Confederate Offspring Are "Last Link" to History-- Part 2

Isham Booth didn't talk much about the war. He was too busy working as a sharecropper. He married, and father children into the early decades of the 1900s. Times were tough in the rural south back then. Young women married old Confederates for their pensions. His mother, a widower, was 38 when H.V., the 12th and final child, was born while Isham was 72.

In 1927, Isham cleared up the desertion charge and began receiving a $25 a month Confederate pension. After he died, his wife Miranda received it until she died in 1968, by then it was up to $110.

When he died in 1934 at age 86, his son H.V. was 15.

Even to the end, his father would pick 100 pounds of cotton a day and didn't believe in schooling. "He believed in working. He said a poor man didn't need anything but a burial plot."

Isham Booth definitely was not one of those slave-owning aristocrats and probably more typical of Confederate soldiers.

Growing Up Poor in the South. --Old B-R'er