Why America Has Never Stopped Paying for the Civil War

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1862, the federal government promised disabled Union soldiers eight dollars a month. By the 1890s, Civil War pensions consumed forty-five percent of the entire federal budget — more than every other government expense combined. The Pension Bureau employed 1,500 clerks in the largest brick building in the world. Claim agents and pension attorneys built a nationwide industry on veterans’ paperwork. The Grand Army of the Republic became the most powerful political lobby in America, strong enough to unseat a president. Confederate veterans, shut out of federal money, were left to the broke states they’d fought for. And the checks kept coming — to widows, to children, to young women who married ninety-year-old veterans during the Depression so the payments would outlast them. The last Civil War pension arrived in May 2020, at a nursing home in North Carolina: $73.13 a month, paid to the daughter of a man who deserted the Confederacy a week before Gettysburg and switched to the Union side. The war lasted four years. The bill lasted a hundred and fifty-five. Sources: Theda Skocpol, “America’s First Social Security System: The Expansion of Benefits for Civil War Veterans,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 108, No. 1 (1993) Peter Blanck and Chen Song, “Civil War Pension Attorneys and Disability Politics,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Vol. 35 (2001) Jeffrey E. Vogel, “Redefining Reconciliation: Confederate Veterans and the Southern Responses to Federal Civil War Pensions,” Civil War History, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2005) Sven Wilson, “Prejudice and Policy: Racial Discrimination in the Union Army Disability Pension System, 1865–1906,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 100, No. S1 (2010) Kathleen Gorman, “Civil War Pensions,” Essential Civil War Curriculum, Virginia Tech (essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com) “She Was the Last American to Collect a Civil War Pension — $73.13 a Month. She Just Died.” The Washington Post, June 4, 2020