Nation's only Civil War pensioner collects $73 a month from VA (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Nation's only Civil War pensioner collects $73 a month from VA (2017)

floridatoday.com

146 pointsgscott34 comments

I heard about such crazy arrangements before in the interview with the author of this book https://www.hoover.org/research/high-cost-good-intentions-hi.... He did a good job studying the history of Federal entitlements stemming from the Civil War and how that select targeting of veterans slowly and steadily expanded with the years. There was this interesting entitlement creep if you will. If I recall correctly it started with soldiers who died in battle to leave a pension or something behind for their widows. Then some soldiers close to that qualification got the next dibs, those who were wounded I believe, and eventually it became everyone who served in the Civil War, and kept creeping to descendants of soldiers or something along those lines. Pretty nuts, but does capture well that aspect of human nature.

Let this be a reminder to just how not long ago the civil war really was. My father’s grandfather was born a slave. He has childhood memories of older relatives who remember the passage of the 13th amendment. That intergenerational trauma is still very real and fresh for blacks in this country. Keep this in mind whenever you wonder why systemic inequality still exists.

Economic injustice can easily span multiple generations. I am where I am today in no small measure because my parents could afford to provide me with a stable environment and a house full of books to read. I never had to work to help support the family, never had to deal with a family member addicted to drugs, never had to worry about drug gangs roaming the street that I lived on, never had to worry about someone judging me negatively or someone in authority harassing me because of the color of my skin. None of that was my doing. It happened simply because I was fortunate enough to be born to educated white parents.

Slavery was one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by mankind. The 13th amendment may have begun the process of making it right, but that process is very far from finished.

Yes, thats why the chinese, colonized by the japanese are still heavily supressed - oh, victim narrative break down...

My family has shizophrenia as curse, and a part of them is all high on this narrative. Its always some conspiracy, some evil external force, and due to them running with this view through the world- and the world reacting, it becomes a self fullfilling prophecy. There is never that one point, where somebody says "Now im really free, and responsible for all what happens".

Get help. Real help. Not this eternal victim narrative which allows for barricading in ones missery. Not that it holds up to daylight anyway, now that the former victims, become the new colonial masters.

Japan still occupies China? That's news to me.

Black people have never been the masters of their own fate in the U.S. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, which lasted 100 years. Jim Crow (which is to say, legally sanctioned racial discrimination) was only eliminated 50 years ago, and it has since been replaced by a more subtle program of gerrymandering [1], racially discriminatory drug laws [2], racially discriminatory law enforcement [3] and other daily indignities to which people of color are selectively subjected [4]. This is not to say that individuals cannot rise above this. They can, and they do. But that doesn't change the fact that the legacy of slavery and other forms of racial bigotry is very much still with us, with your tone-deaf diatribe being yet another supporting data point.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/09/how-a...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/22/police-hand...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/julia-isabel-amparo-me...

Could the very same not be claimed about nearly all other non white ethnic groups? Still - they prevail, some even doing better then the "evil" supressors- and are in turn discriminated against by affirmative action. Add to that a already frail ladder when it comes to upwards mobility, which also discards a lot of "white trash", which dont fit into this tale of victims and evil doers either and you end up with something that just doesent sound convincing.

Why should - beside the usual aristocratic supression of chance - single out the black ehtnicity for discrimination, when racism and jingoism & culture enthusiasm existed for every other ethnic group arriving in the US ?

Also was there not the option to leave free- and on there own accord? So staying was a choice made. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia

> Could the very same not be claimed about nearly all other non white ethnic groups?

No. To be sure, people of (all) color have been systematically discriminated against in the U.S., but none other than Africans have been subjected to centuries of legal enslavement. All other ethnic groups came voluntarily, and could leave if they wanted to. Blacks couldn't. That makes a big difference. Also, no other ethnic group has ever been the target of legalized discrimination on the scale of Jim Crow. The treatment of blacks has been uniquely horrific in the U.S.

Has been and continues to be.

Perhaps the only thing over-shadowing that is the treatment of indigenous people in the New World.

