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PROTECTING CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: PENSIONS, GENDER, AND THE WELFARE STATE IN THE U.S. SOUTH, A CASE STUDY FROM FLORIDA
| By Elna C. Green |
Florida State University |
| In addition to the more visible political changes it produced, the Civil War prompted revisions in U.S. social policy that scholars have only recently begun to investigate. The exigencies of war produced our first military conscriptions; they also prompted a change in federal pension policy. As an incentive to potential soldiers, Congress approved an expanded pension program, which would provide more generous benefits to a wider range of survivors than had previous federal pensions. A soldier could enter service knowing that not only his wife and children were covered but also that elderly parents or other dependents would be cared for in the event of his death or disability. This dramatic enlargement of the commitments made by the pension system resulted in a comparably dramatic growth in its costs: by 1893, more than 40% of the federal budget went to the support of Union veterans, their widows, and other dependents.1 |
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By law, Confederate veterans and their families were exempt from this federal social welfare program. So, as white conservatives regained control over the Southern states' legislatures after Reconstruction, they initiated state pension programs very similar to those on the national level. By the early-twentieth century, Southern states were also committing substantial portions of their annual budgets to the support of Confederate veterans and their families. Hence military pensions, both North and South, constituted a cornerstone of the nation's public welfare policy. Scholars have recently devoted considerable attention to the important place of Civil War pensions in shaping modern American social policy. Central to many of these analyses has been a focus on gender as a foundation of social welfare.2 |
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However, this wealth of scholarship has largely neglected the South and its regional variation on Civil War pensions. Little scholarly work has yet been done on the relationship between Civil War pensions and the development of social welfare in the region, or in fact on social welfare policy in the South at all.3 This essay will analyze the system of provision for needy Confederate veterans and their widows, using the records of one Southern state. Florida may have been the "smallest tadpole in the dirty pool of secession,"4 but it created a post-war system of Confederate welfare support that could compete with—and occasionally even best—those from states like Virginia and Georgia that were more widely recognized for their generosity to their aging veterans. This essay will first examine the origins of the Confederate welfare system in Florida. Then it will consider some of the political and social uses to which the welfare system might be put. Much was embedded in the Confederate welfare programs, and Southern states used them to fulfill multiple missions at once. This essay argues that Confederate welfare programs provided governmental financial support to the Lost Cause movement; they buttressed white supremacy and the Democratic party; and they endorsed a conservative gender code. Confederate welfare programs did both political and cultural work, and a close analysis of these systems may help scholars better understand the South's complex views on public provision and the welfare state in the twentieth century.5 |
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