America's Last Living Emancipated Slave, Civil War Veteran and Oldest Man: The Remarkable Story of 130 Year Old Sylvester Magee
In 1966, on his supposed 125th birthday, Governor Paul B. Johnson, Mississippi’s first Governor who wasn’t a staunch segregationist or overt racist, declared May 29, 1966 to be Sylvester Magee day in honor of the Hattiesburg man who claimed to be America’s last living enslaved person, last surviving Civil War Veteran and the oldest living person in the history of the United States.
Lyndon B. Johnson the then President of the United States, a man known as a Civil Rights reformer in the 1960’s, personally wrote Mr. Magee a note of congratulations on reaching his 125th birthday. The Mississippi State Legislature honored Sylvester Magee with resolutions that lauded his service to his country during the Civil War, in which Magee claimed to have served on both sides, and the town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where Sylvester had resided for the past seventy years and where he was known by everyone both white and black simply as “Sylvester the Slave” in the politically incorrect parlance of the time, held a lavish parade for the last former American slave, Civil War veteran and oldest man alive that garnered headlines and news reports from around the world.
And through it all, Sylvester Magee, a man who never drank but used tobacco for over a century, who was born a slave, escaped to freedom and saw combat in the Civil War, remained modest and was said to have been liked by everyone who met him.
He claimed to live to be 130 years old, not passing away until October 15, 1971 after allegedly having been born on May 29, 1841 which would make Sylvester Magee the oldest living human ever by nearly eight years.
On November 4, 1971 Jet Magazine, perhaps the leading periodical in the United States at the time published by and for the African-American community, ran an obituary honoring Sylvester Magee entitled, “America’s Oldest Citizen Dies in Mississippi At 130”. In his obituary in Jet, Magee is quoted as saying on his 125th birthday when asked by reporters about the secret to his longevity, “It’s because of the good Lord above. He’s smiling down on me.”
Magee’s obituary in Jet Magazine goes on to quote the same Civil War historian from Mississippi named A. P. Andrews that was quoted at the start of this article by The Hattiesburg American in 1966. The Jet Magazine obituary quoted Andrews as saying that Magee, “talked with rare intelligence and seldom rambled in telling of his participation in the Civil War more than 100 years ago.”
When talking about Magee’s claims to Civil War veteran status and his own longevity, the coherence, accuracy and verifiability of his own verbal recollections are extremely important, since by Magee’s own admission as a person born into slavery and living thus enslaved until at least the age of twenty-two, he never had the opportunity to learn how to read and write. It would have been extremely difficult for Sylvester Magee to have concocted his own memories of his purported enslavement and Civil War service after having read of such things in a book, though admittedly, it is possible that he created his Civil War service and longevity stories based upon the oral testimony of others that he had heard over the course of his lifetime. However, there is no evidence that Sylvester Magee was ever a dishonest person at any time in his life according to those who knew him.
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| Magee being interviewed by reporters 1965 |
And if the evidence for Sylvester Magee’s birth, and his own claims about his age and memories of the American Civil War are to be believed then, apparently when it comes to old age at least, the good Lord smiled down on Sylvester Magee more than any other person who has ever lived.
The oldest verified person to have ever lived was Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment who lived from February 21, 1875 until August 4, 1997, to the age of 122 years. Ms. Calment is the only person in history to have verifiably lived in excess of 120 years and she lived long enough to have met Vincent Van Gough when she was a teenager and to also have had her own email address during the final three years of her life. Ms. Calment’s age is verified because her birth was documented with a legal French birth certificate, and unfortunately, no such privileges as legal birth certificates were afforded enslaved Americans like Sylvester Magee in the years prior to the American Civil War.
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| Jeanne Calment in 1997 aged 122 |
Sylvester Magee died at a veterans hospital in Columbia, Mississippi in October 1971 having been recognized by the state of Mississippi as a verified American Civil War Veteran and by the President of the United States as the oldest living American ever. Although Sylvester Magee, who was born a slave, did not have a birth certificate that attested to the actual date on which he was born, he did have a life insurance policy that stated he was, “Born on a North Carolina Plantation, a slave, on May 29, 1841”
And though Sylvester Magee is not today recognized as the oldest living person ever (or even as America’s last surviving Civil War veteran most likely on account of his skin color alone!) many major newspapers in the United States at the time of his death stated simply that, “Historians have stated that it would have been impossible for a person who neither reads nor writes to have related stories of the Civil War in such detail as Magee without having served in the conflict.”
Sylvester Magee claimed that he was born to enslaved parents named Ephraim and Jeanette, who worked on a North Carolina plantation owned by a wealthy landowner named J.J. Shanks. Magee said that he was sold at a slave auction in the year 1860 where he was purchased by Hugh Magee of the aforementioned Covington County, Mississippi who state records indicate owned the lucrative Lone Star tobacco plantation. As was common at that time it seems likely that after being auctioned off Sylvester was forced to adopt his new master’s surname which he then kept for the rest of his long life.
