Most of what survives of Aaron Vanderslice is bound inside a single government file — ninety-five brittle pages of a Civil War pension claim, opened for his orphaned children in 1864 and fought over for more than a decade. Read straight through, those pages tell a story no family would have chosen to invent: a good soldier, a double tragedy, a drunken mistake, a battlefield death, and a scandal that reached all the way to a federal investigator's undercover report. Nearly every scene below is corroborated by sworn testimony inside that file.
A shoemaker's family
By 1850, sixteen-year-old Aaron was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, learning the shoemaker's trade — a craft he'd keep the rest of his short life. Within a few years he moved to Philadelphia, and on July 3, 1854 he married Martha (her maiden name is recorded variously as Wylie, Whylie, or Bryte), in a ceremony performed at a friend's home by the Rev. Robert Armstrong.
Over the next six years they had four children: William and Ann Eliza — twins — born June 14, 1855; Henry, born August 19, 1857; and Thomas, born in 1860. (Henry is the child most often dropped from later retellings; he appears to have died young, and by 1870 only three of the four were still living.)
When the war came, Aaron answered it, enrolling on May 5, 1861 as a Corporal in Company E of the 27th Pennsylvania Infantry. And while he was away at the front, tragedy found the household: in October 1862, his wife Martha died, leaving four small children without a mother.
Three days in 1863
Grieving and far from home, with four motherless children in another family's care, Aaron — by the sworn account of neighbors and his children's guardian — had taken hard to drink. On a brief furlough in the early spring of 1863, badly intoxicated, he was introduced to a young woman named Mary Ann Frazier, known around the neighborhood as "Moll." On March 25, 1863, an alderman married them.
It lasted about three days. Sobered up, Aaron is said to have regretted the marriage at once, left Mary Ann, and returned to his regiment — never mentioning the union to his fellow soldiers, his family, or his closest friends. It was a secret he carried to his grave, and one that would nearly cost his children everything.
The first day at Gettysburg
That summer the 27th Pennsylvania marched north. On July 1, 1863 — the desperate first day of the Battle of Gettysburg — Aaron's regiment fought a holding action near the town, and Aaron was severely wounded in action.
He was carried back to the Camden Street General Hospital in Baltimore. His close friend Cornelius Stevens — the man who had employed Aaron since boyhood — traveled to Baltimore to sit with him. On his deathbed, Aaron made no mention of any second wife; he asked only that Stevens take legal custody of his children. He died of his wounds on August 21, 1863.
He was sent for by the dying soldier, and went to Baltimore, was there when he died — and he made no mention of his marriage nor alluded to his having a wife. — from the guardian's sworn affidavit
A pension, and a ghost from the furlough
Cornelius Stevens kept his promise. He returned to Philadelphia, was confirmed by the Orphans' Court as guardian on October 16, 1863, and secured a federal minor's pension of $8.00 a month to house and feed the children. William was placed at the state-funded Chester Springs Soldiers' Orphan School, where the 1870 census records him, safe, as a "scholar."
Then, in 1873, the long-forgotten furlough marriage came back. Mary Ann surfaced to file a competing Widow's Pension — and because federal law placed a widow ahead of minor children, the government promptly suspended the orphans' payments.
The Pension Office sent a Special Agent, M. E. Jenks, to investigate. His undercover report laid bare a startling picture: Mary Ann was a well-known Philadelphia madam operating under the names "Moll Frazier" and "Moll Donnelly," running a house of prostitution at No. 340 St. John Street. Her own cousin told federal agents she had been in the trade since she was a teenager.
The waiver, and the orphans restored
The marriage certificate, however, was legally binding — which made Mary Ann, whatever her profession, Aaron's lawful widow. But she seems to have understood what her claim was doing to his children. In 1874 she signed a statement waiving any right to the money already paid to the minors, making, in her words, "a present of it to the children."
Her health was already gone. Dying of consumption, she closed the house on St. John Street, moved to Lorraine Street, and died there on November 2, 1874 — just twenty-seven years old. After Cornelius Stevens himself died, his widow Catherine Stevens took over the guardianship, submitted Mary Ann's death record, and petitioned to lift the suspension. On June 14, 1877, with the competing widow gone, the government formally restored the pension to Aaron's children — keeping William fed and schooled until he aged out of the system.
He grew up to become the Rev. William A. Vanderslice, and the line ran on through him — down four more generations to the present.
Who was Aaron's father?
This is the one thing the pension file never says — and the 1850 census, which promised to answer it, instead deepened the mystery in a telling way.
That census places sixteen-year-old Aaron precisely: he was living in Lancaster, in the household of a shoemaker named Eugene Harkins — not with his own family, but boarding as an apprentice, learning the trade he'd practice the rest of his life. So it confirms how Aaron became a shoemaker, but it does not name his father.
It does sharpen the candidates. A shoemaker's apprentice was very often a shoemaker's son — and the same 1850 census turns up exactly such a man: Jacob Vanderslice, a shoemaker in the Kensington district of Philadelphia, born about 1806, with a houseful of children whose ages run right up to Aaron's. The trade match is hard to ignore.
Against that sits the earlier evidence — Aaron's Chester County birthplace, and a federal investigator's 1874 note that "none of his relations reside in Philadelphia," which pointed toward the family's Chester County / Phoenixville branch (and a candidate there: Daniel Van Derslice of Chester County, married 1829). The two aren't irreconcilable — a Chester County family could easily have moved to Philadelphia for work by 1850, and "no relations in Philadelphia" a generation later may simply describe a family that had since scattered, one brother as far as New Jersey.