Look, you're free to move to Liberia if you don't like it, too.

If you want a taste of what a post-apocalyptic world looks like, start packing.

China is not a colony. It no longer has any masters to serve. Even then it took decades for it to shake off all of the geopolitical interference from would-be overlords including Japan and various European powers.

Meanwhile minorities in the US are systematically denied any opportunity to escape their situation. Everything is rigged against them.

It's hard to pull yourself up with your own bootstraps when there's a boot crushing down on your neck and a hand in both pockets to steal whatever you might scrape together.

I agree. Lots of us have ancestors who were involved with slavery in the US. For me it's at least one great great grand father who held twenty plus enslaved people in South Carolina. His son was drafted into the CSA at 16 in the final months of the war. His son, my grandfather, was a big influence on my life until I was 21. The gggrandfather lost a lot after the war and was bitter and resentful for the rest of his life. His son, born into privilege and wealth, grew up poor, lived an honest, meager life and died a horrible death as the result of a steam boiler explosion. I didn't learn these things from my grandfather. I learned them when I did my own research into these people and uncovered their stories.

I have not lived in the South for fifty years, have no accent, consider myself unbiased by race and extremely progressive politically. Yet, as I found and verified these traces of my personal history, I could feel a certain resonance between them and aspects of myself. Not particularly admirable aspects, but present nonetheless. Like a tendency to resent others who seem to have things given to them when I have always worked. Or a deep anger that (very) occasionally leaps out in disproportionate response to slight things. Like I say, not admirable, but there. I am not suggesting they were 'caused' by ancestral experiences. But I do think they are consistent with them.

And what was I to do with the knowledge my ancestors were slave holders? What happens to a person to make it OK for them to engage in such a hideous thing in the first place? Next was what am I supposed to do? It is extremely uncomfortable to sit with these things. I can not imagine the emotions I would feel sitting with knowledge that my ancestors were enslaved. For myself I decided I could acknowledge the truths my family never talked about. I could look at my own patterns of denial and identify the traces of them wrapped up in racist rhetoric. And when folks are having discussions about slavery being something in the so distant past I can point out that my personal connection to it is not all that distant.

I offer this bit of personal history to support the OP - the civil war was not that long ago. The repercussions and the sentiments of it are still with us and passed on intentionally or not. They are the sort of thing that turns into a background hum against which systematic inequality seems correct and harmonizes with the rhetoric of nationalism and racism.

The original story illustrates that we are still paying, metaphorically and actually, for the civil war.

> Or a deep anger that (very) occasionally leaps out in disproportionate response to slight things.

In the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers[0], he mentions that there are physiological differences to stress and verbal insults depending on what part of the US you are from. Specifically, being from the South led to stronger physiological responses to verbal insults.

The main thrust, was that if you are descended from pastoral (vs farming) folks and they lived in a mountainous area, there was a high correlation with "honor" and "vendetta" cultures. You can't steal a farm whereas you can steal livestock which in turn led to vendettas etc. The example given in the book is Scottish highlanders who moved to the Appalachians and basically brought the "you stole my sheep, I stabbed your brother, you stabbed me" lifestyle with them.

[0] http://throughaglass.net/archives/2009/03/23/outliers-by-mal...

In Belgium there’s a woman now in her thirties who gets a WW1 survivor’s pension. A buried shell was set off by the heat of a campfire, tearing into her leg.

I see this as a reminder of why you shouldn't remove an option from a form just because you find it unlikely or improbable.

The last Revolutionary War widow died in 1906 (https://blog.genealogybank.com/last-revolutionary-war-widow-...). She was receiving pension payments until then.

A 109-year old former slave's daughter voted for Obama in 2008 (https://www.npr.org/sections/newsandviews/2008/10/109yearold...).

The entire history of the US is covered by the first woman's husband, the first woman, the second woman, and a baby born in 2008.

