I found this article quite interesting…and surprising. The life expectancy of someone who was born in the middle of the 19th century was somewhere around 48 years according to the stats I’ve seen. Yet, in 1913 there were upwards of 50 thousand Civil War vets still alive and attending the Battle of Gettysburg reunion. And that’s not even counting those vets who were still alive and not planning to attend. Those guys really defied the odds, living through a war in their youth and on to a ripe old age that is old even by our standards.
The other thing I found interesting is that so many vets would even want to attend the reunion. That was a brutal war, not your push button annihilation warfare of today. Soldiers on both sides would have witnessed their comrades disemboweled, dismembered, and worse. Families were torn apart…cities on both sides destroyed. It is surprising that so many of those vets from both sides would have wanted to attend.
AVERAGE life expectancy statistics can be a little misleading. Higher infant mortality for example will drive those numbers down. People didn’t keel over at 50 because of old age, it’s the higher number of babies that don’t survive that skews the average. But if you manage to make it to adulthood and don’t get copped by one of the various diseases that are today much more easily treatable with modern medicine, a person could live just as long then as now.
That’s probably it… in fact the article makes mention of one 112 year old vet who attended. Still, the modern life expectancy rate of 78 years is with the infant mortality rate factored in…So indeed, the big hurdle back then was to make it past childhood. If you could survive early death from natural causes then you had a good chance at a long life, as these vets proved.
I would say that they were not actually celebrating the evils of the war. Instead, they were celebrating their bond with each other that resulted from facing those evils together.
From what i have read, there were a lot of those gatherings based on the bond of surviving the horrors of war. There were/are some gatherings in Europe where both sides from WWII share experiences with each other.
That was the most captivating history article (railroad or otherwise) that I’ve read in years, and it left me wanting to know more about the event. Just shows how tough those old guys were.
I agree…and to say they were tough is an understatement. I’ve read a lot about the Civil War and just reading about some of what those soldiers and others went through was difficult.
Remember, those Civil War vets weren’t celebrating the death, destruction, and the horror. What they missed and were nostalgic for was their youth. “In our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” Civil War vet and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said.
And some of these men were VERY long lived. The last Civil War vets, both Confederate, died in 1959.
There’s a great story I read years ago. A veteran journalist (who’s name escapes me) had a chance as a reporter for his high school paper in the 30’s to interview a Union Army veteran who’d been at the battle of Gettysburg, and then was one of the troops on hand when Lincoln gave the “Gettysburg Address.” The old man saw the teenager was very nervous and asked him why. The young man said he was in awe of him, the old vet had been places and seen things that he’d only read about in history books.
“Oh, that’s OK son, I understand fully,” the old man said. “I felt the same way at your age when I met a man who’d been at Yorktown with General Washington!”
Kind of shows you what a young country this really is. When I was born in 1953 there were Civil War vets still living. When those men were born there were Revolutionary War vets still living.
True as far as it goes, but I think there’s more to it than that. My father was a WWII veteran from the backwoods of south Georgia, who had very few close friends. Yet, to the end of his life he maintained friendships with a guy from Maryland and a guy from Ohio who fought beside him in the war. They had been through fire together and were sort of welded together by their shared experience. Even though they returned to the areas where they grew up after the war, they still cared about one another despite the distance between them and the passage of the years. Even veterans who didn’t know one another during the War Between the States could respect one another for having fought during the war, even if it were on different sides.
Think back through your own life. If you ever went through a really tough time and had a friend then who stood by you through it, if they called on you today and needed help you would help them if you could. Somehow when you share a tough experience with someone and find them loyal and dependable when the chips are down, you feel close to them forever.
I hope I may piggyback onto your interesting story. As a young lawyer Abe Lincoln belonged to an organization where the members gave speeches to the group in order to learn the art. In one of his speeches he pointed out there were still a few veterans of the Revolutionary War living. He compared then to old trees that had weathered many storms, trees which were venerated but which soon would be gone due to old age and infirmity. And he asked who would be left to remind Americans of what the nation was all about when the last one died. He answered his own question by saying at that point all we would have is the cold and unemotional logic of the founding fathers, logic that is memorialized in the Constitution. And we must hold on to that as a legacy.
Abe Lincoln was in his twenties when the made that speech. He certainly could not know where life would lead him. But the belief never left him. Many years later when Lincoln was elected President and secession began the men who had led the Republican party wanted to accept it. Horace Greely editorialized that we should not try to pin the Confederates to the Union with bayonets. And William Seward began negotiations with Confederate Commissioners about the terms of a peace. Lincoln would have none of it. The nation was the legacy of the founding fathers and he would do everything he could to protect that legacy. And he did just that.
By everything I’ve ever read about soldiers in combat, is that you feel that you have more in common with the men shooting at you than anyone in your own rear echelon. A “band of brothers,” if you will.
I’m sure you are correct on this point, Don. Still, these were the days before antibiotics and even adults could succumb. During the civil war many died when their war wounds became infected. And consider Theodore Judah who died of disease from a mosquito bite as he rode the Panama Railroad on his way to New York.
I don’t know. I’ve read that the war didn’t just end and all was good after that. Vets on the Confederate side were discriminated against by employers. Vets struggled to cope with injuries and disabilities when there was virtually no assistance from anyone. They had to suck it up and move forward as best they could. Hard feelings, anger and hatred lingered for decades after the war. Even today, particularly in the South, some people still fly the Confederate flag. It’s a war that broke up families and pitted neighbour against neighbour. But I guess time does heal some wounds, and by 1913 some Union and Confederate vets could get together peacefully in remembrance.
Still, his death at age 37 was tragic. He was pretty important to the Central Pacific Railroad before the Associates brought him out. Had he lived railroad history might be different but we will never know.
Tragic indeed. He never really got the recognition he deserved. Maybe he was a bit too far ahead of his time…and sometimes the wrong people get all the credit. The Big Four, for whatever reason, live on in history (especially in California) while very few people would even recognize the name of Judah. His widow said as much when the UP and CP joined in 1869…I read somewhere that it was a said day for her as her husband even then had been all but forgotten.
Also, many of the vets served at a much younger age than vets of later wars. Ages in the ranks were as young as 14. Drummer boys were truly boys, as some were only 7 or 8.
You are absolutely right, Ulrich. And to top it all off the associates denied Judah’s widow the support she should have had despite the fact that they could easily have afforded it.
Judah was a railroad man and a visionary. The associates were merchants always looking to make a profit. I don’t want to use the standards of the present day to pass a harsh judgement on them as many have done. They simply were the men they were. But Judah did quarrel with them because he wanted to build a first class railroad and they wanted to take the money and run. Had Theodore Judah been in charge and remained in charge things would have been a lot better. As it is the railroad and the country were a lot better off because of his influence both on the route and on the Pacific Railroad Acts.