The United States paid Civil War pensions until 2020

Irene Triplett died on 31 May 2020 in a nursing home in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. With her ended the last pension the United States was still paying for its Civil War, which had finished in 1865: 73.13 dollars a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The arithmetic is not archival, it is domestic. Her father, Mose Triplett, was born in 1846, enlisted at sixteen with the Confederate army, deserted in 1863 a few weeks before the battle of Gettysburg, and enlisted again, this time with the Union. In 1924, a widower of seventy-eight, he married Elida Hall, who was twenty-seven. Irene was born in 1930, when her father was eighty-three.

Veterans' pension law had foreseen exactly that case: the daughter of a former soldier who became incapacitated before coming of age drew an allowance for life. Irene had an intellectual disability, was never able to work, and cashed that cheque from her father's death, in 1938, until her own.

Mose Triplett made it to the 75th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg, in July 1938, and died that same month. His daughter made it to the pandemic. Between the first shot of that war, in 1861, and the last cheque it paid there are one hundred and fifty-nine years and only three people: a soldier, his second wife and a daughter.