THE OLDEST SOLDIER
American Legacy, Spring 2004

The old man moved slowly down Minneapolis's Fremont Avenue with the help of a cane. He was at least 106 years old, and a familiar sight in' the neighborhood. He might have looked less menacing had it not been for the doublebarreled shotgun over his shoulder and the determination in his eyes. It was a warm June day, but he wore a sweater and a coat covered with badges.

Henry Mack was supposed to have been on the porch with his dog and cat. His daughter-in-law had gone to the store for less than an hour. When she returned home, a neighbor lady ran out to her, calling "Dad is gone, Dad is gone." Allie Johnson at first thought the old gentleman had passed away. When she realized otherwise, she set out on foot to look for him. Neighbors joined in the search. They found him five blocks from home, sitting on a porch. A woman who knew him had called him over and talked him into taking a rest. He told everyone that he was headed for the Army recruiting station. It was June 1944; the Allies had just landed on the Normandy beaches.

America was in its third year of the struggle to defeat totalitarianism. Mack had closely followed the news since the war began. The defiant old warrior insisted he had a lot of vigor left to offer his country. Henry Mack was, in fact, one of the last remaining veterans of the American Civil War. The coat he wore on his way to the recruiting station was from the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic, the once-powerful organization of Union Army veterans. His exploit that day was particu1arly remarkable, considering that he was no longer able to climb the stairs in his house and his GAR coat was kept in a closet on the second floor.

Henry Mack was born a slave near Fayette, Alabama. The year was about 1836, but no one was ever really sure. He picked cotton throughout his youth. The overseer was a violent man, who rode through the fields wielding a rawhide whip. He decided one day that Henry's mother, Phoebe, was not working hard enough and threatened to whip her. Henry, then in his mid-twenties, pleaded with the overseer to beat him instead. The overseer obliged. 
 
When Henry recovered, he determined to run away. He took his mother with him and they fled, traveling by night, until they came to a broad river. They followed along its banks until they came upon a man with a boat who agreed to row them to the far side. The river was the Mississippi: Henry' and his mother had made their way across the state of Mississippi and into Arkansas. They were among the thousands of fugitive slaves who attached themselves to the occupying Union Army in Helena. Phoebe became a cook, and Henry helped out around camp.

President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, transformed the war into a crusade to free blacks from bondage, and Henry wanted to share in that fight. In May of that year the U.S. War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops. Henry adopted the surname Mack and enlisted in the United States Army at Helena on December 15, 1863. The Army assigned him to the 4th Arkansas Infantry (African Descent) Regiment, which it redesignated the 57th United States Colored Troops (USCT) in March 1864. The eagerness of African Americans to serve was so overwhelming that by the end of the war the federal government was able to form more than 160 regiments from approximately 200,000 volunteers. Mack's initial experience was not unlike that of many in a war in which disease claimed more casualties than bullets. At Little Rock, in the winter of 1863-4, he came down with rheumatism and "was laid up in camp and off duty all winter," he said many years later. He added that the rheumatism had come back every winter since.

Private Mack boarded a transport ship headed up the Arkansas River in early 1864. He remembered for the rest of his life the image of his mother on the wharf at Helena, waving good-bye to him. He never saw her again. He and his comrades were relegated to guard duty on railroad bridges as part of Gen. Frederick Steele's Camden Expedition. Steele's objective was to capture Shreveport, Louisiana, and drive the Confederates from southwestern Arkansas, but he ended up retreating back to Little Rock, barely managing to save his army. The campaign accomplished little, other than to define one pattern of conduct that would often reappear: The Confederates captured a large number of African-American soldiers at Poison Springs on April 18 and massacred them. When the 57th saw its first action, in a skirmish near Little Rock on April 26, the men understood not only that the war was about race and freedom but that surrender was not an option.

The 57th took part in two skirmishes near Little Rock, on May 24 and May 28, 1864. Orders in July then sent the men to Duvall's Bluff, to strengthen fortifications in the area. The regiment was on garrison and patrol duty there almost until the end of the war. After the collapse of the Confederacy in April 1865, the regiment became part of the occupation force in Arkansas.

The Department of Arkansas, the state's administration at war's end, ordered the 57th to Fort Smith in July. The white citizens of Fort Smith had grown used to the sight of black soldiers patrolling their city streets and keeping order; while former Confederates were less than enthusiastic, Arkansas Unionists praised the soldiers. A reporter for the Fort Smith New Era witnessed the 57th. in dress parade in early September and wrote that he "never saw a finer exhibition of a regimental parade. . . . No one could fail to see the spirit of manly and soldierly pride with which the men carried themselves. . . . These men know they are free and no power on earth can reenslave them." The reporter added, "The behavior of the men when off duty is modest and respectful and no complaints have been known to exist against them."

