Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor: Joseph Clements, brother of former county sheriff William Clements, was granted a

$1 monthly pension in September 1896, a “munificent rate,” The Republican reported. I’m guessing Joseph was a Civil War veteran. William was, enlisting in the 51st Regiment on his 17th birthday and serving four years and four months. George W. Scearce and Amos Kersey got the same verbatim 1914 county history tribute for their Union Army service:

“Pensions and political power may be thrown at their feet; art and sculpture may preserve upon canvas and in granite and bronze their unselfish deeds; history may commit to books and cold type may give to the future the tale of their sufferings and triumphs; but to the children of the generations yet unborn will it remain to accord the full measure of appreciation and undying remembrance of the immortal character carved out by the American soldiers in the dark days of the early sixties . . .”

George, in Company K, 51st Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, during more than three years was in 31 engagements. Captured and imprisoned, and then paroled, he returned to duty and was shot in the hip at Nashville. Mustered out, he re-enlisted as a private and was made second lieutenant.

Lincoln’s widow was said to receive a $3,000 yearly pension in 1881, and The Republican took umbrage at the exorbitant sum.

“A great howl is justly being raised against what is generally being termed ‘the pension frauds,’” and the widow, “relict” of the slain president, was cited in connection with the howling.

Custer’s widow received no pension as of March 1882, according to the paper, “and has been painting plaques for a living.” I think she earned quite a bit writing and lecturing about her foolhardy husband.

A local widow of a Revolutionary War soldier was granted an $80 monthly pension in 1871, retroactive to 1867 when she was 100.

A local man who served three years in the war, and was shot twice, was condemned in October 1881. “A man of dissipated habits,” the dayworker and father to 11, had “an undue appetite for strong drink.”

Until attacking another man, for which he was charged with assault and battery “with intent to commit murder,” he had been considered “an inoffensive and average citizen.”

I have to wonder whether our nation’s bloodiest conflict had a role in his behavior, notwithstanding the paper’s judgment of his “depraved appetite.” Had he earned a pension?

A county asylum inmate was granted a $13,500 pension in mid-1890. A cavalry veteran of the 1864 Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, he was injured when he was thrown from his horse and hit his head on a rock. Confederates had strung wires between trees.

“He had been known as one of the most jovial men in the company, but he gradually grew morose and sullen, until now he is a hopeless idiot.”

Oak Ridge’s W.A. Hollingsworth, known as “righteous act,” was granted a $12 pension in October 1889.

The Republican could not resist republishing a St. Louis paper’s 1886 jab at Democrats’ reported failure to override Grover Cleveland’s veto of several pension bills:

“Unless the patriotic people of the country place the Republicans in a majority of the lower branch of Congress, a man who lost his arm by a mowing machine or in a railroad accident stands a better chance of getting a pension than a maimed soldier of the Union army under this administration.”

Jacob Huber, Coatesville, had his pension increased from $14 to $17 per month in March 1898. He served in Company B, 11th Indiana Infantry. His white stone at Danville South Cemetery carries no birth or death date.

A former comrade of bachelor shoemaker Harvey Henry, Company I, also 11th Indiana, reached town in May 1882 “in search of evidence to secure a pension,” claiming he walked all the way from Texas.

By then, some 269,851 were on the pension roll, receiving $292,634,690 annually. “Upward of 5,000 . . . residences could not be obtained, as they follow the sea for a means of livelihood.”

One cited source in 1886 claimed the federal government had paid nearly $750 million in pensions since 1861. “This sum would erect a free library in nearly every town in the country.”

Paul Miner Lizton