Widows of North, South to Meet

William Jasper Martin and Robert Anderson might have tried to kill each other, had they met on the Gettysburg battlefield.
But on Tuesday, Alberta Martin, 90, the only known surviving Confederate widow, and Daisy Anderson, 97, one of only two living Union widows, just want to shake each other’s hands and catch up on old times when they meet at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennyslvania.
“I just want to ask how she’s been, and how she’s been able to live such a long life,” Martin said on the night before she left for Gettysburg.
“We will just talk about what we’ve seen, and I might find out more about the war. She might not be able to remember too much.”
The meeting was organized by Dr. Kenneth Chancey, commander of the Col. William C. Oates Camp No. 809 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.
Chancey, an Enterprise dentist who spearheaded the SCV camp’s efforts to get Martin’s pension last year, heard there were also a couple of Union widows still living and in contact with the SUVCW and Gettysburg National Military Park. So he asked Martin in May if she’d like to meet the Union widows.
“At the time, she was in the hospital with the flu, so she couldn’t get too excited,” Chancey said, “but she said, ‘Let me feel better first. Then, I will get excited.’
“She reminds me a lot of my maternal grandmother. When she died, I never thought I’d have a relationship with an older woman like that until I met Mrs. Martin.”
Efforts to reach the other surviving Union widow, Bertha January of Tennessee, were unsuccessful, Chancey said.
The first date mentioned was Nov. 15, which Gettysburg recognizes as Remembrance Day, but Chancey requested an earlier date because of the deteriorating health of both women.
Anderson’s husband was an escaped former slave who served in the 125th United States Colored Troops. They married in 1922 when he was 79, and she was 21. Anderson died in an automobile accident in 1930. His widow now lives in Denver.
Martin’s husband served in Company K of the Fourth Alabama Infantry Regiment. They married in 1927 when he was 81, and she was 21 and had one child, William Oren Martin, now 68.
He became ill after attending a United Confederate Veterans meeting in Montgomery and died in 1932. Martin lives in Elba.
The widows plan to be special guests Tuesday at an interment ceremony for an unknown Civil War soldier who was found in a railroad embankment at Gettysburg in March 1996. It was the first discovery at Gettysburg since 1939.
If their health permits, Chancey said the women hope to shake hands over “The Angle,” the famous stone wall at Cemetery Ridge. For years after the Civil War until 1937, a Confederate and Union veteran met at the wall and shook hands.
Since adopting the Confederate widow, the SCV camp has taken Martin to the opening of the Civil War Museum in Franklin, Tenn., Richmond, Va., and reenactment activities in Selma. Her trip to Virginia was Martin’s first airplane trip in her life.
Martin, who had been ill recently, but was beginning to feel better before her flight to Gettysburg, said she was also looking forward to a breakfast Tuesday morning at Lee’s Headquarters. Chancey said she would be permitted to eat with the actual utensils General Robert E. Lee used 134 years ago.