Question

What is civil war pension? how it work for veterans and their family members. What are the significant impact on veterans and their family members?

Answer 1

The portrayal of Civil War veterans is the one they've seen in the movies or read in novels for most contemporary Americans. The old man tells tales of wartime courage for an adoring crowd, still in the remains of his uniform. Whether the veteran was a Confederate or Union veteran, it doesn't matter for the image. As normal, the reality of the situation was quite different from the picture. By the 1890s (when the Civil War commemoration movement was at its peak) most veterans were in their fifties and sixties, feeling the effects of both their physical war wounds and the economic collapse of the country, and desperate for some sort of help from anyone who could provide it.

We are now confident supplying our veterans with tangible and intangible benefits. There is widespread agreement that they should be compensated for that service after they have put their own lives on hold to serve their country. In that more than two million veterans could legitimately claim their government's attention, the Civil War faced significant challenges. The unknown number (but probably a fairly large percentage) was affected by what they had been through physically or emotionally. Their hometowns threw parades at them, their family was (usually) excited about having them back, but it wasn't enough.

For widows, the rules on citizenship centered on marriage date and whether they had remarried. Early pensions allowed the service member to die in action, at the time of his death the widow had to be married to him, and she could not have remarried. As the veterans ' rules changed, so did the widows ' rules. The act of 1890 allowed widows to collect pensions if, for any reason at the time of their death, their husbands were disabled, not only because of injuries sustained in service. By 1901, even if she had remarried, a widow was liable for a pension as long as she was a widow again. If she was still remarried, Congress was still averse to allowing a widow to receive money.

The Civil War pension system was blind in color because there was nothing that allowed applicants to be white in the application process. Yet recent scholarly studies have shown that the mechanism itself was far from blind light. Since African American troops were both less likely to be assigned initially to combat positions and then less likely to be hospitalized (applications for early disability).

A precedent for later schemes was offered by the Civil War pension system. The sheer size and complexity warned the federal government about what could happen later if there were even bigger wars. And it also provided desperately needed aid to thousands who did not have to move anywhere else.