Rob Bates

The system of pensions established in the United States for veterans of the Civil War has often been seen as emblematic of the American state's transformation during the post-war period. By sequestering the U.S. Pension Bureau within a narrative that chronicles the rise and fall of an incipient American welfare state, however, historians have overlooked alternative yet significant aspects of its evolution.

My research reconsiders the Pension Bureau's place within American state development during the final third of the nineteenth century. Though historians charting the growth of federal authority in the post-war period have customarily highlighted the escalating demand on the Federal budget and increasing number of citizens pulled into the purview of the Pension Bureau, they have been less inclined to explore the parallel emergence of its investigatory and law enforcement capacities or the internal institutional logics which guided their development. This project considers the Civil War pension system within the context of a system of governance that was both fragmented and frequently improvised, and which, in an age of reconstruction, reflected the manifold conflicts and contingencies attendant upon the development of central state authority.