Every month, she was receiving a pension of 73 dollars in the name of a war ended a century and a half. Irene Triplett died last week in a retirement home in North Carolina, in which State she was born, 90 years earlier. With it dies the last living person to have a direct link with the Civil War in the United States. With it turns a part of the history that America today can barely look him in the face.
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Born in 1930, Irene Triplett has not lived the american civil war, which was fought between 1861 and 1865. For memory, the conflict broke out after the secession of several Southern States, following the election of republican president Abraham Lincoln, which had the ambition of abolishing slavery, threatening the economic model of plantations in the south. During this war, nearly 530 000 counterfeit soldiers are dead, out of about three million engaged.
Engaged in the two armies
The father of Irene, Moses Triplett, 16 years of age at the commencement of hostilities, was one of them. Done a bit banal, he bore the uniform of the two opposing armies. A native of a State to secession, he enlisted in the confederate army, the 53rd regiment of North Carolina, in may 1862, and then is transferred in the 26th, the following year. While his regiment is heading to Gettysburg, he falls sick and must stay in the hospital. This save may be the life : of the 800 men in his regiment, 734 will be killed, captured or wounded. The clash was decisive, considered the turning point of the war, when the offensive of the armies of the South is halted by the North. It is also a turning point for Moses Triplett. He took advantage of her hospitalization for deserting, and joined in 1864 the ranks of the Union. Its function will be to go sabotage targets confederated : food supplies, bridges, railways… His regiment suffers from a bad reputation in the population : the sympathizers of the South are sometimes robbed by the soldiers for the benefit of those in the North.
Irene and his father Moses. Screen Capture video.
After the war, Moses returned to North Carolina, not far from where he set the population back. The former soldier asks for a pension as a veteran is granted. He hangs out with the image of his regiment, and has the reputation of being a solitary, gruff, remaining under his porch an old gun military on the knees, pulling on nuts, with the simple purpose of scaring the neighborhood. It is also a bit special, is pleasant to raise rattlesnakes in the chicken coop. All this does not prevent married Elida Hall, 50 years his junior, in the 1920s. During the american Great Depression, such differences in age at marriage were not uncommon : the pension of a veteran was a degree of financial security. Irene was born of this union. Moses is aged 83.
Will of Lincoln
life has not been easy for Irene, who suffered from mental health problems. At home, her parents struggle with a handle of oak. At school, mocks his father, the “traitor”. She quickly abandon the studies, to be unable to learn to read or write. Moses Triplett died in 1938, at the age of 92. The mother Irene died in 1967. It is at this time that the daughter inherited the pension from his father which she received until her own demise, thus respecting the will of Abraham Lincoln to take care of the one that will be mounted in the front as well as “his widow and his orphan”.
Irene Triplett screen Capture video.
After the death of George Floyd, a part of America would like today to erase the symbols confederates come down to us. Flags, statues and monuments are on the hot seat, regarded as the expression of the past slave-holding american, disappear from the cities. With the disappearance of Irene Triplett, it is the human connection to this conflict, founder of the young american nation that is permanently gone.
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