16. The last Civil War pensioner died while George W. Bush was in the White House
Maudie Hopkins was not a Civil War widow, nor was she born until many years after the war. She was but 19 (approximately, reports differ) when she married Confederate veteran William Cantrell in 1934. He was a bit older than his new bride, 86 years of age, and although that may look unusual using today’s eyes, it was not at all unusual for the time. She married at least twice more, perhaps three times, and bore three children. A resident of Arkansas, she was not eligible for a Confederate widow’s pension when she first married, but a change to the law enacted in 1937 made her eligible for a small pension from the state as the widow of a veteran of the Confederacy. The amount of the pension was negligible, even by the standards of the day.
Younger women marrying older men became common in many of the former Confederate states for two generations following the Civil War, mainly because there were so few men of marriageable age due to the casualties of the war. By the time of Maudie’s first marriage it was no longer common, but it was also not all that rare. Many of society had begun to frown about the practice, and the tsk-tsk of wagging tongues caused many young women to keep their marriages to aging veterans secret. Maudie may not have been the last Civil War pensioner, but she was the last known when she passed away in a nursing home in August, 2008 at the age of 93. At the time Barack Obama was deep into his campaign to win the Presidency of the United States, an event which would have been considered unheard of in the Arkansas of her youth.