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5 Conclusion The slow pace of reimbursement for most states lasted until the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, Congress began to display considerably less interest both in watching over the issue of reimbursement and in carefully guarding the doors of the treasury. An increasingly bureaucratized institution with broader interests and duties found it much easier to hand off responsibility for war claims than had Congresses in the early years of the Gilded Age. Just as Congress had loosened its grip on veterans’ pensions and benefits throughout the 1880s and 1890s, so too had it eventually seen its way to liberalizing the flow of indemnification to the states. First there was the Dash Act of 1902, which finally authorized payment of interest on bond issues. Ten years later, Congress followed with the Dent Act, transferring jurisdiction over state claims to the United States Court of Claims and expediting most cases, if not those of the Price raid, where documentation was in order. The net effect was a flood tide of money to the states that would total almost $15 million by 1930. It was this round of reimbursement that helped build a Grand Army of the Republic Memorial and Library in Topeka, Kansas, and a state capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky. Even Nevada benefited from the new largess when it received over $500,000 in 1930. Within the paradigm established by Daniel Elazar, a more ‘‘cooperative’’ period in intergovernmental operations had arrived .1 Despite real success, problems and disputes remained during this new period, the tenor and issues of which were the same as those seen between 1861 and 1880. Kansans still pursued the Price raid claims, while Missourians still struggled in vain to have the Crafton claims, and others, recognized. Throughout the Great Depression of 1 U.S. Statutes at Large, 40 (1919), 772; Brainerd Dyer, ‘‘California’s Civil War Claims,’’ Southern California Quarterly 45 (1963): 1–24; Kansas City Times, October 4, 1948; Bayless E. Hardin, ‘‘The Capitols of Kentucky,’’ The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 43 (1945): 173–200. 172 SACRED DEBTS the 1930s and even well into the 1990s, Missourians queried officials in Washington and Columbia about their scrip. Perhaps most aggrieved were Californians. Stuck on the fringes of the war and contending more with hostile Indians than rebellious Confederates, California accumulated a debt, with interest, totaling nearly $9 million . The state pursued this claim all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953. Despite the Court ruling adversely, California persevered until at least the late 1990s in trying to recover its war debt. Although quite relevant to contemporary citizens with claims to press, the issue and controversies of state indemnification have become little known and little remarked upon. They have, in a sense, assumed a position in the history of the Civil War much like that of the still-living widows of Confederate veterans, who continue to surface in quirky human-interest segments in the contemporary news media. The war claims and the widows have thus become mere footnotes and trivia to the war itself.2 To recover the history of the claims, I posed a series of questions at the outset of this study. The questions concerned both simple procedure and the larger context within which indemnification took place. The subsequent discussion suggests that careful distinctions need to be made when describing governance in the Gilded Age. For most of the twentieth century, a conventional wisdom has ruled the historical treatment of the period. It has been a none too favorable treatment and one defined by what Ballard Campbell has called the ‘‘indictment thesis’’; that is, the Gilded Age was a time synonymous with corruption and government held hostage by Robber Barons. Even where recent scholarship on the period has downplayed the role of corruption and Robber Barons, its analysis of governmental operations has still tended to the negative. Since the late 1970s, scholars have poked and prodded the early Gilded Age for evidence 2 Kansas City Times, October 4, 1948, describes the continuing efforts of Kansans to get scrip redeemed. For Missouri’s attempts to secure reimbursement through the Great Depression, see C. C. Calhoun, Attorney for the State of Missouri, to the Comptroller General of the United States, July 20, 1933, Comptroller to Calhoun, November 29, 1933, Calhoun to Comptroller, January 30, 1934, E. Y. Mitchell Collection , R. 95, F. 3674, WHMC. A most recent example of an individual’s attempt to redeem the Crafton scrip can be...

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