The last soldier to die in the Civil War?

Answer 1

I don't know that anybody wrote down the name of the unlucky guy who was the last killed outright. At Appomattox, there is a tiny National Cemetery, which has, if I remember correctly, thirteen graves. That could not possibly be all that died in the day or two that there was skirmishing there, before Lee surrendered.

However, that was not the last battle of the war. The generally agreed last battle was at Palmito Ranch, in Texas, May 12-13, 1865. It was a Confederate victory. It was not a very big battle, and by that time, if the death toll was not in the thousands no one took much notice.

But even after the last Confederates hauled down the flag, there were still hospitals full of soldiers, who continued to die for months, of disease and the effects of their wounds - to say nothing of the medical "care" they received.

Maybe the last man to die from the war might be Union Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Chamberlain was very badly wounded in 1864, shot in the neck. He had been an authentic hero at Gettysburg in 1863, perhaps even saving the Union army from defeat there. In 1915, Chamberlain's old neck wound opened up and he bled to death. He was very old by then, of course. Old wounds reopening like that are symptomatic of a vitamin deficiency.