Last Person to Receive Civil War-Era Pension Dies

That seems completely irrelevant to GP's point.

If a Civil War veteran were born in 1845, served in his late teens, and died at 85, then anyone older than 90 could have spoken to him.

Play with assumptions a bit, or go back a few decades, and the numbers become much less extreme.

I think Russ Roberts of econtalk went into this pretty in depth.

EconTalk: John Cogan on Entitlements and the High Cost of Good Intentions http://www.EconTalk.org http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2017/Coganentitlement...

Ironically, everyone here seems to be angling at the political angle, not the fact that pensions can be easily survive well beyond what they were intended, especially public ones.

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

Through census and immigration records, it looks like every branch of my family tree came over between 1890 and 1910.

Thing is, only one of those branches was even well-known among my family, the others are all lost history. Out of curiosity I've asked some friends and co-workers and several have said similar things - they don't know when their ancestors immigrated, their personal family history just doesn't go back that far.

My earliest ancestors came over in 1620, the last came over in the 1850s. So during the civil war, all my ancestors were already on this continent. However, none of them participated in the war since they all lived out west, beyond the boundaries of the USA, throughout the war.

~31 million Americans in 1860, so it's likely to be a large number.

Half of my family, of German Dutch ancestry, dates along the east coast to before the Revolutionary War, and spent the better part of 200 years as farmers in the northern Union Appalachia region (the last generation that were farmers is almost gone now; the family farm land - which isn't very valuable land - has been gradually sold off over the past century; the area is difficult land to farm, it's a rough way of life, and it's nearly impossible to compete with modern corporate farming). The other half came over during one of the large immigration waves toward the end of the 19th century.

There's a lot of us, especially in the South. My great-grandfather was a child in the siege of Petersburg. My mom still tells the story of how the family house was struck by a Union cannonball as they were sitting outside it. She heard it directly from her grandfather when she was a child herself.

Some of my ancestors arrived as early as the 1620s. There have been several books about them. Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1333427255

My Civil War era ancestors were in Nevada at the time, where we've largely remained since.

Possibly a lot, given the potential exponential descendants 1 person could have. I have several ancestors and their relatives that fought for the North. My kids could trace 5-6 generations back to the civil war, meaning 32-64 ancestors to consider.

I have ancestors living in America in the 17th century.

I know someone (born in 1951) who said they remember a school announcement that the last Civil War soldier died. That matches what you had heard.

If I remember correctly the "why we fight" series of WW2 propaganda films opens with elderly American Civil War veterans participating in the 1940 Washington DC memorial day parade.

That's quite a story. I guess you never really know when your number is up.

Civil partnerships, brought in for the purpose of giving the same legal rights for gay couples as married ones had, presumably also granted these rights. Since then gay marriage has rendered these redundant for their original purpose but they still exist. Some overtly non-romantically involved, long term, co-habitees are now using civil partnerships to protect the surviving person from estate duties upon the other's death. The anomaly now is that the people have to be of the same sex and there is pressure to allow people of the opposite sex to form them.

There’s no estate tax in the US anymore up to $10 million after the most recent tax bill passed.

I’m not sure there’s much need to “dodge” anything anymore for 99.9% of people.

The "line marriage" concept from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes to mind here.

The grandson comes across as a nice sensible countryman, no airs or graces despite the extraordinary lineage and the wealth he seems to have, judging by his house.

The 1619 project has admirable aspirations, but it's maybe worth noting that some prominent academic historians have criticised it for inaccuracy: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians...

Still very worthwhile if you're unfamiliar with the deep and ongoing legacy of slavery in the United States.

The solid south flipped in the 1960s. LBJ through force of his will basically betrayed the senate democrats and pushed through significant social legislation. (Voting, civil rights, great society, etc)

The solid south types saw the writing on the wall and started breaking away. The “Southern Strategy” as implemented by Nixon and perfected by Reagan basically started as a collaboration of conservative southerners (“rehab Democrats”) and western resource extraction interests. Eventually they took over the GOP and you have the circus that we see today.

> The Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?

They started flipping with the New Deal Coalition, which gave the Democratic Party a new but not yet unifying working class national agenda.

The splitting off of the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (“Dixiecrats”) in the late 1940s was a response to this and the Democratic Party’s support for Civil Rights at the time.

The major turning point, though, was Johnson's support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican effort to exploit that known as the Southern Strategy. The Dixiecrats hadn't lasted as a breakaway group; the Republicans in the 1940s and into the 1960s had a strong base of support for Civil Rights too, and there wasn't anywhere better than the Democratic Party for white racists to go. But when the Republicans actively courted them, that changed.

The phase of political realignment that started in the 1960s (which was itself an extension of the one starting in the 1940s) completed around 1994-1995, as the last of the Southern conservative Democrats (those further right than the center-right neoliberal faction like Clinton) in office jumped ship to the Republican Party.

Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on party flipping: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/pierce....

dataflow's link will have more detail. Besides the Southern Democrats you had the machine democrats in the urban cities whose power block was representing working class immigrants and minorities. Except blacks who were Republicans up until the late 1920's. Blacks broke for FDR in 1932.

Oh gosh, the answers and discussion here so far are quite bad.

First, we have to discard the idea that there was a specific year, or even decade, that the two parties "flipped". The history of politics is absurdly complex and involves lots of different players and there are rarely any discrete points in history you can point to and say, "this is precisely where this big ideological shift happened". It would be a lot like asking, "what year did tea party politics take over the Republican party?"

We also need to address the dog whistle in the air: modern Republicans love saying that they are the party of Lincoln and that it was Democrats that fought for slavery. They count on people having heard of this shift happening but not being well enough versed in it to understand where the lie is hidden.

Let's start with Andrew Jackson. He started as a member of the Democratic-Republican party but he pushed hard for an ideology that would become known as Jacksonian democracy [1]. This alienated a lot of fellow members of the Democratic-Republican party, and they joined forces with the remnants of the Federalists and a handful of others and formed the Whig party. The Democratic-Republican party became the Democratic party, led by Jackson. Neither the Whig party nor the Democratic party had views which exactly parallel any of today's popular political ideologies.

After the Mexican war, the loose coalition of Whigs started to fracture over the issue of slavery. A bunch of smaller groups, including former Whigs, joined together to form the Republican party, which opposed the expansion of slavery. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the Civil War, the Democrats started to split into northern Democrats and southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats"). At this time, slavery is the leading political issue of the day, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Lincoln runs as a Republican and wins. There's a Civil War, and Reconstruction begins. The northern Democrats had held a wishy-washy position on slavery, and as a result, they lost all political power. Industrialist political influences in the north became represented by the victorious Republican party, while the Democratic party held on to power in the south.

This is the part where people see a "pro-slavery Democratic south" and an "anti-slavery Republican north", but neither of these parties at the time are all that similar to their modern antithesis. The Republican party at this time has a conservative group and a progressive group, and they fight frequently over things like concentration of wealth (sound familiar?). Southern Democrats meanwhile focused most of their political efforts on fighting any and every expansion of civil rights for former slaves.

Conservative Republicans won the presidency with McKinley, but Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive, was his VP. McKinley gets assassinated, Roosevelt takes office, and proceeds to enact a bunch of progressive reforms. [2] This ultimately results in a lot of friction between Roosevelt and conservative Republicans and that leads to an internal fight, with Taft leading the conservatives and Roosevelt forming the Progressive party.

Along comes Woodrow Wilson. (Bear with me, we're getting there.) Wilson, a Democrat, has been frustrated by his party's inability to tackle any issues other than civil rights. He manages to gather enough political influence to take control of the Democratic party, getting it out of the hands of the Dixiecrats. [3]

The infighting in the Republican party meanwhile leaves southern blacks unprotected, so they get really unhappy with both parties. All of this comes to a head post-Depression when FDR comes along. He's a very egalitarian, populist, post-Wilsom Democrat, and he captures a lot of political power.

So the situation now is this: there is a broken Republican party in the north, with progressive Republicans and conservative Republicans, and there is a progressive Democratic party, and there are a bunch of unhappy Dixiecrats -- the "Southern Democrats". FDR manages to pick up a bunch of the progressive Republicans along with black voters, and then Truman comes along and continues FDR's racially progressive policies, so this is when black voters begin to vote as Democrats.

The Southern Democrats were nearly shut out of national politics altogether at this point, while northern conservative Republicans were kept on life support until Nixon. There's a Nixon-Goldwater fight over the Republican party, but Nixon is an absurdly shrewd politician, and over the course of several years, he's able to build an FDR-like coalition of multiple groups under the Republican banner, including the northern conservatives and the former Dixiecrats, who were thrilled to get some political power again.

Nixon though was still an old-guard Republican and he would barely recognize today's Republican party. But, from here, the remaining dots are easy to connect.

This was the shortest summary of 150 years of messy politics that I could come up with. I'm skipping over a lot of important details and there are probably some points here that can be argued by those better-versed in this stretch of history.

But the important part is that these two modern parties have not existed as constant political entities, and so they didn't "switch sides". They were just labels for loosely-associated smaller political and demographic groups, and those groups changed allegiances depending on the biggest political issues of the day.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonian_democracy

[2]: The excellent u/Samuel_Gompers with a lot more detail on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nolzz/why_w...

[3]: u/Samuel_Gompers again, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yczua/can_so...

Sorry, if you are pointing towards Presidential politics as evidence, that actually supports the OP's point that the roots of this party flip began in the 1960s.

Goldwater won the American deep south handily in '64 based on his "states rights" rhetoric.

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

The party flip happened due to single-issue voting on the topic of abortion. It became the Republican platform during and after Reagan. They've since co-opted a host of other issues that cater to their base, but abortion is still at the heart of it.

Abortion changed the Republican party.