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143 6 State Aid for Veteran families Artificial Limbs, Commutations, Pensions, and Confederate Homes He was discharged from the army . . . and has been a very delicate man ever since. —Dr. W. A. Brumfield, in John C. mcHaney’s 1905 pension application In an 1895 application for a pension, Confederate veteran W. H. Power attempted to explain how wartime wounds to his right arm and leg had affected him: “there are many things I can’t do now, that I am prevented from doing by the lameness which are necessary and which I used to do in laboring.”1 In the aftermath of the Civil War, many of Virginia’s veterans and their families needed help. Some of that help came from relatives, friends, churches, or local members of the elite. Veterans and their families who needed more than those groups could provide them turned to the state of Virginia for additional assistance.Whereas the last chapter addressed the mental legacy of the war,this chapter explores the physical impact of the war and aging on veteran households and the ways, often financial, by which the state addressed the effective loss of many veteran families’ ability to engage in manual labor. Though the aid served political and racial purposes, it responded to the needs of these veteran families in the decades after the war. Through a series of postwar acts passed by Virginia’s general Assembly,the state built on its wartime relief efforts to provide financially for the soldiers and families who had most severely borne the burden of the Civil War. It began in a limited way with aid for amputees, those survivors most physically harmed by the war.Over time,Virginia legislators widened the scope of financial assistance to include all veterans disabled by war, women widowed by war, veterans disabled by age, and widows whose veteran husbands died after the war. Eventu- 144 take care of the living ally,Virginia provided homes for elderly and disabled veterans,veteran widows, and even veteran daughters. In doing so, the state of Virginia created a limited social-welfare system where one had not existed before, albeit only for white, “worthy” veterans and their families. most of the historical scholarship on Civil War pensions and homes has focused on the North and on the extensive financial and other aid offered to Union soldiers.2 In recent years, however, several scholars have begun to examine Confederate pensions, as well as the creation of homes for Confederate soldiers and widows.3 Still, there is work to be done in this area, most notably in placing damaged veteran families at the center of the story of increasing state involvement. Although aid to Confederate veterans started immediately after the war in the form of artificial limbs and the one-time monetary payments known as commutations, the most significant expansion in Virginia came in the postReconstruction , post-Readjuster period of political turmoil often associated with the rise of the Lost Cause movement. Pensions and homes built on earlier attempts to address the demographic hole left in soldiers’ families by the war and allowed white Conservative Democratic leaders to celebrate Confederate veterans and their families and to create a faint reflection of the robust federal system of veteran aid, all while funneling limited state financial aid toward whites.4 many veteran families took advantage of the state-based aid offered after the war in the form of artificial limbs,commutations,pensions,and homes for veterans and their widows. This veteran-specific assistance and the process of applying for it responded to and reinforced the legacy of the Civil War as the central event in the lives of many of Virginia’s veteran families; this was especially true if one’s last days were spent in a home built for participants in “The War.”for most veterans and widows, the financial benefits supplemented, rather than replaced, the networks of family and local support discussed in earlier chapters. Still, the state’s assistance was badly needed, avidly sought, and gratefully welcomed by veterans and their families. The Laws Wartime wounds hampered many former soldiers as they aged: the aches and pains, the twinge in a poorly healed knee or a stiff arm, the scars left by bullet holes and shell fragments, reminded veterans of the sacrifices they had made in their failed cause. Other veterans, weakened by diseases caught during their time in the army, died sooner than they would have or, in their weakened condition, attempted with great...

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