In 1968 I saw the unranked Ole Miss Rebels defeat the #3 ranked Tennessee Vols in Jackson Mississippi at a highly anticipated game where Archie Manning stole the day as the Rebel quarterback. Little did I know that Lester McClain who was the Vols’ first black player in 1968 was on the field and that his father was 50 years old when he was born and his grandfather was 50 years old when his father was born and that meant that his grandfather had been born into slavery. I just discovered that amazing fact recently. Today I have discovered another amazing fact that relates back to that same time period.
Still Paying for the Civil War by Michael M. Phillips

Mose Triplett, second from right, with his first wife, Mary, and unidentified people. After Mary’s death in the 1920s, Pvt. Triplett married Elida Hall, 50 years his junior. She suffered from mental disabilities, as did their daughter Irene. Collection of Dorothy Killian

Irene Triplett, 84, the last living recipient of VA benefits connected to the Civil War. Her father, Mose Triplett, fought for both South and North. Michael M. Phillips/The Wall Street Journal (Ms. Triplett), Jerry Orton (certificate)
Ms. Triplett’s father, Pvt. Mose Triplett, was born in 1846, on the mountainous Tennessee border in Watauga County, N.C. He was 16 years old when he got caught up in the fratricidal violence of the Civil War. North Carolina seceded from the Union soon after Confederate forces attacked federal troops at Fort Sumter, S.C., on April 12, 1861. Confederate records show Pvt. Triplett joined the 53rd North Carolina Infantry Regiment in May 1862. He spent half of that enlistment hospitalized, though records aren’t clear whether for illness or a gunshot wound to the shoulder that he suffered at some point during the war. In January 1863, Pvt. Triplett transferred to the 26th North Carolina Infantry Regiment. The regiment’s farmers, tradesmen and mountain men were commanded by 20-year-old Col. Henry Burgwyn, Jr., a strict drillmaster educated at the Virginia Military Institute, according to David McGee’s regimental history. Earlier, in 1859, Col. Burgwyn had been one of the VMI cadets dispatched to provide security at the hanging of John Brown, the famous abolitionist.
In early 1863, Pvt. Triplett joined a Confederate regiment, the 26th North Carolina Infantry, commanded by an officer the soldiers called the ‘boy colonel.’
Col. Burgwyn’s martinet ways alienated his men at first. But he won their affection and a reputation for coolness under fire when he guided the regiment across a swollen river after the Southern defeat at New Bern, N.C. The regiment spent months sparring with Federal forces. In June 1863, the men were posted outside Fredericksburg, Va., trading artillery rounds with Union troops across the Rappahannock River. On June 15, the North Carolinians began the long march through the Shenandoah River Valley, across a slice of Maryland and into Gettysburg, Pa. Gen. Robert E. Lee intended to give the North a taste of the war, fought so far mostly on Southern soil.

Unable to read or write, Pvt. Triplett signed an X when enlisting in the Union’s 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry. National Archives
Along the way, Pvt. Triplett fell ill with fever and went to a Confederate hospital in an old tobacco warehouse in Danville, Va. Eight days later, he disappeared. Pvt. Triplett was “present or accounted for until he deserted on June 26, 1863,” state records say. He missed a terrible battle for his regiment, and the South, whose loss at Gettysburg portended its final defeat. Of the regiment’s 800 men who fought at Gettysburg, 734 were killed, wounded or captured. There was a strong strain of Union sympathy in western North Carolina. Friendly locals often helped hide Confederate deserters. Pvt. Triplett crossed the mountains to Knoxville, Tenn., where on Aug. 1, 1864, he joined a Union regiment, the 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry. Military records listed him as a farmer, 5 feet 8 inches, blue eyes and sandy hair. He signed his enlistment contract with an X. An Army surgeon certified him “free from all bodily defects and mental infirmity, which would in any way disqualify him from performing the duties of a soldier.” The recruiting officer swore that Pvt. Triplett was “entirely sober when enlisted.” Pvt. Triplett’s older brother, Darby, joined the same day. “He served his time out with the Union so he would get a pension,” said Pvt. Triplett’s grandson, Charlie Triplett, of North Wilkesboro, N.C.
Charlie Triplett, grandson of Pvt. Mose Triplett, visits his grandfather’s grave overlooking Elk Creek, in Wilkes County, N.C.
Pvt. Triplett’s Union regiment was nicknamed ” Kirk’s Raiders,” after its daring, Tennessee-born commander, Col. George Washington Kirk. Col. Kirk, a carpenter, rocketed from private to commander of a regiment he assembled from Union supporters in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. Pvt. Triplett’s new regiment slipped in and out of North Carolina to destroy Confederate supply depots, railroads, and bridges in the region where Pvt. Triplett grew up, according to a history by Matthew Bumgarner.

