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  • A Debt We Never Can Pay, A Debt We Refuse to Repay:Civil War Veterans in American Memory
  • Barbara A. Gannon (bio)

As the victorious Union Army marched down Pennsylvania Avenue right after the surrender at Appomattox in 1865, an overhead banner proclaimed, “The Only National Debt We Never Can Pay, Is The Debt We Owe To The Victorious Soldiers.” The banner acknowledged a simple fact; all wars have postwar costs. A recent census-based recalculation of the Civil War’s casualty count suggests that the death toll may have been as high as 850,000. Ironically, if every soldier had perished, the national debt owed to these men might have been lower. Instead, many hundreds of thousands of wounded survived, including thousands of amputees. In addition, veterans suffered from life-long chronic physical illnesses resulting from their service, while others experienced psychological injuries that their contemporaries did not understand or diagnose. More than one hundred and fifty years after the war ended, how these men and the debt owed them were remembered reflects the evolution of American understanding of veterans’ postwar challenges.1

How scholars treated these men and the nation’s postwar obligations is one way to assess how Civil War veterans were remembered. Early scholarship focused almost exclusively on Union veterans and their postwar organizations, and not all of this attention was favorable because of veterans’ persistent efforts to obtain pensions for their wounded and ill comrades. In contrast, much less has been written about Confederate veterans, though historians examined their efforts to advocate the “Lost Cause” — a southern, white, Civil War memory that remembered a war for state rights and not slavery. Part of this lack of interest in southern soldiers may have been that these veterans made no postwar pension claims, at least none that affected the federal budget. When scholars recognized Confederate veterans’ efforts to shape Civil War memory, they in turn, examined Union Civil War veterans’ memory using the status of black veterans as a litmus test on how they remembered the war. If white veterans treated African Americans poorly, they must have forgotten that they fought with black soldiers to end slavery. Despite scholars’ ongoing preoccupation with nineteenth-century memory, the reality of twentieth and twenty-first century wars and a greater understanding of [End Page 69] psychological casualties prompted a reassessment of the true toll of the Civil War. In turn, this prompted scholars to reexamine the former soldiers of the victorious Union army and those of the defeated Confederacy as veterans and not as champion of their respective causes. Based on our modern understanding of veterans’ postwar challenges, the banner may have been right; regardless of causes won or lost, veterans cannot be truly repaid for their suffering and sacrifice.

Even before Lincoln vowed in his Second Inaugural Address “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan,” Americans realized that veterans were owed something. Early in the Civil War, Congress passed a law that ensured soldiers, widows, and dependent children received compensation for service-related disability and death. These payments were based on the nature of the disability and a soldier’s military rank. Initially, these payments may have been as much as thirty dollars a month or as little as eight dollars a month; private soldiers received the smaller payments. In addition, widows received the same pension their deceased husbands would have received if he had lived but had been totally disabled. Later, when eight dollars was found to be inadequate, the rates were increased, for example, twenty dollars a month for the loss of a hand or a foot, or twenty-five dollars a month for blind veterans. After the war, poor hospital records rendered efforts to receive postwar pensions difficult, particularly if the need was based on sickness; the link between military service and a wound was easier to make than a link to chronic illness such as diarrhea. Exacerbating these issues, certain physical legacies of the war, such as rheumatism, only became problematic as a veteran aged; a young veteran right after the war might be able to work, decades later this same man might be disabled...

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