Civil War Widows
Produced by: Joe Richman All Things Considered (NPR)
7/1/1998


ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: This is All Things Considered. I'm Robert Siegel.

NOAH ADAMS, HOST: And I'm Noah Adams. On this day 135 years ago, Union troops clashed with Confederates at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The fighting at Gettysburg would mark the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. At that same battlefield one year ago today, Daisy Anderson and Alberta Martin first met. They had come to Gettysburg to be honored as the last known living Civil War widows. Both women married in their early 20s. Their husbands were near 80. Alberta Martin and Daisy Anderson of course were not alive during the Civil War, but they married into history. Producer Joe Richman visited both women this year and put together an oral history of these two Civil War widows.

JOE RICHMAN, PRODUCER: There's the concept of a parallel universe --- that somewhere there's someone living the same life you are, except that because it's a parallel universe, some things are backwards, almost the opposite.

[fiddle music]

RICHMAN: The day I visited Daisy Anderson, she had just purchased a brand new American flag. It was a gift for the residents at her nursing home outside Denver, Colorado. The flag was also a memorial to her husband, a slave who escaped during the Civil War to join the Union Army. I walked up to the front yard just as Daisy, in her wheelchair, was helping to hoist the flag up the flag pole. A few months later, I went to see Alberta Martin. She lives in Elba, Alabama in a small house at the end of a gravel road, with her son who is 70. In their living room is a large Confederate flag given to her a few years ago by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Daisy Anderson is black. Alberta Martin is white. Both grew up poor, children of sharecroppers. Daisy in Tennessee, Alberta just five miles from the house she lives in today. Both women are in their 90s now, but seven decades ago, they were brand new brides. And as it happens, their husbands served on opposite sides of the Civil War.

[music ends]

DAISY ANDERSON, CIVIL WAR WIDOW: I'm Daisy Anderson. I'm 96 and-a-half-years-old. And I'm the last widow of the Union soldiers.
ALBERTA MARTIN, CIVIL WAR WIDOW: My name is Alberta Martin and I was born in nineteen hundred and six the first day of December. I'm the last Confederate widow living as far as anybody knows.

[music]

DAISY: I'd like to tell you about my childhood. In those days, my folks didn't have nothing. Most usually there was just one room, all of us cooking, eating, sleeping in the same room. The house was just shacks.

ALBERTA: We rambled around from one house to the other one when I was growing up. We'd farm on that side of the road one year, next year we'd move back over on the other side of the road and farm.

DAISY: Yeah, had to pick that cotton by hand. Pulled it, pulled it, pulled it, pick that cotton and put it in them sacks and it was something terrible. And they working for a $1 a day, then man.

ALBERTA: Cooking oil was about 25 cents a gallon. Meat about 5 cents a pound. I remember when we didn't have no clothes hardly to wear. Lord, I've seen some hard times in my life.

DAISY: We was the same as slaves. We was the same as slaves. The only thing they just didn't call it slavery.

[music ends]

DAISY: You know, it's as funny thing. I was 21 and the preacher said Miss Daisy, I got an old man here. He coming to church every Sunday. He's wealthy, too. He come from Nebraska and said I'd like to have you to meet him tomorrow. And Robert Anderson come into church and sat down one seat behind me and I looked around and seen he had hair all over his face and long whiskers down on the chin. Oh, my God, he looked like a wild man. And his white hair all over his head. And I got started snickering and laughing, and I laughed all the while I was in church - just laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. [laughs]

ALBERTA: Well, I was about 19 years old. It was late in the fall, kinda and you know there wasn't no farming going on right then. Crops were laid by. And this old man lived up a little piece above our house, and we met as he'd go along the road. And he just talked a little bit and went on. Maybe he'd stop, say a word or two, when he come on back.

DAISY: He talked to me that whole afternoon. Tell me all about his life and him being a slave and all that kind of stuff. And when I got through talking to him and he got through talking to me, I found out that I didn't have nothing to laugh at. The laugh was on me. I'm the one that was ignorant. But I was just 21. He was 79.

ALBERTA: I know he was way on in his 80s. I couldn't exactly tell you how old he was. I don't reckon he really knew how old he was. And first and last then, he asked me if I'd marry him. And I told him I would. He went in the house and asked my daddy if he could have me. I reckon they was tired of feeding me. [laughs] So, we got married the 10th day of December, 1927.

