Free Those Who Have Borne the Battle by James Wright Page B

war. Lincoln pledged, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” He went on to conclude with his commitment to the Union veterans “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” The nation would keep this commitment, at least to the veterans and survivors.

    In the years following the Civil War, Congress regularly expanded eligibility and enhanced benefits packages for wounded veterans and for survivors of those who were killed in the war. In every instance, they acted earlier and more generously than legislators had for prior wars. This process culminated in 1890 with passage of a comprehensive pension act. Union veterans who had served for at least ninety days and had any disability as a result of the war—or any other disabilities that were not war related, as long as they had not resulted from “vice”—were eligible for a pension. This was also available for the widows and orphans of eligible veterans who were deceased.
    President Benjamin Harrison signed the 1890 pension bill. In his 1888 campaign he had argued against then president Grover Cleveland, who had vetoed a pension bill in 1887, that this was “no time to be weighing the claims of old soldiers with apothecary’s scales.” In fact, it was quite a comprehensive and generous bill. One Grand Army of the Republic officer described it as “the most liberal pension measure ever passed by any legislative body in the world, and will place upon the rolls all of the survivors of the war whose conditions of health are not practically perfect.” 45
    Civil War pensions evolved from disability and survivor benefits to a comprehensive pension program for veterans and their families. By 1905 some 80 percent of living Union veterans were receiving federal pensions. In the South, on the other hand, where Confederate veterans were dependent upon state programs, only some 20 percent of the surviving veterans in 1905 received pensions. And these were more charity than pension, often defined as support for the “truly indigent.” A study in 1917 determined that from the Revolutionary War to that point, the US government had paid veterans and their eligible survivors some $5.2 billion in pensions; $4.9 billion of this amount had gone to Civil War veterans and eligible survivors. 46
    There were few immediate benefits offered to veterans of the Spanish-American War (the War of 1898), except for the generous plans intended for those who suffered disability as a result of war service and for the widows and orphans of those killed in action. The government at the outset of the war determined that there would be no distinction between volunteer
troops and regulars. The entire expedition seemed to go well. Ambassador to Great Britain John Hay wrote his friend Theodore Roosevelt, describing it as a “splendid little war.” Pride over the success and the brevity of the war, though, was soon tarnished by the Filipino resistance to American occupation there. This turn of events, and increasing numbers of stories of some atrocities committed by American troops in the Philippines, surely moderated the national elation. There were some monuments and memorials, with the memory of the Maine and the glorified, and often fictionalized, battle for San Juan Hill at the center of these memorials. 47
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    If no American war would equal the Civil War for sustained cost and emotions, World War I would exceed it in terms of scale and rapidity of mobilization. It seemed an exhilarating experience—at least until the US troops found themselves in the trenches.
    Americans moved quickly to organize a military force and provide the matériel