In 1866 six companies of the 57th were sent West to the New Mexico frontier to protect settlers there from hostile Indians. They stayed through the end of the year, when their enlistment expired. Those men of the 57th who had gone West were the first Buffalo Soldiers--African-American regiments authorized by Congress to perform frontier service for the peacetime military. Henry Mack couldn't claim this distinction, as his company remained at Fort Smith.

After the 57th Colored Infantry mustered out at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in December 1866, Mack returned to Arkansas. He traveled around the state for several years searching for his mother, but he never found a trace of her. Life in Reconstruction-era Arkansas was difficult for African-Americans. Some white citizens violently resisted change, terrorizing and murdering both white Republicans and the blacks who attempted to exercise their new rights to vote and hold office. Federal troops offered the only protection in the South for African-Americans, and they were too few to do so effectively. Mack left Arkansas, lived for a time in Kansas, and moved on to Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1870s

The period known as Reconstruction ended when the disputed presidential election of 1876 was resolved by a compromise in which Southern Democrats allowed the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to become President in return for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. The abandonment of African-Americans by the U.S. government was particularly painful for veterans like Henry Mack, who had worn the uniform of the United States Army and fought bravely in the nation's service. But Nebraska offered African-Americans some escape from the oppression in the South, with jobs available at the Union Pacific Railroad and many meatpacking companies. By 1890 nearly 700 African-Americans called Omaha home.

In 1881 Mack married Martha Green, a widow with three children. Seventeen years later, a physician's affidavit pronounced him "wholly disabled for the performance of manual labor. He has been able to do janitor work and such work as porter." He remained in Omaha, surviving on his military pension of $10 a month.. He was forced to sign a document in 1912 clarifying some confusion about his birth date. In it he stated: "I know, according to what my friends tell me in response to my relating of circumstances which I had seen in past years. . . I am seventy-five years old and past." In the end the date was not deemed material and the government increased Mack's monthly pension to $40 by 1918 and $72 by 1925.

A race riot in Omaha in 1919, which ended in a lynching, or the death of his wife the next year, may have led him to move on. He traveled north to Minneapolis, and in 1922, in his late eighties, he became a member of the city's George N. Morgan Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. The 1930 federal census lists him and his second wife, Sadie, as residing at 626 Bassett Place in Minneapolis's Third Ward. Sadie was much younger than he, and the neighborhood children often mistook her for his daughter. Born in Iowa, she supported both Henry and Clarence, her son from a previous marriage, by working as a domestic. Money was tight, as Mack's 1929 letter to the Federal Bureau of Pension reveals: "A year ago I wrote for an increase in my pension being feeble also sick at the time being. . . . I am [now] a great deal worse off having to have constant care and looking after. I am 93 years old. . . and I sure think I am entitled to an increase. Now dear sir will you be so kind as to let me know how I can obtain it."

Sadie died in 1935 at the age of 53, whereupon Henry moved in with his stepson. Clarence and his wife, Allie, were Catholics, but they faithfully drove Henry to worship every Sunday at his own church, Zion Baptist. They also took him to his regular GAR post meetings.

Neighborhood children came to know Henry Mack. One of them, Harry Davis, a lifelong resident of Minneapolis who later became the city's first African-American to run for mayor, recalled of Mack, "he liked kids, would always talk to us and play with us." Davis said that Mack never used vulgar language, unlike many of the men who hung out on The Avenue-a stretch frequented by bootleggers, racketeers, and pimps. Children never poked fun at him, and young men never bothered him. Harry remembered that the old man was as knowledgeable about current events as most educated people in the neighborhood.

Everyone knew from his regular appearances in parades that Henry Mack had been a soldier. The boys never saw Mack wearing his uniform except in parades, but they knew him as "that 
old soldier" and passed rumors that he was 113 years old.

In 1935 the federal government began making a serious effort to organize what would surely be the final national reunion of Civil War veterans. A government field examiner reported that Henry was "up and about the house and has been feeling quite well." The report noted, "He is saving his pension funds for the purpose of attending the Civil War Veterans Encampment." More than 1,800 veterans-the youngest of them in their early nineties-arrived at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in late June 1938. The Union contingent included 58 blacks, among them Henry Mack, aged about 102. The Philadelphia Afro-American reported that "all traces of discrimination . . . were absent" at the reunion, and accounts of African-Americans who attended confirm this. The highlight was the appearance of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on July 3 to dedicate the Eternal Light Peace Memorial.

