Gee, if only some important event had happened this week so I would have something to write about...
Well, there was one small event that everyone probably missed—the last surviving Civil War widow died. Yes, more than a century and a half after the end of the war, the last surviving widow has passed away.
Military pensions are an old, old custom started not so much for the welfare of the aging soldier, as for the comfort of their military leaders. There has always been an inherent problem with training and equipping young men to fight, and then at the war’s end, telling these same men they are unemployed and their services are no longer needed. Historically, some unemployed soldiers sought employment with new revolutionary leaders.
Julius Caesar understood this problem and used newly conquered lands to build new cities for his former soldiers, simultaneously rewarding faithful service while moving them far from Rome and strengthening new border towns by populating them with citizens of proven loyalty. Augustus Caesar was forced to change the system slightly, as there was only so much new territory even Rome could acquire. Upon retirement, a soldier received an honesto missio, an honorable discharge, and a lump sum payment equivalent to thirteen times a legionnaire’s annual salary. More importantly (and this is something that today’s military might consider as a way of increasing recruitment), the retired Roman soldier received a lifetime exemption from Roman taxes.
In the United States, military pensions were originally only for veterans who had become disabled as a result of their military service and not for retirement. One of the first acts of the Continental Congress was an act to provide for the soldiers, “providing that every commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer and private soldier who shall lose a limb in any engagement, or be so disabled in the service of the United States of America as to render him incapable of afterwards getting a livelihood, shall receive during his life or the continuance of such disability the one-half of his monthly pay from and after the time that his pay as an officer [or soldier] ceases.”
During the Revolutionary War, the pay of a captain was $26 a month while a private received $6 a month. Even in the late 18th Century, a pension of $3 a month was, at best, barely enough to live on. Until the 20th Century, neither the recipients nor their dependents could claim the pension if they were able to work.
Over the years, Congress periodically changed the amounts received, the terms of qualifications and added provisions to provide for the veteran’s dependents. Though the amounts of the pensions were steadily raised, they never exceeded the bare minimum needed for survival.
After the Civil war, only the soldiers who had been disabled by injuries incurred during their service could apply for a pension. If the veteran fought on the side of the Union, the pension was paid by the Federal Government, while Confederate veterans had to apply to their respective Southern states. By the end of the 19th century, the widows and dependents of these veterans could also apply.
Immediately after the fighting, the citizens of the United States were in no mood to pay pensions to anyone in the South, especially to the veterans. While each state of the former Confederacy eventually established its own individual pension, most of the states did not begin these pensions until decades after the war, and even then, the amount of the pensions and rules for qualification varied.
Early in the 20th century, during the Depression, the Federal Government assumed the responsibility of paying all of the remaining pensions for the Southern States. There was an ever-dwindling number of veterans still receiving the pension—the last surviving veteran of that tragic war did not die until 1951.
During the Depression, when so many people were starving, that pitifully small pension became vitally important and was a cherished source of cash for many impoverished families. Aging Civil War veterans began marrying young women to be able to pass on that pension to their spouses. In some cases, the new spouse was a distant relation of either the Veteran, or occasionally, a relative of his first wife. These May/December marriages were usually marriages of convenience, with the partners rarely actually living together.
A typical example was Gertrude Grubb, 18, who married John Janeway, 81, in 1927. Janeway, a Union veteran passed away in 1937 and his wife continued to collect $70 a month until her death in 2003, meaning that the modest pension spanned three centuries. Gertrude Janeway was the last surviving widow to receive a pension. The last child of a Civil War veteran receiving a pension died last year.
The last surviving widow, Helen Viola Jackson, married her 92-year-old neighbor, James Bolin in 1937. Bolin, who had enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 14th Missouri Cavalry three days before Lee’s surrender following the battle at Appomattox Court House, was bed-ridden and refused to accept charity, so he offered to marry his 17-year-old neighbor in exchange for the care the teenager was providing. A marriage of convenience, Jackson kept her own name, never lived with Bolin, and after his death, never applied for his pension. Jackson, who never remarried, died in December at the age of 101.
As far as is known, she was the last surviving widow of a Civil War soldier.
One would hope that the last traces of that horror would be long gone. But it seems the losers of that conflict have never quite been able to let go of the idea that one group of people are inferior to wealthy white people and still need looking after. The evil that spawned the Civil War remains in at least the political decedents of those elitist self-appointed leaders of that great rebellion. It feels as if the Old South, or at least its upper classes have risen again and are looking for payback. I leave that to you to decide who thinks minorities are less able to think for themselves and care for their own.
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