DAISY: I got him to shave that hair off his face and cut his hair and cut them whiskers off, except for just a little bit of goatee. And so in 30 days he asked me I would marry him and I told him sure. [laughs]

[banjo music]

DAISY: First night after we got married, we went down to stay all night with his brother. They had a nice big bed, you know. My husband he got in the bed first. He told me to "come on, honey." I sat there for a couple of hours. I wouldn't go to bed. So he got up out of that bed and he took that thing that I had on and he took it off of me, like this. And he said now you come on and get into bed. He had to make me get in the bed that time. But after that, I always beat him into bed. (LAUGHS) He sang to me at night. I'd sit on the floor and put my hands beside his knees like this, you know. He could sing too.

ALBERTA: I called him Mr. Martin. As long as he lived, I never did call him by his name. I don't know, I was just taught to say Mister and Misses when I was growing up. Love him? Well, I don't know. 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. I don't know, just almost like living with your daddy or some of your folks or something, most of the time. 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 old man's darling than a young man's slave."

DAISY: This here's an old photograph at the house. As a girl that didn't have a house or never had nothin' in my life and then take me into a home like that. Uh-uh. Decorate that house for me just like a dollhouse. This here, back in here, that was a water works. Had pipes that made it, made the house modern. You see how it look, don't you? That's me and him right there standing in front of it. They say that I just married him for his money. His relatives said that too. But that's the reason he wanted to get married to me. He wanted to help me. Wanted to make my life better. I'm proud. I'm proud because my husband escaped from being a slave, went to join the service and he wanted to be free. That's what he wanted to do. Go and have a home of your own and kids of your own. And he did it too. Didn't want no more slavery. He wanted to be a free man.

ALBERTA: That's a little picture, only picture I got of him. Yeah, he was a nice lookin' man. [laughs] We didn't live together very long, though. I don't know, something 'round about five years, what have you. Think he died in 1932. He never did talk about his life in the war. About the only thing he ever told me was they had it rough, you know. Didn't have nothin' to eat. And when it rained, they'd have to sleep in the mud and water. If I had it to go over though, I'd sure have a history. I'd ask him to explain his whole life to me if I could.

DAISY: We was married about eight years. Been a long time ago, but it seems like it was just yesterday. And once in while, I dream about him now. And it's a beautiful dream. Sometimes he just show up and that's all. Just show up. And I wake up and it's not true.

[fiddle music]

RICHMAN: After Robert Anderson died in 1930, Daisy Anderson lost most of their money in the Depression. She moved to Colorado and found work picking potatoes and cleaning houses. She never married again. Four years ago, at the age of 93, Daisy entered the nursing home where she lives today. She still receives her Civil War widow's pension of $149 a month. When Alberta Martin's Confederate husband died in 1932, she was left to take care of their son on her own. Eight weeks later, she decided to marry again. And as it turns out, she was able to keep the Martin name: she married her late husband's grandson from a previous marriage. There was just a two-year age difference this time around. Alberta Martin often complains that while she lived with her first husband for just five years, her second husband was with her for 50, but nobody every wants to hear about him.

[Taps being played]

RICHMAN: Private William Jasper Martin served in Company K of the 4th Alabama Confederate Infantry. Robert Anderson escaped slavery to join the Union Army's 125th Colored Infantry. One hundred and thirty-some years later, their wives had a chance to meet each other at last year's annual war memorial in Gettysburg.

[sounds of people in military re-enactment, Gettysburg]

RICHMAN: In a farmhouse by the battlefield, surrounded by photographers and TV cameras, Daisy Anderson and Alberta Martin exchanged gifts and a kiss on the cheek.
DAISY: I'm sure glad to meet you.
ALBERTA: I'm sure glad to meet you too.
DAISY: I've heard lots about you.

[clapping, sound fades]

ALBERTA: Well, I don't care about being last widow none. It don't give me a big head or nothin'. But it's good to know, you know, that somebody still lives to tell the tale -- all that I know about it.

DAISY: It means an awful lot to me to be the last one. But I really believe that my time is coming pretty soon now. Won't be none of us left.

RICHMAN: Civil War widows Daisy Anderson and Alberta Martin. And there's a postscript to this story. Just last weekend, the Tennessee Chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans made a trip out to a log cabin in eastern Tennessee to meet a woman named Gertrude Janeway. She lives without a phone, but she still has the war documents from her husband's years fighting in the Union Army. Mrs. Janeway is 89 and is now considered the third last known living Civil War widow. For National Public Radio, I'm Joe Richman.

[music]



© Joe Richman/Radio Diaries, 1998