14. Living on a Confederate Pension
As Maudie Acklin put it in a 2004 Associated Press interview: “After Mr. Cantrell died I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat. It was hard times; you had to work to eat. … I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve worked hard my whole life and did what I had to, what I could, to survive. I didn’t want to talk about it for a while because I didn’t want people to gossip about it. I didn’t want people to make it out to be worse than it was“.
Cantrell supported her with his Confederate pension of $25 every two or three months. The pension benefits ended upon his death in 1937, but true to Cantrell’s promise, he left her his house and land upon his death. Maudie Hopinks remarried three more times, and had three children – two daughters and a son. She died in a nursing home on August 7th, 2008, a few months before Obama was elected president.
