The table shows the remarkable increase in the amounts of first payments in the ten years following the passage of the Arrears Act. Such payments were very largely arrears under the act of 1879. In 1880 there was an unusually large expenditure for pensions exclusive of first payments. This was doubtless due to the payment of arrears to pensioners already on the rolls, in which case the arrears would not be first payments. Another element appearing in first payments is back pension to cover the period-often several years-between the time of filing the application for a pension and the date when the claim is finally allowed by the Pension Bureau. This element is an important part of the first payments after the passage of the act of June 27, 1890. The first payments in 1892 were the largest in the history of the Pension Bureau. The Arrears Act was also a powerful stimulus to the building up of the permanent pension list, although many of the original claims filed before the arrears limitation expired were not favorably passed upon by the Pension Bureau for many years after 1879.

CHAPTER III

Civil War Pensions-The Act of June 27, 1890, and ServicePensions-Pensions and Politics

From 1861 down to June 30, 1885, 555,038 pension claims were filed alleging the existence of disabilities of service origin, and 300,204 of these claims were allowed under the provisions of the general pension law. Likewise 335,296 claims of widows, minor children, or dependent relatives were filed during the same period, alleging death of the soldiers to have been due to causes originating in the military service. Of these claims on behalf of widows and other relatives, 220,825 were allowed.1 Thus at the close of the fiscal year 1885 there were 254,834 invalid claims and 114,471 claims of widows and relatives, which had not been acted on favorably. Some were pending; some had been rejected but might be reopened on the discovery of necessary evidence.

The great obstacle to passing favorably on these hundreds of thousands of claims was the requirement of the pension law that proof must be made that disability and death were due to military service. In some meritorious cases, the lapse of years since the war and the absence of record evidence made it difficult or impossible to comply with the requirements of the law. In many other cases, it was improbable that the soldier's disability or death had any relation to military service. These conditions brought on a movement for the introduction of a new principle into Civil War pension legislation-that of granting pensions to persons who had performed a certain period of military service, provided they suffered from disabilities, but regardless of the origin of such disabilities. In some of the bills proposed, the grant of a pension was conditioned upon the claimant being de

1 Report of the Commissioner of Pensions for 1885. House Ex. Doc., 49th Cong., 1st Sess., Doc. 1, Part 5, 100.

pendent upon his daily labor, or upon the contributions of others, for his support. The movement also had in view the pensioning of widows of soldiers who served the required period, without regard to the cause of the soldier's death. Measures put forward to carry out these plans were known as "dependent" or "disability" pension bills.

Contemporaneously with the above movement, there was a widespread agitation on the part of ex-soldiers and G. A. R. posts for universal service-pensions. The appetite for pensions had grown keen, and soldier politicians found it to their advantage to go about asserting that all the veterans ought to be pensioned, whether disabled and indigent or not. At the G. A. R. national encampment of 1887, Comrade Johnston of Indiana, a member of Congress, said:1

I may go into the rural districts, and let Comrade Hamlin go with me and tramp up and down the Wabash Valley, taking the soldiers as they come, and nine out of every ten, Democrat and Republican, are in favor of a service pension bill. We are here to legislate for that. Let me give you a little piece of history. The gallant General Hovey of Indiana, Captain White of Fort Wayne, and myself represent three districts in Indiana, and in each of those districts. the majority against us is from twelve to fifteen hundred. We held a council of war. We declared in favor of a universal pension. Our opponents were foolish enough to fall into the trap and opposed it. Hovey carried his district by fourteen hundred majority. Captain White carried his by over twelve hundred, and I carried mine by eleven hundred and fifty. When I talk, I am talking for the men who represent the rank and file in the Grand Army.

A large element in the G. A. R., including the Committee on Pensions, thought it wise policy to postpone the demand for service-pensions and to concentrate all effort on a "disability"

1 Journal of the 21st National Encampment, G. A. R., 1887, 231–232.

2 General A. P. Hovey was President of the Service Pension Association of the United States. He made a political issue of the pension question and was elected governor of Indiana on the Republican ticket in 1888.

measure. Comrade Hannibal Hamlin of Maine said at the same encampment:1

We have a presidential election coming, and I tell you that there is a power behind that. I am no prophet, but I would predict that a President who will again veto a Disability Pension Bill can never be reelected President of the United States. You put to them a Service Bill, and I am not quite sure that a veto would have the same result. Let us be careful and wise in what we are doing. Keep within proper limits. We simply say now we will express no opinions. Don't kill the Disability Pension Bill by asking for a great deal more.

There were also those in the G. A. R. who put opposition to service-pensions on higher ground than that of prudence. Of the demand for such pensions, Comrade Burdett said in the same discussion:2

I can see no other answer than that it is setting up our patriotism against pay. When Abraham Lincoln-whose name be blessed forever-cried: "To your tents, O Israel!" the roads and the byways were thronged with the feet of them who rushed to the recruiting stations and thousands were turned away. That was the grandest sight the sun ever shone upon. A nation of gentlemen and patriots, not asking what the pay should be, came rushing to the front. I protest against spoiling that immortal picture by now calling the remnant of that great host again around the moneychangers' table to receive a pittance of eight dollars a month.

This is a great republic, and if it lives it is to live upon the unpaid patriotism of its sons. And I protest that the Grand Army, last of all, should set an example for future times of seeking to set a money value upon its services.

These extracts from the debate between the advocates of service-pensions and the advocates of disability pensions are

1 Journal of the 21st National Encampment, G. A. R., 1887, 231.

2 Ibid., 229.

given as typical of what took place at several of the Grand Army encampments. The supporters of service-pension proposals gained in numbers from year to year, and were in control at the encampment of 1888. At that time a report was adopted by a vote of 446 to 22 which favored the presentation of a bill to Congress making provision that every soldier or sailor who served in the Civil War for a period of sixty days or more should receive a service-pension of eight dollars per month, and that all who served a period exceeding eight hundred days should have one cent added to the monthly pension for each additional day's service. However, the same report added that "we do not withdraw our repeated approval of the bill now before Congress, which was proposed and endorsed by the National Pension Committee of the Grand Army, known as the disability pension bill."1

The experienced members of the pension committee were right in their opinion that there was a chance for a "disability" or "dependent" pension bill in Congress, but no immediate possibility of the passage of the Universal Service-Pension Bill. The Senate, as early as the summer of 1884, had adopted a disability pension measure as an amendment to the Mexican War bill, but the amended bill failed in the House. In his annual message for 1886, President Cleveland included a passage expressing "tender consideration" for the ex-soldiers, "who, having served their country long and well, are reduced to destitution and dependence, not as an incident of their service, but with advancing age or through sickness or misfortune." Of this class of veterans he said:

We are all tempted by the contemplation of such a condition to supply relief, and are often impatient of the limitations of public duty. Yielding to no one in the desire to indulge this feeling of consideration, I can not rid myself of the conviction that if these ex-soldiers are to be relieved, they and their cause are entitled to the benefit of an enactment under which relief may be claimed as a right, and that

1 Journal of the 22d National Encampment, G. A. R., 1888, 190-191.