I would have thought the pension would be inflation indexed.

the pension is older than inflation based monetary policy in the United States

yes, we only moved off the gold standard in 1971

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock

For practical purposes we moved off of it in 1914. The value of the dollar steadily declined against gold from then on, despite the official exchange rate. The divergence was nearly 2:1 by 1929, and the run on the banks then was caused by this. The runs stopped only when FDR suspended payments in gold.

Is it not in any way? $73 seems high for the mid nineteenth century, but low for today.

(edit: Low to be inflation linked)

Absolutely amazing, that someone connected to the civil war in that way is still alive.

"Connected to the civil war" is the key word here.

She was born well after WW1 in 1930... which was 63yrs after the Civil War ended. Meanwhile:

> The last surviving Civil War veteran died in 1956 at the age of 109, according to the VA.

Similarly (and probably more interesting) is the 17th century perpetual bonds still paying interest from 370yrs+ ago: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-17th-century-bond-...

Also reminds me of how Germany states are still bankrolling bishops in compensation of taking territories from their predecessors shortly before the original HRE collapsed to Napoleonic pressure. Survived three collapsing empires, two republics (GDR also paid up) and half a dozen or so decades of independent states honoring those obligations. A plan for buying out is on the books since the Weimar constitution (and explicitly honored in the Grundgesetz), but nobody seems to be in a particular hurry...

GDR also paid up

This is the most surprising detail!

“Connected” is the key, still kind of amazing, her daddy fought in the civil war. It’s just late life children and such, it’s a remarkably direct connection.

I agree, while meaningless in some rational sense it is still quite evocative.

My grandmother was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and while again, meaningless (she was an infant, in Australia, when the queen died) still has always made all that 19th century history feel more contemporary to me.

That's pretty cool. Kinda reminds me how often during border conflicts, modern country states legitimize their claims with arrangements made hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Or how your EU4 spies need about a year to generate a claim on a neighboring province, thus giving you a casus belli.

I always suspect "inspired by Paradox" when this kind of comment comes up. It's scary to see how much these games influence our perception of history, considering the permanent conflict of interest between accuracy and gameplay.

On the other hand, those games are teaching models instead of "facts", which is much less prone to cause future conflict when the stuff taught is not exactly consistent with what others were told. Ever met one of those people who only know Hitler as heroic shatterer of colonialism? scary. All in all, Paradox is doing an amazingly good job, but we should not only be careful about how many hours we lose to them, we also need to be wary of putting too much faith into the models we absorb from them.

Well, if countries didn't constantly refer back to "arrangements made hundreds or even thousands of years ago" as still valid, then the globe would be a complete blood-path or territorial disputes, expansion, and murder.

It's not just during "border conflicts" that they refer to them. The borders themselves, as they stand in peace, are based on "arrangements made hundreds or even thousands of years ago".

That is not legitimizing but contortion of history into nationalist sentiment. No one takes these stories seriously, aside from the easily impressed, that don't have a solid grasp on history. Besides, most of these "claims" are already invalidated by contracts between modern states. A state and its borders is not legitimized by fancy ahistorical fiction but by mutual recognition and contracts.

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[0]: https://www.princeton.edu/~slaughtr/Articles/722_IntlRelPrin...

>That is not legitimizing but contortion of history into nationalist sentiment. No one takes these stories seriously, aside from the easily impressed, that don't have a solid grasp on history.

That's absolutely wrong.

All kinds of "hundreds and thousands" year old arrangements are part of modern borders and state relationships.

This includes purchases, centuries old loans, and other such matters. European borders, for example, depend on arrangements going back to the time of Charlemagne.

>A state and its borders is not legitimized by fancy ahistorical fiction but by mutual recognition and contracts.

Which is neither here nor there, because today's contracts are still based on arrangements made hundreds and thousands years ago (as well as later arrangements, of course).

The 10th President of the United States, John Tyler, has two grandsons still alive today [1]. And the last witness to Lincoln's assassination appeared on TV [2]. So someone receiving a pension from the Civil War doesn't seem too far fetched.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/heir-raising-experience/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4

The article without the google survey ads: https://outline.com/bjSx3m

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