The Real McCoy

Lewis McCoy Civil War pension file. 1892-1905. Washington, DC: National Archives. Photo by author.

When you’re working with Civil War pension files at the National Archives, you never really know what you’re going to get. A soldier’s file could be a few pages or a few hundred. It could include a simple rejection or repeated special investigations. If you’re lucky, it might include something like a photograph or an original marriage certificate.

I’ve looked at a lot of pension files over the years and know to expect the unexpected, but nothing could have prepared me for Lewis McCoy. As this photo shows, it was a monster.

Lewis McCoy was born into slavery in Kentucky around 1844. When the Union Army passed through in 1862, he, like many other enslaved people, followed the army, ending up in Vicksburg, Mississippi. There, on March 12, 1864, he and his brothers Green and George McCoy enlisted as privates in Co. K of the 66th U.S. Colored Infantry (USCI). Both Green and George died in June 1864, almost certainly during an epidemic, but Lewis McCoy served uneventfully for two years and was honorably discharged with the rest of the regiment on March 20,1866, in Natchez, Mississippi.

He remained in the area, working as a farm laborer on a series of plantations along the Mississippi River before finally settling in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. There he lived with a woman named Mallie and had a daughter, Mahala, with her in 1869. He reportedly had a reputation as a “blackleg,” a swindler or cheating gambler, and he was convicted and imprisoned twice for assault with a deadly weapon between 1870 and 1873. By 1878, he was out of prison and had married Lucinda Wade, who died around 1890. After that, he moved to rural Issaquena County, Mississippi, where he married a widow named Francis Hawkins in 1897 and died in 1905.

Lewis McCoy, living in the Mississippi Delta, was unaware that his identity had been stolen in Caldwell, Kansas, by a man named James Nelson. Nelson never served in the military but filed for a pension first as James Nelson in 1892 and again under the name James King in 1893. [1] He claimed in both cases to have served in the 66th USCI but with details that were complete fabrications. For example, he stated that he enlisted in the regiment in May 1863, seven months before it was formed.

H. C. Norman, Jr., Natchez, Mississippi. February 1900. “Photograph of Lewis McCoy.” Lewis McCoy Civil War pension file. Washington, DC: National Archives. Photo courtesy of Kathleen M. O’Brien.

In March 1896, Nelson filed for a third time as Lewis McCoy. This time, the details in his claim were much more accurate, including the correct enlistment and discharge dates. He claimed to have been wounded in a skirmish with a gunshot wound to the left leg and loss of sight in his right eye from an exploding percussion cap, injuries that Nelson had actually suffered, although not in battle, while working as a laborer for the Union Army in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the war.

It’s not completely clear how Nelson came to be in possession of the facts used in his claim. He certainly knew something of the 66th from his time as an army laborer, but after the fraud was discovered, he claimed that the information came from his pension attorney. Either he or his attorney was able to obtain fraudulent statements from several individuals, including James Brown, assistant surgeon for the 66th USCI, who claimed to have treated Nelson’s injuries, and William Harris, who had served with Lewis McCoy in the 66th. Nelson also conned Armistead McGraw, another soldier from the 66th, into providing an affidavit for him. [2]

Nelson’s claim to be Lewis McCoy was compelling enough that he might have gotten the pension were it not for one complication. In July 1897, while Nelson’s claim was still being reviewed, a woman named Martha Young in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, filed claims for herself and her son, alleging that her first husband, who had died in 1877, was actually Lewis McCoy but had been using the name Calhoun Grimes. She was able to provide Lewis McCoy’s army discharge certificate to support her claim.

By April 1898, the Bureau of Pensions had realized that these two claims could not both be true and began an investigation. [3] By November 1899, the Bureau’s Law Division had concluded that both cases were frauds. As the Law Division chief put it in a letter to the chief of the Bureau’s Southeast Division, “From the special examination already had in these claims, it is evident that this entire outfit are imposters and that a greater fraud was never launched upon the Bureau.” At this point, the Bureau could have simply denied the claims, but they wanted to prosecute the perpetrators, which required conclusive evidence.

