Race, Ethnicity, and Disability Veterans and Benefits in Post-Civil War America

Using data from more than 40,000 soldiers of the Union army, this book focuses on the experience of African Americans and immigrants with disabilities, investigating their decision to seek government assistance and their resulting treatment. Pension administrators treated these ex-soldiers differently from native-born whites, but the discrimination was far from seamless - biased evaluations of worthiness intensified in response to administrators' workload and nativists' late-nineteenth-century campaigns. This book finds a remarkable interplay of social concepts, historical context, bureaucratic expediency, and individual initiative. Examining how African Americans and immigrants weighed their circumstances in deciding when to request a pension, whether to employ a pension attorney, or if they should seek institutionalization, it contends that these veterans quietly asserted their right to benefits. Shedding new light on the long history of challenges faced by veterans with disabilities, the book underscores the persistence of these challenges in spite of the recent revolution in disability rights.

1. The winding path of the self and the other; 2. The moral economy of veterans' benefits; 3. African-American veterans and the pension system; 4. Pensions for foreign-born veterans; 5. 'A more infamous gang of cut-throats never lived'; 6. Havens of last resort; 7. Epilogue.

This book focuses on the post-Civil War experience of African Americans and immigrants, investigating their decisions and assessing their resulting treatment. It contends that discrimination was far from seamless but instead shows that individual veterans quietly asserted their rights, while examining how African Americans and immigrants weighed their circumstances when seeking government assistance.

Larry M. Logue is Professor of History and Political Science at Mississippi College. He won the Francis and Emily Chipman First-Book Prize for A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah and is the author of To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace and co-editor of The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader and The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader.
Peter Blanck is a University Professor at Syracuse University and Chairman of the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI). He is a trustee of YAI/National Institute for People with Disabilities Network and is Chairman of the Global Universal Design Commission (GUDC). Blanck's most recent book is Disability Civil Rights Law and Policy (with Hill, Siegal and Waterstone).