Henry Mack credited his long life to abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. And local newspapers credited him as being the country's oldest Civil War veteran when he died in 1945 of pneumonia.
He took his last breath at the Minneapolis Veterans Hospital on April 8, 1945, the eve of the day that Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Grant eighty years earlier.
Most of Mack's life was spent in Arkansas, Kansas and Nebraska, he moved to Minnesota in the early 1920s and spent his last two decades in Minneapolis as a fixture at parades and patriotic events.
"Henry Mack's regular presence at public gatherings ... served as a reminder to the people of the Twin Cities of the past role of the African Americans in the defense of the nation and their willingness to serve," wrote Steve Chicoine in the "American Legacy," a magazine devoted to black history.
Chicoine, 70, says Mack's headstone at Fort Snelling caught his eye because it had the Civil War's recessed shield and was well preserved. He began doing extensive research on Mack and his Civil War unit, the 57th United States Colored Troops (USCT).
--Old Secesh
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