World War II broke out one year after the reunion. By the time the Minneapolis Tribune honored Henry Mack on Memorial Day in 1941 as "Minnesota's oldest living war veteran," at 105, everyone knew that America would be getting into it.

At the seventy-fifth annual encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic's Department of Minnesota, held at the St. Paul Hotel on June 4, 1946 years after the war's end-Henry Mack was among the 10 veterans in attendance. National membership in the GAR, which had stood at over a hundred thousand in 1920, and still more than twenty thousand in 1930, was barely a thousand.

Minnesotta's GAR veterans sent a letter of support to President Roosevelt in 1942, and Mack and four comrades participated in a large Flag Day parade in June of that year, to the applause of the crowd. The next month, the Minnesota GAR held a somewhat tardy 105th birthday party for Mack at their July 1 meeting, presenting him with many gifts including a silk flag.

Not everyone celebrated Mack's 105th birthday with joy. One member of the city's GAR Ladies organization wrote the administrator of Veterans Affairs in Washington on July 2: "Mr. Mack has a foster son, married to a white woman, who claims Henry Mack is 105 this next 4th of July. . . there is a big 'to-do' about it . . . our oldest was Andrew Larson of Willimar 102 next August 4th." Larson claimed to have proof of his age in the form of a Norwegian birth certificate. Another letter, written two months later, strongly supported Mack: "We patriotic people have many opportunities to give Henry Mack all the honors to which he is rightfully entitled, the fact that he is colored, was a slave and the one and only veteran who really knew what that war meant, should be enough. . . ."

Minnesota continued to honor Mack as its oldest veteran, but he missed the national GAR reunion in Indianapolis that summer. The problem was arthritis-not his own, but that of his stepson Clarence, who was going to accompany him. Allie, Clarence's wife, told a reporter, "Dad could have gone on by himself but he just got out of the notion when his plans were upset. . . . Why, he went along last Monday to the State Fair, where he was a guest at the army day program. Dad said he knew he could get out there and march right up with the rest of them if he had to."

His public appearances continued throughout the war, his regular presence at public gatherings as a member of the Minnesota GAR serving to remind people that blacks had defended the nation for generations.

Only seven members made it to the Minnesota GAR's seventy-seventh encampment in 1943, and they elected Henry Mack junior vice-commander. The war effort was consuming the energy of the entire nation, and African-Americans were again rushing to enlist. There was some question at first as to whether they would be allowed to fight in the segregated military, but one who proved his heroism was a pilot named Harold Brown from Henry Mack's own neighborhood.

While African-Americans battled for freedom abroad, national and local black leaders demanded to know how true freedom could still be denied them at home. The world-famous singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson visited the Twin Cities in early December 1944 to perform in Shakespeare's Othello. Robeson's contract specified that he would play only cities "where there will be absolutely no discrimination or segregation in the audience." Through all of the national debate, Henry Mack's regular appearances in his GAR uniform demonstrated his own firm resolve.

He was one of only three at the encampment in Minneapolis in 1944, where in his report as junior vice-commander he noted, "As the years pass and our ranks grow less and less, there is less and less work for us to do." In December of 1944, just six months after making his way to the Army recruiting station' he fell at home and broke his hip. He entered the Veterans' Hospital and never left it. He requested in one of his last conversations that "when the time came for him to go and be with his comrades in heaven that the Grand Army take charge." He died late in the morning of April 8, 1945.

At his funeral the Reverend Claude Ireland presided, with the Theodor Petersen American Legion Post delivering a full Grand Army of the Republic military service. His remains were laid to rest in Fort Snelling National Cemetery.

Henry Mack did not live to see President Harry S. Truman integrate the United States military, or the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but by his longevity, he became himself a living symbol of the long service of African-Americans to the nation, and of their continuing struggle. The camaraderie and solidarity that the members of the Minnesota GAR showed one another in their many public appearances demonstrated how society could and should function among all Americans. In the end, Henry Mack and his comrades in ,the GAR helped win more than one war.  

Stephen Chicoine is the executive director of TURN (Twin Cities Urban Reconciliation Network) in Minneapolis. He is the author of John Basil Turchin and the Fight to Free the Slaves, recently published by Greenwood Publishing Group. 

Return to Top