Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories

A Pension for the Old Man

60 Pvt. Silas F. Havens, Company G, Fiftieth Massachusetts Infantry Carte de visite by Abraham Bogardus (1822–1908) of New York City, about 1862 61 A Pension for the Old Man Silas Havens felt angry and hurt. In the summer of 1896, he was abruptly dismissed from his job as deputy collector of taxes for New York’s Second District. Desperate for income, the fiftynine -year-old salesman-turned-bureaucrat hoped to land an important government contract—his disability pension. During the Civil War, he had served with the Fiftieth Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment organized in the autumn of 1862. Havens was ill on September 19, 1862, the day he mustered in as a private (the nature of his illness was not recorded), and he was sent to a New York hospital, where he recuperated over the next three months. In December 1862, he joined his comrades in Company G and sailed for New Orleans, where the Fiftieth saw limited combat. At Port Hudson, Louisiana, the regiment’s lone battle, it played a supporting role for heavy artillery units. Without losing any men to enemy fire, the Fiftieth mustered out in August 1863, having completed its nine-month term of enlistment. Havens found work in New York City, married in 1868, and settled across the Hudson River in Passaic, New Jersey. In his 1896 pension application, Havens claimed he suffered with rheumatism and varicose veins contracted in the army. His claim could not be proven, and the government denied his request . He began a futile letter-writing campaign to protest his rejection . In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, he vented his frustration at losing his state job, “for no other reason only that I was a Republican. I think the least the Government can do is to pension the old men until they are called to their long home, which is fast drawing to a close.”98 The following year, he reapplied , this time alleging, in addition to his other infirmities, total deafness in his right ear. A medical board disagreed—they found 62 his hearing was only diminished—and he was rejected again. He was finally granted a pension in 1907, after an elevator accident in the cellar of an office building in New York’s financial district crushed his left hand, causing the loss of two fingers. He enjoyed his stipend for barely a year, when, in February 1908, he suffered a fatal heart attack at age seventy. He left behind his wife, Charlotte , who filed an application for, and was promptly awarded, a widow’s pension until her death in 1920. ...