The special examiner assigned to the case undertook to find the real Louis McCoy and, in February 1900, finally located him “in the swamps 65 miles above Vicksburg.” He took McCoy to Natchez, Mississippi, where he had a photograph of him made (see above), and then took either the photograph or McCoy himself to obtain affidavits from his former comrades as to his identity. The special examiner also deposed McCoy, collecting 18 pages of testimony with a wealth of information about McCoy’s life before, during, and after the war. From this testimony, it became clear that McCoy had known Calhoun Grimes in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. Grimes had been “stepping out” with McCoy’s lady friend Mallie while McCoy was in prison and had stolen McCoy’s gun and clothes (and probably also his army discharge). That testimony helped explain how Martha Young, Grimes’s widow, had obtained the evidence for her claim.

The Bureau of Pensions did prosecute James Nelson for fraud, and in September 1900, he was convicted and sentenced to 18 months at hard labor in the state prison. They also filed charges against Martha Young, but I have been unable to find any record of the outcome. She vanishes from the records after her fraudulent pension claim so may have died or moved away to live under another name. In a sad coda to this story, when the real Lewis McCoy filed for a pension in 1901, the Bureau seems to have at first assumed he was the imposter, James Nelson. He did eventually get his pension, backdated to his original claim, but had to go to some trouble to prove his identity.

[left] Bureau of Pensions Board of Review. 3 May 1898. “Note linking claims of James Nelson alias James King and Martha Young.”
Lewis McCoy Civil War pension file. Washington, DC: National Archives. Photo by author.

[right] Wichita Eagle. 15 Sep 1900. “Additional City News.” p. 3.

The twists and turns of Lewis McCoy’s pension file are not the norm, but pension fraud was a very real concern in the late 19th century. The pensions authorized for Union veterans and their dependents following the Civil War were the largest government effort ever taken by the United States at that time. By 1890, there were more than half a million pensioners, and the annual cost of their pensions was over $100 million. That same year, the law was changed so that veterans could make a claim even if their disability wasn’t caused by their service in the war. This change opened the floodgates to many new applicants, nearly doubling the number of pensioners by 1893 and raising the cost to over $150 million. Concerns were raised in Congress and the press about the cost, but public opinion was firmly on the side of helping veterans and their dependents, and the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization founded in 1866, was an effective lobbying group (Glasson 1918).

As a result, the focus of the Bureau of Pensions came to be on reducing fraud, and the Law Division was established in 1886 to take on this task. Proving fraud was challenging in a world of inconsistent record-keeping and slow communications, and the opportunities for fraud were many. Some claimants lied about their age, disability, or marital history. People stole and cashed pensioners’ checks. Con men like James Nelson impersonated veterans while others impersonated Bureau special examiners to gain access to free room and board while traveling. Pension attorneys charged illegal fees, and in some cases, orchestrated large-scale frauds, as James Nelson’s attorney may have done (Kiewitt 1996; Kluskens 2018). Given these challenges, the Bureau of Pensions was fortunate that they eventually located the real McCoy.

Gillam, F. Victor. 1898. Throwing Light on the Subject. New York: Sacket & Willems Litho. & Pt'g. Co. Photo from the Library of Congress.

[1] It was very common for veterans of the US Colored Troops to be using a name other than the one under which they enlisted when they filed for a pension. Some veterans enlisted under false names for various reasons; others changed their names after the war. The pension files for these men are full of explanations about why the names are different. James Nelson simply declared that he couldn’t remember under which name he had served, which actually isn’t that implausible.

[2] Brown may well have treated Nelson’s injuries but would have known that he was a laborer rather than a soldier and that his name was not Lewis McCoy. Brown was himself dismissed from the service for incompetency, which makes it hard to trust his account. Harris reported that he was with McCoy when he was injured in a skirmish, which was certainly not the case. McGraw, on the other hand, seems to have believed that Nelson and McCoy were the same person.

[3] The length of time it took to review these cases is typical of the pension claim process. Without documents like photo i.d.s and formal medical records, even many legitimate claimants found it difficult to prove their own or their deceased husband’s identity, military service, and disability.

Works Cited

Glasson, William. 1918. Federal Military Pensions in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kiewitt, Carrie. 1996. A Study of Fraud in African-American Civil War Pensions: Augustus Parlett Lloyd, Pension Attorney, 1882-1909. Master’s Thesis. University of Richmond.

Kluskens, Claire Prechtel. 2018. “Thieves, Scoundrels, Impostors, and More.” NGS Magazine 44 (3): 43-7.