Shrouded Veterans: The Untold Struggles of an Iowa Colonel’s Widow

“Both of my children have been very sick. Your letter assured me, that he, my husband, still lived,” Margaret R. Clune wrote to newspaper proprietor Ferdinand Flake on December 23, 1866. Facing poverty and in poor health, Margaret feared that the only way she could support herself and her two little boys would be to find a strenuous job, as she had married young before completing her education.

The last she had heard from her husband, William, he was in Galveston, Texas, and claimed to have sent her several hundred dollars. However, she never received the money. All the letters she sent to him had been returned by the Dead Letter Office as undeliverable.

“Could I, a strange woman with a good sewing machine, make enough to help him, support myself and children in Galveston?” she asked Flake. “Would it be best for me to try to go where he is, had I the means to do so?”

By late February 1867, Margaret had not received a reply from Flake. She moved from New York to Illinois to stay with her widowed brother while she worked to regain her health. Although her condition had improved since she last wrote to Flake, her anxiety about locating William had not.

“I beg of you, if possible to tell me if you know where he is, or mail this letter to him,” she pleaded in her follow-up correspondence. “I fear that something has gone wrong with either his or my letters, and that may be the cause of all my trouble.”

In March, Flake’s Bulletin published a plea from Margaret, asking William to visit the newspaper office to retrieve her many unanswered letters. Shockingly, her long-lost husband appeared at the office, but instead of expressing gratitude for the newspaper’s efforts to reconnect them, he made insolent threats against its staff for running the embarrassing column about his personal affairs.

“We did not like to say, that so far as our observation went, he was a hale and hearty man, without visible means of support, in a city where any man who wants work can have it at good wages,” the newspaper reported.

By August, William H. Clune, once an accomplished lawyer, eminent politician, and successful Civil War colonel, was dead.

Iowa State Senator Edward H. Stiles, who met Clune during a political convention in 1858, described the lawyer-turned-Iowa state representative as “a lively, entertaining fellow” who delivered speeches “full of animation and fire.” Lawyer James W. Woods called Clune “a meteor dropped into Iowa,” praising him as an eloquent speaker, a skilled lawyer for someone so young, and a talented politician.

“He would take first rank in whatever he applied himself to,” Woods wrote. “He was small in stature, very pleasing in manner and would attract attention in any assemblage he might happen to be.”

On July 19, 1861, Clune volunteered to serve in the 6th Iowa Infantry and was appointed a quartermaster sergeant. The regiment marched thousands of miles and fought in 27 engagements in the Western Theater, beginning with Shiloh and ending with Bentonville.

Clune rose through the ranks from enlisted man to colonel, taking command of the regiment after the death of Major Thomas J. Ennis at the battle of Ezra Church on July 28, 1864. On November 22, Clune suffered a minor wound at the battle of Griswoldville, where he was knocked off his horse by a Confederate bullet that struck the buckle of his sword belt.

In May 1865, the 219 surviving veterans of the 6th Iowa, led by Clune, marched in the Grand Review of the Armies before being officially mustered out.

“The serpent that darted, with poisonous fangs, at the vitals of the Republic, no longer tempts the statesman. Its head is fatally bruised, and it has no mourners,” Clune declared during his farewell address to the 6th Iowa veterans.

“Tell the sorrowing father, the weeping widow and the mourning sister, ‘He died bravely at the iron front. The Southern breeze, that sighs a requiem over the resting place of your loved one, shall never fan a slave.’”

After the war, the ambitious ex-colonel moved to Texas, hoping to make a fortune to support his young family by establishing a law practice. Whether due to embarrassment over his inability to achieve this, his struggle to escape personal demons, or some other reason, he severed communication with his family and died alone and impoverished during a yellow fever epidemic that swept through Galveston, claiming hundreds of lives.

The Howard Association provided burial services for the indigent dead at Old Cahill Cemetery (later renamed New City Cemetery), where Clune’s remains were interred. In August 2024, Shrouded Veterans placed a veteran headstone for Colonel William H. Clune at the cemetery.

