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Jan.-March 2015
Vol. 9, No. 1
Richmond, Ky.















Living offspring of Civil War veterans
are very few, but they’re still around

Fred Upham, 93, relates that his father, as a Civil War soldier, shook hands with President Abraham Lincoln at the White House.

And ninety-two-year-old Iris Lee Gay Jordan remembers the colorful stories her Civil War father told on the porch of her girlhood home.

Upham and Jordan are among fewer than 35 living offspring of men who fought in the War Between the States. These very old “children” were born mostly in the 1910s and 1920s to Civil War veterans and young brides. The fathers, typically on second marriages, were in their 70s or 80s when these children were born.

Fred’s father, William, was a private in the Union Army’s Second Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He was severely wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), in 1861, and later personally appointed by President Lincoln to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. William Upham later was elected governor of Wisconsin. Fred, a Wisconsin native, now lives in Colorado.

Iris, who lives in Georgia, is one of only 11 surviving daughters of Southern soldiers documented by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She was nine when her father, Lewis F. Gay, died, in October 1931. Her eyes still well up with tears as she remembers him.

“Mostly, he told stories on Sundays,” she says. “I could sit on the porch and listen to his stories all day.”

Corp. Gay had been in the Confederate Army’s Fourth Florida Volunteer Infantry. He saw combat in numerous bloody battles across the South: in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia. He was reportedly one of only 23 soldiers left in the Fourth Florida by war’s end.

Iris’s and Fred’s fathers were lucky. After being captured in separate battles in 1861, they were placed in prisoner of war camps – William Upham was sent south to Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., and Lewis Gay north to Fort Delaware near Wilmington. Both were released the next year in a prisoner exchange that swapped Union soldiers for Confederates.

Their treatment as prisoners, they both said, was humane at this early stage in the war – in contrast to the horrors that happened later on in notorious places like Andersonville, in southwest Georgia.

“Prisoners were exchanged only sporadically for part of the war,” according to Derek Mills, educator at the National Civil War Museum, in Harrisburg, Pa. “Those who were exchanged early on were very lucky. As the war dragged on, exchanges broke down and didn”t happen much again until the war was nearly over.”

Stories remembered
Fred Upham and Iris Lee Gay
Jordan vividly recall stories
from their fathers about the
Civil War. Growing up, most
of their classmates and
teachers couldn’t believe
Fred’s and Iris’s fathers
were Civil War veterans.
– National Geographic photos
Iris and Fred say their fathers held no animosity toward their captors.

“My father said that the men in the North were just like he was,” she said. “He told us, ‘We were all far away from home, and we all would much rather have been home with our families.’ There was no bitterness on his part at all.”

Among the experiences of William Upham was one involving Confederate States President Jefferson Davis. Upham was corporal of the guard for the imprisoned Davis and played checkers and chess with him. He said Davis was pleasant and social, full of reminiscences and was a fine Southern gentleman who knew Wisconsin better than even William did because Jefferson Davis had traveled the state as a surveyor.

Clifford Hamm’s father, John, fought for the South, serving in the 71st Regiment, North Carolina Troops.

“My seventh- and eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Little, taught about the war from the Southern point of view,” Hamm related. “To her, it was the war of Northern aggression – not the Civil War, because there was nothing civil about it."

Clifford, who followed in his father’s warrior footsteps as a U.S. Marine in World War II, says he still thinks of the War Between the States the way Mrs. Little did.

“My father would never acknowledge the South was defeated,” he commented. “He used the word ‘overcome.’”

Among this group of Civil War children are four surviving siblings from the same family: Charles Parker Pool’s sons, John, Garland and William, and his daughter, Florence Wilson. Their father served in the Union’s Sixth West Virginia Infantry.

“My father didn’t like to talk much about the war,” Garland noted. “He did say the main reason he wanted to fight was that he didn’t want to see the nation divided, and because he was against slavery.”

William remembers the story of his father’s company capturing a Confederate soldier who had a slave as his personal attendant throughout the war. The slave, freed when his master was taken prisoner, had asked Pool’s company commander for his gun.

“The slave clubbed the Rebel with it and stood over him saying, ‘The bottom rail is now on top.’”

Whether Northern or Southern, these Civil War sons and daughters shared a collective experience as they grew up: In school, when they told how their fathers had fought in the Civil War, teachers and classmates scoffed, saying it couldn’t be true.

“There’s been a lot of sideways glances over the years,” Fred said.

“They told me, ‘It must have been your grandfather or your great-grandfather,’” Hazel Jeter explained. “They thought I was lying and looked at me like I was crazy.”

Hazel is the daughter of Silas D. Mason of the First Maine Cavalry.

Gail Lowman Crosby, president of the real daughter club for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, emphasized that the Civil War children are a true link to “another part of this country’s history.”

“Whether Confederate or Union, they’re a treasure,” she continued. “The stories they tell today are the stories they heard as they sat on their daddy's knee.”

Articles and photos appearing on www.thekentuckycivilwarbugle.com may be used with permission. For permission, contact Bugle editor Ed Ford at fordpr@mis.net.

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