Those Who Have Borne the Battle by James Wright Page B

circumstances.” This was an important step toward the embrace of national gratitude: “As young soldiers, once treated with suspicion and hostility, aged veterans had come to be cherished as the spiritual relics of the Revolution whose emergence and reward uplifted the nation’s public morality and dignity.” 22
    Under the 1818 Pension Act, veterans filed significantly more claims than the advocates and lawmakers had predicted. Some 25,000 veterans submitted claims under the law. The expectation had been that the number would be 3,000. Some of these represented fraudulent claims, which caused the old Republicans to insist that their predictions had come true. However, over the next years, as the numbers of remaining veterans continued to decline, a new political commitment to the survivors took hold. In 1832 Congress extended coverage of the 1818 legislation, providing for a pension payment to all surviving veterans who had served at least six months during the Revolution.
    This 1832 legislation transferred authority over pensions from the Treasury Department to the War Department; Congress assumed that this cabinet office would validate claims for service more effectively than Treasury had. As in 1818, the number of claims far exceeded expectations.
By early 1833, more than 24,000 veterans submitted claims. Nonetheless, in 1836 Congress also extended the pension to surviving widows. For nearly the next half century, Congress extended definitions of service and of the marriage dates of the widows so that when the last veteran pensioner, Daniel Bakeman, died in 1869 at the age of 109, 887 widows still remained on the rolls. 23
    By these cumulative actions, the national embrace of war veterans and their families became complete. This was a specific program for the Revolutionary War veterans, but a pattern had been established. If the American Revolution had a privileged place in the nation’s memory, those who served the Republic in subsequent wars would now move into the same patriot’s band that came to define those who served in the Revolutionary War. Their service became special, exemplary, and by definition heroic, as their numbers became a smaller proportion of the population. A grateful nation would look after them as they aged and, following their deaths, would attend to the surviving spouses.
    It was not clear that any political leaders in the early nineteenth century ever developed a political philosophy that affirmed this principle, but through a series of incremental actions, the idea of the debt of a grateful nation became a part of this narrative. Ironically, even as the concept of every citizen being obliged to serve in wartime remained a critical part of the narrative, the recognition that in fact every citizen was not serving embedded further the sense of the nation’s obligation to those who actually did serve. The iconic “everyman” in war became the venerated “hero” in peace.
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    When the War of 1812 began, the formerly inconsistent interplay between colonial and Continental governments no longer prevailed. At the outset of this second war with the British, enlisted men who were disabled qualified for a pension of five dollars a month; officers were eligible for half pay. Widows and orphans received a pension for five years, a period later extended. No uniform pension for all surviving veterans of the War of 1812 existed until 1871, at which time about 25,000 survivors became eligible. As part of the declaration of war with Mexico in 1846, Congress made provision for disability and widow and orphan pensions,
the terms of which were extended in later years. Congress approved comprehensive pensions for all Mexican War veterans in 1887.
    Throughout the nineteenth century, as Congress considered these various pension laws and their enhancements, they introduced new categories of survivors of the Indian Wars. These allowed pensions for “invalids”