On December 2, 1869, Margaret Clune applied for a widow’s pension, claiming her husband had died of disease brought on by his compromised health from a war wound. She stated that William had complained that the concussion from his fall at Griswoldville caused congestion of his internal organs, leading to a broken-down constitution.

In November 1871, Commissioner of Pensions James H. Baker rejected her claim, ruling that the disease leading to Clune’s death was not a result of his military service.

By December 1872, Margaret Clune had relocated to Yankton, Dakota Territory, and petitioned First Lady Julia D. Grant to deliver a letter to her husband, President Ulysses S. Grant. In the letter, she begged the president to use his influence to pass a pension bill in Congress.

In her lengthy letter to Julia, Margaret explained that, about a week before William’s death, he had written to her saying he was still suffering from his Griswoldville wound. He had intended to return home, but was stricken with yellow fever.

“Oh, how dark the world was to me, for weeks I know nothing of what passed around,” she lamented. “I tried to find out all about his death but have never heard all I wish yet! I only have a ring and a lock of hair that is all.”

Margaret sold her home, silver, jewelry, and everything else of value, seeking any type of work to support herself and her family. Her youngest son, Willie, died less than a year after her husband’s death. She relocated to Dakota Territory to claim roughly 160 acres of public land under the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Homestead Act.

Her surviving 12-year-old son, George, helped support her in any way he could. Together, they lived on 25 acres in a small house on the open prairie long enough to legally secure the land. The house was unfit for winter living, so Margaret rented a house in Yankton, where she cooked, cleaned, washed, and ironed for boarders to make ends meet. Despite her efforts, they barely had enough to get by.

“I am not ashamed to work at anything that is right in the sight of God and man, but when my boy needs an education and I have not the money to pay for his schooling or get books to teach him myself it is so very hard,” she wrote.

Margaret asked Julia Grant to deliver a note to her husband, President Ulysses S. Grant, as she saw no other way for him to receive it. For four years, she had been trying to get a pension bill passed in Congress. She claimed it was a remark by her son a few days earlier that prompted her to write to the Grants.

With tears in his eyes, George told her he had worked so hard to get her a gift for Christmas, but had to use the money to repay his grandmother for a loan she had given him to buy an ax, as his grandmother desperately needed the funds.

As one mother to another, Margaret’s pleas to Julia Grant did not fall on deaf ears. In January 1873, Representative Moses K. Armstrong of Dakota Territory introduced a bill granting Margaret a pension.

On February 12, 1873, Orville E. Babcock wrote from the Executive Mansion to U.S. Representative Jesse H. Moore on behalf of the Grants, asking him to give special attention to the pension bill before the Committee on Invalid Pensions. “[Mrs. Grant] wishes me to say that she will be very glad if you will give the case special attention and thus insure [sic] its becoming a law,” Babcock wrote.

However, the committee failed to pass the bill, and Margaret did not receive a pension until June 27, 1890. In June 1900, the committee increased her pension from $8 to $30 per month after medical testimony revealed she had been suffering for years from neurasthenia (physical and mental exhaustion), which had completely incapacitated her from labor and left her entirely dependent on the meager pension.

Margaret Clune lived until 1920, passing away at the age of 81. Despite his mother’s struggles, young George relocated to New York. Perhaps his careful money management in his youth led to a career as an auditor and treasurer for a coal company. He died a little more than a year after World War II ended.

Margaret’s emotional and financial struggles highlight the tribulations that soldiers’ wives endured long after the four years of the Civil War — sometimes for the rest of their lives. Similarly, William’s postwar life reveals the challenges some soldiers face after successful military careers, including trouble reintegrating into civilian life and experiencing a downturn in the months and years that follow.

The effects of the Civil War lingered for decades and even generations after its conclusion.

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Shrouded Veterans is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing the neglected graves of 19th-century veterans, primarily Mexican War (1846-48) and Civil War (1861-65) soldiers, by identifying, marking, and restoring them. You can view more completed grave projects at facebook/shroudedvetgraves.com.