for what her husband fought for." One official in Montgomery perhaps summed it up recently in an "off the record" interview. "We all feel sorry for her but there’s nothing we can do. If anyone proposed a bill in her behalf, they would be committing political suicide. Her case is really an embarrassment for most of the people down here, because she’s just not politically correct. I doubt seriously if the state will even help bury her once she dies." "No one wants to repeal the tax," he continued to say, "because then they would have to pass another tax to make up for the lost revenue." Almost a century and a half ago, hundreds of thousands of young men followed Alabama’s flag as they marched off to distant battlefields. The ones who returned came back to a land devastated by war and conflict. They asked nothing for their services but when it was offered they gratefully accepted. They had no idea that one day their widows would be an embarrassment to the State of Alabama. |
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