Then, with the Union Army pressing down on Vicksburg in the Spring of 1863, Sylvester Magee was able to escape from his enslavers, cross over to Union lines, where he claimed that he was forced to serve as a laborer tasked with road construction and the building of fortifications. Magee also later asserted to Civil War historians, about a century after the war, that prior to 1863 he had been pressed into service by Confederate forces as a laborer in their army! It should be noted, that as far as I was able to tell, no documentary evidence has been found for Sylvester Magee’s service in either army during the American Civil War, though as has been already noted, his recollections of both armies, and of the positioning of various units and forces during the war, most historians agree could only have been known by either someone with service experience during the war or who had exhaustively studied the history of the Civil War in Mississippi.
After Magee’s 125th birthday celebration in 1966 he gained some worldwide notoriety and became a sort of minor celebrity. He never left his native Mississippi, except for five years after the American Civil War, when he journeyed to Chicago but according to his own recollection he returned to his native state because, “It was too cold.”
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| Sylvester Magee in 1970 |
At the purported age of 128 or 129 Magee developed pneumonia that required hospitalization. It was the first time in his life that he had ever been hospitalized. It was at this time, specifically on July 31, 1969 that the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, conducted a long interview to determine Sylvester’s status as an American Civil War Veteran and also to try and determine if he was, in fact, America’s last surviving emancipated person born into slavery.
A transcript of key questions in the rather extensive interview (the full pdf version of which can be found online) runs as follows with regard to Magee’s longevity:
FEMALE INTERVIEWER: How old are you?
MAGEE: 129
MALE & FEMALE INTERVIEWER: 129?
MALE INTERVIEWER: What year were you born?
MAGEE: 18 and 41. (Note that Magee can be forgiven for his confusion as to what year it actually is. He would have been 128 at the time of the interview)
MALE INTERVIEWER: 1841?
MAGEE: Yes Sir.
MALE INTERVIEWER: We hear your parents lived a long time too.
MAGEE: Yes, my mother did. She lived over 110 years.
MALE: How long did your daddy live til?
MAGEE: He only lived til 108 years.
In reference to his Civil War service Magee had the following to say in the interview:
MAGEE: Well the Lord…I reckon he just works….I’ve been through some hardships.
MALE: You have? Do you remember much of that stuff?
MAGEE: In the slave times I was beaten up by my master.
MALE: By your master?
MAGEE: Yeah, Master Hugh Magee.
MALE: Where did you all live back then? Slave times?
MAGEE: Back up on Dry Creek.
MALE: Back over there? You lived around there all your life?
MAGEE: Up there, well, yes Sir. Well, I left and then I went in the war. I stayed over at Vicksburg.
MALE: Let’s see. What else did you do during the war Sylvester? What rank were you? Did you get a uniform? Did you have a uniform?
MAGEE: Some kind of old blue something.
MALE: They gave you an old uniform? Were you a private?
MAGEE: Yes.
MALE: What battles did you fight in….you fought at Vicksburg? Got wounded at Vicksburg?
MAGEE: Fought in the Civil War.
MALE: Civil?
MAGEE: Yes, Civil.
The transcript of the interview continues on at some length. Sylvester Magee talks more about his service and about fighting Confederate soldiers in combat. He tells the interviewers about his move up north for a brief time after the Civil War; he talks about his nephews; his grandson and his two marriages. In the end, the information that Sylvester Magee provided to the Mississippi Department of History and Archives was enough to convince them that Sylvester Magee was indeed the last surviving Civil War Veteran in the United States and the last living emancipated American slave in history.
Was Sylvester Magee’s longevity claim true? Maybe. Unfortunately, in the Holocaust that was American slavery of the 18th and 19th centuries few accurate records were kept, and no birth certificates were provided for the tragic souls that were considered to be less than human by their owners and oppressors.
It is clear that in the second half of the twentieth century the residents of Mississippi believed that there native son was the oldest man ever; the last Civil War veteran and America’s last emancipated enslaved person and that Sylvester Magee definitely believed what he said, and perhaps, that’s all of the history that we need.
During his interview with the Mississippi Department of History and Archives on July 31, 1969 a mere eleven days after the Apollo moon landing one of the interviewers asked Magee, “Did you hear about the moon? The moon walk? About the men walking on the moon?”
Magee, as he appeared to have always done in life, modestly replied, “Yes ma’am. I heard them talking about it.”
She then asked him, “Do you believe it? Do you believe that the United States has men up on the moon?”
At that question, when reading the interview, it seemed like Magee paused for a moment and thought before he replied, “Well I believe it. I believe what they are saying. They were bound to have went up there sometime.”
She then said to Magee, “Well, a lot of people don’t believe it.” In rural Mississippi where illiteracy was all too common, even in 1969, and where superstition still ran rampant and access to information was limited, many people both black and white remained incredulous when it came to the moon landing and new technologies in general.
But not Sylvester Magee, the last living emancipated American slave and the oldest man in history. He said, “Well, I believe it. They wouldn’t have went up there…to the moon…if it wasn’t important. People don’t believe nothing today (inaudible mumbling) they should be believing like the Lord having them to do…”
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