Did the Federal Government Pay Pensions to Ex-Confederate Soldiers?

By Stephen Davis · Originally published February 2019 · p. 39

Did the Federal Government Pay Pensions to Ex-Confederate Soldiers? By Stephen Davis Special to Civil War News Even to this day, the U.S. government will provide a headstone for the grave of a Confederate soldier whose descendants meet criteria. The reasoning is that Northerners and Southerners were all American soldiers, right? So the question follows: did the Federal Government pay pensions to former Confederate soldiers in the years after the war? The answer is no. Historian James Marten puts it succinctly: “Southern states, of course, paid for Confederate pensions.”1 While Union veterans after the war could lobby both national and state governments for financial aid in their waning years, ex-Confederates could only turn to their states and localities, as Professor Marten asserts.2 The postwar United States Congress was so vindictive toward ex-Rebels that it enacted, in the words of the late E. Merton

Coulter, “the withdrawal of pensions from all Confederates who were veterans of past wars.” Meaning, if you fought for your country in the Mexican War, but then later joined the Confederate army, you were cut off. Or, if you were the widow of a Revolutionary War soldier, but had a son who fought for the South, you also were denied further benefits.3 Southerners, of course, were outraged, especially as Federal pensions for former Yankee soldiers were being paid by every American taxpayer, including those in Dixie. Worse, it was a whopping amount of money. One writer to Confederate Veteran Magazine in 1898 declared that the annual cost of pensions to Union veterans would total “the entire salary-list of the government in Washington and throughout the country, the expenses of all departments, including the whole judicial system, the cost of the army and navy, post-office deficiencies, public buildings, fortifications and ships, rivers and harbors, the Department of Labor, and the whole expense of the White House and its salaries.”4 The sources I’ve cited so far are from my personal library (the “Brig. Gen. Clement Anselm Evans Memorial Research Library,” as I call it, to my wife’s perplexity). When Jack suggested that I write a column on this question, I also went online to a source you should check out, too: www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com. There I found Kathleen L. Gorman’s definitive article, “Civil War Pensions.” • “Union soldiers were covered under the federal system while each former Confederate state had to create and fund its own pension system.” • Southern states could not even use Federal tariffs to fund pensions. Georgia had to resort to tobacco taxes. • “Part of the issue was that state officials continually underestimated the number of eligible pensioners and how much those numbers would change annually. It is easy to see why they had such trouble. In 1937 Georgia had 232 veterans receiving pensions, but still 1377 widows, all of whom were eligible for $30 a month even in the depths of the Depression.” Needless to say, the state struggled to meet its obligations. “In the state of Georgia alone,” Gorman continues, “in 1952 there were still 401 widows receiving aid at a cost of $361,000.”5 To be sure, a federal law enacted in1953 affirmed elibility for federal pensions for spouses and children of all Civil War veterans, including ex-Confederates. But it took nearly a century. 1.

Civil War Widows, 1869. Widows Of Civil War Soldiers Receive Their Pensions At The Sub-Treasury In New York City, 1869.

Endnotes:

James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 16. Ibid., 240. E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction 1865– 1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), 13. “Fraudulent Pensions,” Confederate Veteran, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1898), 38. Kathleen L Gorman, “Civil War Pensions.” Essential Civil War Curriculum. www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com.

Civil War Widows, 1869. Widows Of Civil War Soldiers Receive Their Pensions At The Sub-Treasury In New York City, 1869.