The Declaration of Independence and the First Veterans Benefits

The Declaration of Independence and the first Revolutionary War benefits act were both approved 250 years ago during the tumultuous summer of 1776. These events were linked. Delegates to the Second Continental Congress waited until they had settled the question of independence before deciding how to treat the citizen-soldiers wounded in service to the Nation.

On May 26, 1776, Brig. Gen. Nathanael Greene took a few moments from his duties organizing the defenses of Brooklyn to dash off a letter to John Adams, who was in Philadelphia attending the Second Continental Congress. Greene knew the British were massing a large force to attack New York and he urged Adams to impress upon Congress the importance of doing everything in its power to boost recruitment. In Greene’s view, the best way to encourage enlistments was to promise financial relief to soldiers who were wounded and to their families if they died. Such a measure would reassure new recruits as well as those already serving, he wrote. It would also deliver “nothing more than common justice” to the men risking life and limb for the Revolution.[1]

Since convening in May 1775 following the first clashes at Lexington and Concord, Congress had issued a string of war-related resolutions. It organized the colonial militias into a single Continental Army under the command of George Washington; appointed 12 other general officers, Greene included; authorized the raising of more troops; ordered the purchase of munitions and supplies; established the Continental Navy; and drafted rules and regulations for both military services.

Yet, despite meeting almost daily, delegates neglected to make any provisions for men wounded or killed in battle. Their inaction on this issue is puzzling, as ample precedent for such laws existed. The English Parliament passed an “Acte for the Relief of Souldiours” in 1593 during its war with Spain.[2] Most of the colonial governments adopted similar measures in conflicts against the French and Native Americans before the Revolution.

Adams responded to Greene’s letter saying he agreed wholeheartedly with the general’s reasoning but doubted Congress would heed his advice, at least not at present. Undeterred, Greene pressed his case in another letter dated June 2. “[I]f there was a support established what confidence would it give to those engaged, what encouragement to those that are not,” he wrote. “Good Policy points out the measure, Humanity calls for it, and Justice claims it.”[3] Adams replied with more optimism to Greene’s second message. “I hope that when We get a little over the Confusions arising from the Revolutions . . . Something will be done,” he stated.[4]

The exchange of letters took place while Congress was weighing the question that had been hanging over its head for the past 12 months: should the colonies renounce their allegiance to the British crown and proclaim independence? On June 8, Congress took up a resolution of independence introduced by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, only to decide after two days of debate to postpone a final vote until July. In the interim, Congress appointed a committee composed of Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and three others to draft a formal declaration in case the resolution passed.

With the decision on independence pending, delegates finally turned to the issue of what was owed the men who shed their blood in the struggle to establish a new nation. On June 20, 1776, Congress formed another committee “to consider what provision ought to be made for such as are wounded or disabled in the land or sea service, and report a plan for that purpose.”[5]

On July 2, Congress voted decisively in favor of independence. Delegates then reviewed the draft Declaration of Independence written by Jefferson with a little help from his fellow committee members. After making revisions to the text, Congress approved it on July 4. Four weeks later, on August 2, members added their signatures to a handwritten engrossed copy of the document. “We have now a Nation to protect and defend,” Adams declared to Brig. Gen. William Heath a day after the signing ceremony.[6]

The committee on disabled soldiers and seamen delivered its report towards the end of August. Delegates accepted its recommendations and, on August 26, they passed a resolution creating the first national pension system for disabled Veterans. The resolution provided half pay for life to any member of the Army or Navy “who shall lose a limb in any engagement, or be so disabled in the service of the United States of America as to render him incapable afterwards of getting his livelihood.” Those who were “not totally disabled from getting a livelihood” were entitled to a lesser amount according to the severity of their injury.[7] Congress later revised the resolution in 1778 to clarify that it applied to all who fought in any capacity on the American side during the war.

John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, sent a copy of the pension resolution to George Washington at his headquarters  in lower Manhattan on August 27. Unfortunately, neither Washington nor Nathanael Greene had time to savor the good news from Philadelphia. On the very day Hancock dispatched the document, 15,000 British regulars and 5,000 German Hessians routed the 6,000 Americans defending the approaches to Brooklyn. Washington managed to extricate the rest of his forces from Long Island to New York by executing a risky night crossing of the East River. Soon afterwards, he abandoned the city and retreated north. Not until September 21, after stabilizing his position along Harlem Heights in upper Manhattan, did Washington have opportunity to share the new pension regulations with his troops.

That same month, with Washington’s army fighting for its life, Congress approved another benefit in the hopes of stimulating recruitment. Earlier in the summer, delegates had awarded a $10 bounty to any soldier who signed on for three years. Washington, however, believed a cash bonus alone was not enough to entice new recruits. “I heartily wish a bounty in Land had been or could be given, as was proposed some time ago,” he wrote John Hancock in July. “I think It would be attended with salutary consequences.”[9]  

After the debacle on Long Island, Congress came around to his position. On September 16, Congress called on the states to raise 88 new battalions. To fill out the ranks of this force, delegates doubled the size of the cash bounty and offered, for the first time, a grant of land to recruits who enlisted for the duration of the war. As with the pension resolution, military rank determined the size of the land bounty, with privates and noncommissioned officers receiving 100 acres and colonels getting 500 acres.

The pension and land bounty resolutions were not Congress’s last words on benefits. In 1778, Congress voted to reward officers with half pay for an additional seven years if they served till the end of the war. The decision to grant officers a service pension was made under duress, after Washington warned delegates that such a measure was necessary to stave off mass resignations within the officer corps.

In August 1780, Congress also offered a half-pay pension for seven years to the widows of officers who died in service. A few months later, Washington persuaded Congress to convert the service pension for officers into a lifetime benefit. As the war wound down in 1783, however, delegates commuted the benefit to full pay for five years. In the 1800s, Congress experienced another change of heart and made lifetime service pensions available to almost all surviving Veterans of the Revolution, officers and enlisted men alike.

 Eventually, about 40-50,000 Veterans and widows would collect a Government pension under these post-wartime laws. The number of men who received a pension for a disabling wound, by comparison, was much smaller, totaling only about 3,000. Nonetheless, of all the Revolutionary era benefits acts passed by Congress, the August 1776 pension resolution carried the most meaning. The Declaration of Independence issued only a month earlier established the Nation’s founding ideals of freedom and the right to self-government. The pension resolution added another bedrock principle: that the Government had an obligation to support the citizen-soldiers who came to bodily harm while fighting for their country.

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[1] Greene to Adams, May 26, 1776, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0092. Spelling in quotations has been regularized except in certain cases. Punctuation has been left unchanged.

[2] Cited in Bernard Rostker, Providing for the Casualties of War: The American Experience through World War II, (2013), 37.  

[3] Greene to Adams, June 2, 1776, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0092.

[4] Adams to Greene June 22, 1776, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0129.

[5] Journals of the Continental Congress, (1906), 5: 469.

[6] Adams to Heath, August 3, 1776, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0189.

[7] Journals of the Continental Congress, (1906), 5: 702-05.

[8] Pay rates for officers and enlisted personnel were set by Congress on June 14, 1775, See Journals of the Continental Congress, (1905), 2: 89-90.

[9] Washington to Hancock, July 27, 1776, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-05-02-0356.