Object 63: Disabled Union Veterans 

The North’s victory in the Civil War came at an enormous cost to the more than two million men who fought for the Union cause. Over 350,000 lost their lives due to battle or disease. Almost as many were wounded in action. Some escaped with minor flesh wounds but others suffered more lasting injuries that left their bodies scarred, damaged, or worse. According to Northern medical records, Union surgeons performed just under 30,000 amputations during the war, although the actual number was almost certainly higher. Roughly 75 percent of the patients survived these operations and returned to civilian life missing one or more limbs or other body parts.    

Congress made provisions to provide monetary compensation to the wounded or disabled at the beginning of the war. In July 1861, lawmakers hastily passed a law for recruits who answered President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, making them eligible for the same pension allowances as soldiers in the Regular Army. A year later, after it became apparent that there would be no speedy end to the conflict, Congress enacted a more comprehensive pension act called the General Law. Modeled on the pension legislation passed for Veterans of the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and Mexican War, the 1862 act covered both battlefield wounds and “disease contracted while in the service of the United States.”

During the war, sickness and disease proved the greater threat, claiming more Union lives than the actions of the enemy. And in the decades afterwards, nearly 60 percent of the more than 400,000 pensions awarded to Civil War Veterans would be for non-battlefield causes.  

As had been the case since the American Revolution, payment rates for pensions depended on rank (at the time of injury) and the severity of the disability. Fully disabled privates and non-commissioned officers received $8 a month, an amount fixed by law back in 1816.

At the other end of the spectrum, officers at the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher collected $30 if incapacitated by their injuries. Proportionally smaller sums were awarded for injuries that were determined to be less than completely debilitating by examining physicians. In evaluating a Veteran’s condition, medical officials used the criteria that had been in place since 1806: they assessed the “nature of such disability, and in what degree it prevents the claimant from obtaining his subsistence”—meaning a living—by manual labor.  

Congress diverged from this simple if highly subjective formula for calculating pension rates later in the war as casualties and the carnage on the battlefield mounted. In mid-1864, legislators approved an act establishing fixed rates that applied to all ranks for specific types of severe and permanent disabilities. 

The new law covered three conditions: the loss of both feet merited a monthly pension of $20 while the loss of both hands or the sight in both eyes was worth $25. Two additional laws passed in 1865 and 1866 added 14 other kinds of disabilities that qualified for a pension at a fixed rate of between $15 and $25. These rates were periodically increased in a series of later laws enacted between 1872 and 1904.  

The modifications to the 1862 General Law were intended to provide clarity and consistency to the pension system, while also awarding more generous compensation to enlisted personnel and lower-ranking officers who suffered grievous injuries. But the new statutes introduced their own set of complications and ambiguities. Many of the disabilities covered were straightforward and simple to ascertain—for instance, loss of a leg at the hip joint or an arm at the shoulder joint earned the injured Veteran a monthly pension of $15. But the 1866 act also awarded $15—soon after increased to $18—for a “disability equivalent to the loss of a hand or foot,” a category of impairment that was open to interpretation.

It also specified a payment of $20 for “incapacity to perform manual labor,” which seemed at odds with the terms of the 1862 law. An attempt to codify all existing pension laws in 1873 added another layer of complexity by empowering the Pension Bureau to establish fixed payment rates of between $1 and $17 for specific disabilities that fell short of being equivalent to the loss of a hand or foot.  

Despite the system’s shortcomings, the federal government applied the Civil War-era pension regulations to all who served in the U.S. Army and Navy after 1865, including those who fought in the Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection (1898-1902). After the United States entered World War I in 1917, however, Congress placed disability compensation under the administration of a new agency in the Treasury Department, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Congress directed the bureau to calculate compensation for Great War Veterans using a fixed schedule that rated disabilities according to their severity. The bureau’s Medical Division released the first official version of the disability ratings schedule in 1921. Revised many times since, the 1921 schedule laid the groundwork for the modern compensation system employed by VA today.