Col. George Washington Kirk, commander of 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry, with his wife, Mariah Louisa Kirk; far left with his father Alexander, standing, and his brother John, at left Collection of Joey Maurer Woolridge and Leon Kirk; collection of Leon Kirk via Tarheel Press

National Archives
Many of the marriages took place during the Great Depression, when veterans’ pensions offered some financial security. About a third of the wives were nurses, offering security for aged veterans, as well, according to Mr. Hoar. Elida Hall’s 1924 marriage doesn’t appear to have been so blessed. She was mentally disabled, according to people who knew her. The couple lost three babies—Phema, Patsy, and Billie Coolidge. Irene was born in 1930 when her father was age 83 and her mother 34. Irene, too, suffered from mental disabilities, said past and current nursing home staff. Pvt. Triplett was just shy of his 87th birthday when Elida gave birth to a son, Everette, later the father of Charlie Triplett. Irene and Everette Triplett were born in tough country during tough times. The forested hills ran with white lightning from illegal stills. Ms. Triplett said she didn’t drink moonshine, but she got hooked on tobacco in first grade. “I dipped snuff in school, and I chewed tobacco in school,” said Ms. Triplett, who lives in a nursing home in Wilkesboro. “I raised homemade tobacco. I chewed that, too. I chewed it all.” Irene said her teachers beat her with an oak paddle. Her parents continued the beatings at home, she said: “When you got a whooping in school you’d be getting tore up when you got back in those mountains.” At school, children would taunt Irene about her father the “traitor,” said Charlie Triplett. She dropped out after sixth grade, unable to read or write proficiently. Of her parents, she said, “I didn’t care for neither one of them, to tell you the truth about it. I wanted to get away from both of them. I wanted to get me a house and crawl in it all by myself.”
In 1938, on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the government paid for Civil War veterans from both sides to attend a reunion on the Pennsylvania battlefield. Pvt. Triplett was one of more than 1,800 who went. “Lincoln spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field; and the years have laid their balm upon their wounds,” President Franklin Roosevelt told them. “Men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray are here together, a fragment spared by time.” Pvt. Triplett wore both, but he kept that secret during the reunion. Organizers housed him in the Confederate camp. The Gettysburg Times quoted him saying he had “fooled everybody” because he had actually been in the Union Army for the entire war, a tale at odds with his military records.
In 1938, Pvt. Triplett attended a Civil War reunion on the spot where the Battle of Gettysburg had been fought 75 years earlier. President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the aged veterans.
“We didn’t want to leave the Union,” Pvt. Triplett told the newspaper, “but our neighbors did.” Pvt. Triplett died of cancer days after returning from Gettysburg, at age 92. His family put pennies on his eyes and buried him on a hillside covered in holly, pine, oak and cedar.
In Wilkes County, the local Sons of Confederate Veterans of the Civil War put Confederate flags on tombstones of rebel soldiers. Mose Triplett’s granite grave marker has no flag and is conspicuous in its neutrality. “He was a Civil War soldier,” it reads. In 1943, 13-year-old Irene and her mother, unable to fend for themselves, moved into the Wilkes County poorhouse. Locals remember it as a grim, two-story brick building on the outskirts of town, where mice and rats scampered on concrete floors.
The Wilkes County Poorhouse

Irene moved into the poorhouse in 1943 when she was 13 years old.

The facility included a ‘colored ward’ and jail for black prisoners.

Residents with tuberculosis were housed separately in the TB hut.
Photos: Pardue Library, Wilkes Community College


During World War I, 2nd Lt. Forreste Ellenberger was a white officer in the segregated black 25th Infantry Regiment–some of the famous Buffalo Soldiers. His widow, Florence Ellenberger, 103, received $1,113 a month from the VA to help pay her expenses at Tampa, Fla., assisted-living facility. The pension fell to $90 a month after Medicaid’s contribution increased last fall. Her antique locket holds photos of Lt. Ellenberger and herself. Edward Linsmier for The Wall Street Journal

Bill Collins was a cook with the 14th Cavalry Regiment during skirmishing on the Texas border with Mexico in the late 1910s. Mr. Collins owned a three-chair barbershop in Somerset, Pa., until his death in 1976. VA payments to his widow, Alda Collins, helped cover rest-home costs until her death last September at age 111. James Collins
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