William Daniel Townsend 1846-1953

Summaryt: His Confederate Service is verified √

Date of Birth: given as 12th April 1846. Census dates February 1850 and 1853 are possible but unlikely.

Date of Death: 22nd February 1953

Age at enlistment: Probably Fifteen. Eight according to some census records but that is unlikely.

Rank: Private

Unit: Company B. 27th Louisiana Infantry.

Service: Training, then battles at Natchez in Mississippi and the Vicksburg campaign.

Combat Experience: Although sick in late 1862, his combat experience started before the siege, in Mississippi and northern Louisiana, but most of it was during the campaign in and around Vicksburg. He was wounded at the siege of Vicksburg.

Length of service: September 1861 to July 1863

Evidence of Service apart from his own accounts. He appears in the muster rolls of the 27th Louisiana Regiment in some detail due to health problems and enquiries.[1] He also appears in the Vicksburg parole lists as captured on July 4th and paroled four days later.[2] When applying for a pension in the 1930s he was asked who could vouch for him. He named four individual soldiers by surname and first name. By surname and initials they were listed in muster rolls, parole lists, Official Records and Booth’s records at being at the siege of Vicksburg.[3] These may have been men he met during either of his hospitalisations as they are from different units and one was a hospital attendant. He also gave the full correct name of another Confederate and eventually found another listed veteran who signed an affidavit that they remembered him.[4] Documents at the Baton Rouge statehouse are mentioned in his 1953 obituary as proving his age and enlistment.[5]

Apart from muster rolls Ancestry.com has a collection of reproduced primary source material online. These include his enlistment papers, a November 1862 furlough permission note due to illness, a clothing allocation dated April 1863, a personalised document giving his name and regiment for the prisoner of war roll and his Vicksburg parole. Several of these documents have attestations or superior’s signatures. All five documents are signed with his name, give his regiment and are verified in a 1953 letter by Adjutant-General Bergin.

William Daniel Townsend, was born in Meridian Mississippi on 12th April 1846 according to family genealogy. The family moved to Louisiana when he was three. He ran away from home to enlist aged fifteen in September 1861.[6] His records which correctly show him as from Mississippi, show that he was enlisted in Company B of the newly formed 27th Louisiana Infantry on 9th August 1862. He was granted a sickness furlough for pneumonia and general disability that November.[7] He said that aged sixteen he saw battle service in Northern Louisiana and in Mississippi in battles at Natchez and Vicksburg and in actions around Alexandria and Pineville. His account of these actions was that “Whenever something would go wrong and more men were needed, they’d call us out of Vicksburg to go to the relief of our hard-pressed units.”[8] He claimed he served for two years, being captured during the siege of Vicksburg and that he was paroled in July 1863 because a bullet tore open his right arm and left it gangrenous. He did have a very faint three inch long scar there in old age.[9] Someone called William W. Townsend was enlisted in the company Townsend claimed he served in and was again listed in that same unit when Vicksburg surrendered and thousands of Confederates were recorded on the parole lists. The scant details in records fit in exactly with what he claimed – and scant or not, several of those records exist and are not forgeries, ambiguous or contradictory.

Evidence against verification: The two census birthdates of 1850 and 1853 (which disagree with each other, let alone his record) the use of his middle initial being a W. instead of a D and the given age on his clothing allocation form of 21 years. Although the commissioners did not quite say it, Townsend was a man desperate for Confederate pension money and insistent for it. This probably counted against him, but who in the USA in the 1930s was not financially desperate? Suspicions that he was not that same man as W.W. Townsend when he claimed his pension in 1935 were probably influenced by his hunger for money, but also based on the following facts, many of which Serrano mentions.[10]

By official records he was supposedly only thirteen when he enlisted. He claimed fifteen. Census records show him as born in February 1850 and as born again in 1853. The latter date means he was eight when he enlisted and this supposed fact still shows on some official documents. The issue of child soldiers and the unreliability of census documents has been dealt with elsewhere.

The other evidence against him is that:

He could not prove his age. The age on one document is 21 years

The muster roll he claims as his has William W. Townsend on lists, in his unit, without his middle name of Daniel.

He named a Captain Gus Cobb as his commanding officer. No record of him could be found.

He probably indulged in the common practice of hiding his real age and identity so as to be accepted for enlistment and not sent home. He named five Confederates as former comrades who could vouch for him, John Orr, Jim Orr, Lum Knox, B. Russell and Dave Seats. The commission quite seriously claimed they could not find them.[11] This was in the later 1930s, over seventy-two years after the siege ended! They should have looked at muster rolls and then very closely in the list of paroled Confederates at Vicksburg’s surrender. Annoyingly only first initials were usually written on that parole list, but there are two J. Orr’s, an L. Knox and a hospital worker B. Russell. All were Louisianans except one of the Orrs, a Tennessean officer. The only Dave Seats on muster rolls anywhere was a Texan cavalryman who spent some of the first half of the war in Louisiana. Knowing one name might be a coincidence or passed on knowledge, but five?

Eventually a Louisiana veteran, Alfred Fuller was found who signed an affidavit stating that he remembered Townsend and then he got his pension.[12] Alfred Fuller was not doing a favour for a similar favour in return, he was already a well-known and established figure in veteran’s organisations.

