Civil War Expansion System

The American Civil War not only brought about vast political and military change to the nation, but also created an opportunity for vast economic expansion within the federal government. A prime example of this expansion being the creation of the Civil War pension system. Although federal aid for families who had lost their source of income to military service can be tracked to colonial era, it was not until 1862 the government formed a strong relationship with veterans and their dependents. The pension bill that was passed by the Republican controlled Congress in February of 1862, was officially signed into law by President Lincoln on July 14, 1862, and issued in a new era of federal aid. This first pension act awarded aid to men who could …show more content…
A steady stream of congressional produced several reforms and amendments that would alter the pension bill from the 1860s to the late 1880s, including the Arrears of Pension Act of 1879 which allowed for Union veterans to apply and request back payments of pension owed since the end of their service. The modification of the pension act occurred for almost three decades until a new law significantly altered the eligibility requirements for …show more content…
Logue and Peter Blanck’s study “"Benefit of the Doubt": African-American Civil War Veterans and Pensions,” provides quantitative data about pension application rates before and after the passing of the 1890 act. The data used in their analysis is what Fogel and colleagues at the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago compiled from service and pension records of men from fifty-two randomly selected companies of the U.S. Colored Troops. The data shows that “slightly less than one-third (31.9 percent) of all black enlisted men in the CPE samples ever applied for a pension, whereas more than half (52.5 percent) of white veterans applied” (Blanck and Logue, 381). Logue and Blanck also provided tables to indicate the rate in which the Bureau of Pensions awarded pensions using race as the independent variable. The data shows that before 1890, 77.9 percent of white applicants of the sample were awarded pensions while only 39.4 of the sample of black applicants were awarded pensions. With these results one must question why quantitative data appears to show that a pension applicant’s race could harm one’s chances in receiving their Civil War pension or even keep one from applying in the first place. It is not the aim of this paper to attribute the inequitable distribution of pensions among disabled Union veterans to an inherent discriminatory nature of the Bureau of Pensions, but rather through the examination of several studies that highlight the