Land of the Blue and Gray: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery That Outlived the Civil War

Richard Serrano, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, pens a story of two veterans. In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117 blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending.



Unknown to the public, centennial officials, and the White House too, one of these men was indeed a veteran of that horrible conflict and one according to the best evidence nothing but a fraud. One was a soldier. The other had been living a great, big lie.

RICHARD A. SERRANO, former reporter for the Kansas City Times, is currently a Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Serrano shared in two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the Hyatt sky walks disaster in Kansas City and the King riots in Los Angeles. He is author of One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.

1 Two Old Soldiers

2 Reunion

3 Old Age and Stolen Valor

4 Albert Woolson

5 Walter Williams

6 Old Men in Blue

7 Old Men in Gray

8 Centennial

9 Last in Blue

10 Debunked?

11 In His Memory-Clouded Mind

12 Last in Gray

13 Of the Dead, Speak No Evil

Postscript

Sources

Index

Table Of Contents

About Richard A. Serrano