By Ronald S. Coddington
In the autumn of 1864, with the war in its desperate final stages, a 17-year-old Alabama farm boy accompanied a neighbor returning to his regiment along the frontlines in Virginia. The teenager, Riggs Crump, enlisted in Company G of the 10th Alabama Infantry on October 15. He joined the regiment at a precarious moment—Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, battered and diminished, struggled to hold the lines around Petersburg and Richmond.
Born Pleasant Riggs Crump on Dec. 23, 1847, in Alabama’s St. Clair County, he grew up among in a nation divided along the lines of slavery and sovereignty, He was 13 years old when the war began. Though his motivations for becoming a Confederate soldier are lost, the timing of his enlistment suggests he wanted to be part of the fighting before it ended.
Fresh-faced Crump took his place among the battle-hardened veterans of the 10th. They numbered a little more than 200 souls—a shadow of what they were when the regiment had been forged in the early heat of the war. Organized in Montgomery in June 1861, its record reads like a litany of the Eastern Theater’s bloodiest campaigns: Dranesville, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Gaines’ Mill, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the Siege of Petersburg. Of the more than 1,400 men who had appeared on its muster rolls, nearly 300 fell in battle or died of their wounds, about 180 lost their lives to disease, and roughly 250 were discharged or transferred elsewhere.
Crump’s baptism by fire—and his lone combat—occurred in early February 1865 at Hatcher’s Run, Va.
Crump came to know these last survivors of the 10th during the war’s final, brutal months. His baptism by fire—and his lone combat—occurred in early February 1865 at Hatcher’s Run, part of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s relentless offensive that resulted in the gain of another few miles of territory for the U.S. Army.
When the end came on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Crump stood among the 208 men and officers paroled after Lee surrendered to Grant in the parlor of the McLean House.
Crump returned to Alabama, where he and his neighbors scratched out a living in the war-torn South. He married Mary E. Hall in 1872, received a plot of land near the town of Lincoln—a gift from his father-in-law—and raised a family. Crump lived a quiet life rooted in work and faith. A spiritual man, he became a deacon in the Refuge Baptist Church and read the Bible through seven times. He recited his favorite passage by heart—John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
Years passed. Crump’s children grew to adulthood. He remarried following Mary’s death in 1902, He watched the world pass by from the comfort of his porch, within sight of a sapling he had planted that grew into a towering shade tree. Crump became a local legend as he aged. He celebrated his 90th, 100th, 101st, 102nd, and 103rd birthdays surrounded by generations of his family, neighbors, and well-wishers—and reporters eager to interview him. He reminisced mostly about God and the changes he had seen—Reconstruction, the Great Depression, two world wars, and transformations in transportation, technology, and society that spanned from the age of the telegraph to the atomic bomb. He viewed it all through the lens of biblical prophecy.
By this time, Alabama provided him with a Confederate veteran’s pension that started at $100 per month, and grew to $150. He received the honorary title of colonel and was celebrated as Alabama’s last surviving link to the Confederate army and the Civil War when he passed on New Year’s Eve, 1951. He was 104 years old.
During the 1950s, as the last veterans of the Blue and Gray passed away and the centennial of the Civil War approached, a number of men claimed to be the oldest Confederate veteran. The media publicized many of the claims believing them to be genuine. Following his death in 1959, Walter Williams of Texas was marked as the last surviving Confederate though his story could not be verified.
Three decades passed before researchers sorted out the various claims. The scholarship of Dr. Jay S. Hoar, William Marvel, Richard A. Serrano, Frank L. Gryzb, and others pointed to Crump as the oldest Confederate veteran.
Ronald S. Coddington is Editor and Publisher of MI.
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