Confederate widow dies.

When Alberta Martin died in 2004, it was widely reported that she had been the last surviving Confederate widow. It wasn’t true. The very day of Alberta Martin’s funeral, Martha Boltz of the United Daughters of the Confederacy published a story about a Confederate widow who still survived: Maudie Celia Hopkins of Lexa, Arkansas. Mrs. Hopkins, who died a week ago today — Sunday, 24 August — at the age of 93, wasn’t the last surviving Confederate widow, either, but she was the last one known to the public.

Maudie Celia Acklin was 19 when she married Confederate veteran William M. Cantrell in 1934. He was 86.

Many years later, Maudie recalled, “I was born into a family with a lot of children. My daddy couldn’t make a living and I needed shoes and a new dress.” Cantrell told her he’d pay her $12 to clean his house.

Boltz says, “Then, one day he asked her, ‘Why don’t you move in down here?’ She said, ‘Oh, that wouldn’t be proper.’ He told her, ‘Well, then, if you marry me, I will give you my property when I die.’”

Maudie married the old man and cared for him until he died in 1937 after being thrown from a mule. “He was a decent, respectable man,” she said. “He treated me right.” After his death, Maudie inherited Cantrell’s house and 200 acres of land, but not the pension. The state of Arkansas denied pension benefits to Confederate widows born after 1870. “After Mr. Cantrell died I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat,” she said. “It was hard times; you had to work to eat.”

For many years, she didn’t like to talk about her first marriage, afraid people would judge her for her marriage to a man so much older than she, but she was persuaded to be interviewed after Alberta Martin died.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I’ve worked hard my whole life and did what I had to, what I could, to survive. I didn’t want to talk about it for a while because I didn’t want people to gossip about it. I didn’t want people to make it out to be worse than it was.”

After Cantrell’s death, Maudie married Winfred White, by whom she had three children, and eventually married twice more. She was widowed four times.

Martha Boltz says she knows of other Confederate widows still living, but they don’t want any publicity. The last known Union widow, Gertrude Janeway, died in 2003.