He would go on to be the last Division Commander of Louisiana’s United Confederate Veterans and as Townsend was active in this organization, they knew each other.[13] While no “Gus” Cobb turned up in the records, the 26th Louisiana had a first Lieutenant George Cobb and another Lieutenant Charles Cobb was nearby in the Crescent Regiment, the same unit as L. Knox. Was Gus a nickname? Townsend stated that Lieutenant Gus Cobb was of Lincoln Parrish and commanded when Townsend was in battle at Natchez.[14]

The difference of the middle initial on his records looks suspicious – until his muster roll record is read. It has a note, written by someone in the Confederate army and reading like a tip off, that the Union provost general was enquiring after a William D. Townsend. It may well have been that his desperate parents contacted the Union officials about their runaway son.

The point about his age emerges as weak: the officials should have looked in the archives. In a 1953 obituary article documents at the statehouse that prove his 1846 birthday and his enlistment are referred to as valid. Photos of him show a very tall man who could have passed for older than his age, as he claimed. The earlier photo of the three veterans at Richmond in 1851 makes this point. Townsend stands beside and much higher than Salling, himself taller than average at six foot one. He made no contradictory, outrageous or unlikely claims and recalled prosaic details of army life such as standing guard for thirty-six hours and how eating mule meat seemed comparatively scrumptious during Vicksburg’s siege.[15] Like William J. Bush he talked of wanting to leave but stayed.[16]

With so many prisoners taken at Vicksburg Grant paroled them on their word of honour not to re-join Confederate forces; many reneged, but Townsend, did not; either because his injury was slow to heal, or from being fed up with the war or from a sense of honour, he kept his word. In old age he said he could not remember taking the oath of allegiance to the Union, but if he did so it was under duress.[17] He became a farmer near Olla, and by his own account he once rode with the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era.[18] He admitted to not being reconciled to “the Yankees” until the 1951 veteran’s reunion. In one of his last interviews he stated that he saw the war as being caused by a personal power struggle between Lincoln and Davis. More sensibly he soon added that the North should have bought the slave’s freedom to avert the war, but although they could afford it, they would not pay the cost.

He also said that Southern people saw slaves as an expensive investment and were reluctant to part with them for nothing. He added that his family owned forty-four slaves. On another occasion he bluntly said that he enlisted because he “didn’t want to see papa’s negroes go free.”[19]

Like Albert Woolson and William Bush, family, music and veteran’s affairs became big parts of his life; he was a popular figure playing at dances.[20] Even after turning a hundred he would still visit hospitals to play tunes and to give patients cheer.[21]

More primary source evidence exists for Townsend’s service than exists for many accepted veterans. Despite some of his actions and opinions he should be recognised for what he was. Those wishing to dismiss his claim and say that the W. W. Townsend of the 1860s documents is a different person have a difficult case to prove. From ample primary source evidence available he was the second last living man who definitely fought for the Confederacy and the third last man to fight in the war. Few veterans have a single piece of evidence beyond their name on a muster roll. He had five government verified documents from the 1860s, the successful naming of five veterans and a testifying creditable eyewitness. Unlike many veterans his health never waned in his final weeks. He died less than an hour after being suddenly stricken on February 22nd 1953, only eighteen days before James Hard, the Union’s last fighting soldier. Hard is widely but incorrectly considered the last man to fight in the Civil War.

*

This is an excerpt from America’s Last Civil War Participants: An Investigation by Garry Victor Hill. The full text can be found for free at my website garryvictorhill.com.au/ Hopefully this will also be an e-book. Twenty eight other claimed Civil War survivors alive after 1951 are also assessed and Part One assesses the sources, problems and controversies about the last veterans.

[1] Company B 27th Louisiana Infantry Muster Roll 27TH Louisiana Infantry Data Base 5 of 14 pages in computer image numbering. http:/www.shepherd.edu/gtmeweb/LA27th/1203HTM

[2] ‘Federal Rolls of Prisoners of War Captured and Paroled at Vicksburg July 1863’; Andrew B. Booth, Military Records of Louisiana Confederate Soldiers and Louisiana Confederate Commands. New Orleans: N.P. 1920 archiveorg>e book and texts Allen County Public library.

[3] Ibid.; Serrano gives the names p76. I looked up those names in the Vicksburg Paroles, Booth, Official Records and Confederate Muster Rolls and found them there.

[4] Serrano, p76.

[5] Unsigned Obituary Article, Lewiston Evening Journal February 23rd 1953.

[6] Ibid,

[7] Company B 27th Louisiana Infantry Muster Roll.; Sickness Furlough original document see Ancestry.com then type William Townsend 1846-1953. Place: Louisiana.

[8] Hoar, Vol. III p1696.

[9] Serrano, p74; Hoar Vol. III p1696.

[10] Ibid, pp75-76.

[11]Ibid, p76.

[12] Serrano, pp 76-77.

[13] Herman Hattaway, “The United Confederate Veterans in Louisiana” in Louisiana History. Quarterly of the Louisiana History Association Volume XVI. No 1. Winter 1975 p15 pp35-36.

[14] Hoar, Vol. III p1696.

[15] Serrano, p74.

[16] Lewiston Evening Journal. previous citation.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Anon. Statesville Daily Record. 23rd December 1952. p18; Esthman Newman, “State’s Sole Confederate Veteran Marks his 104th Birthday at Olla.” The Shreveport Times. Sunday 16th April 1950.

[20] Serrano, p74; Eric C. Brock. “Shreveport’s Last Four Confederates.” 1950s newspaper clipping. Identification details not included. Ancestry.com previous Townsend citation.

[21] Serrano, p74; Hoar, Vol. III p1699. Photographic evidence and caption. Townsend plays the violin for an audience of veterans in a Shreveport hospital.

William D Townsend