Confederates hold out with last widow of US Civil War

Almost 140 years after the end of the American Civil War, there are still nostalgic sons of the Confederate South who dream of mitigating defeat with some symbolic taste of victory. Now, in the strangest way imaginable, their wish has come true.

Ten days ago, the Confederates and the Unionists could each claim to have a surviving war widow on their side. Both women were, admittedly, well into their 90s and less than coherent about their long-ago husbands' experiences. Both had married absurdly young, and for an absurdly brief period, to war veterans more than 60 years their senior.

But then Gertrude Janeway, the Unionist's wife, died in the three-room cabin in rural Tennessee where she had spent almost all her adulthood. In the battle of the widows, that left the South the victor, thanks to a certain Alberta Martin who continues to totter on, aged 96, in a nursing home in Elba, Alabama.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans – a group that likes to depict itself as a purely historical society while quietly pushing the old agenda of segregation and state-by-state regional autonomy – wasted no time in marking their little victory. They invited Mrs Martin to be guest of honour at a banquet celebrating the birthdays of Robert E Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, the South's most famous generals.

"She's just a living, walking icon of Southern heritage. She's just absolutely the only living link to that time in our history," gushed Ken Chancey, an Alabama dentist and Confederate die-hard who has done more than anyone to publicise her status. Mrs Martin could not entirely enjoy the occasion since she was having, in her friend's words, an "in and out" evening. Ever since she fell into a diabetic coma 18 months ago, her doctors say she has not been the same. Nevertheless, she understood the main point. As she beamed to a local journalist: "I'm getting lots of attention."

She has every reason to consider herself lucky. Fifteen years ago, she was utterly unknown to the movement, which had bestowed the title "last-known Confederate widow" on someone else entirely. It was Dr Chancey who discovered her, trumpeted her name around and even secured a widow's pension for her.

Thanks to him, she has a website (www.lastconfederatewidow.com) and even, well ahead of the event, a meticulously planned funeral, complete with mule-drawn wagon and honour guard. Her status is not without its controversies. A few years ago, the writer Tony Horwitz looked into the military record of her long-deceased husband, Private William Jasper Martin, and concluded that he had deserted after seeing action briefly at the siege of Petersburg.

According to research for his best-selling Confederates in the Attic, Martin delayed claiming his own war pension until he was well advanced in age, by which time all records pertaining to his service were lost or shrouded in ambiguity.

It was that pension which attracted 21-year-old Alberta Stewart. She was a destitute single mother at the time and, as she put it: "It's better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave."

After Martin's death in 1931, she scandalised Alabama society by marrying his grandson, a union that may or may not have originated in an adulterous affair but nevertheless lasted 50 years until his death.