While successfully refuting a false historical perspective, more can be done about the postwar memory work of Black Americans. For example, the life experiences of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) veterans’ kin and their eternal fight on the battlefield of Civil War public memory deserve more scholarly and public attention. Scholars have done an exceptional job uncovering the war’s lasting impact on newly freed, formerly enslaved, USCT veterans and their families. However, northern freeborn veterans’ kin are rarely, if ever, the center of historical analysis. As a result, less is known about their struggle in the post war era to memorialize their service and their family’s sacrifices. I argue that it is long overdue to shift the historical conversation to people who experienced the Civil War and its aftermath in important and starkly different ways from newly freed people. To accomplish this goal, one need only examine the Civil War pension records of USCT veterans’ dependents to understand how they persistently fought for inclusion in the conversation around the meaning of the Civil War generations after 1865.
Focusing on a dependent’s’ pension application provides multiple ways to understand how the federal government (namely the Bureau of Pensions) documented and occasionally approved dependent pensioners. At each aspect of the application process federal government representatives ignored the Lost Cause which ignored Black soldiering in the war, and the lasting impact soldiering had on dependents generations after the war. Instead, the Bureau of Pensions officials acknowledged what I term the Families’ Cause, which refers to the concerted efforts that multi-generational dependents demanded regarding both social welfare and the lingering impact that their male-kin’s wartime sacrifices held on their households.
There were limits to this inclusion—or something like that. Many Black applicants experienced racial discrimination. In many cases, it had to do that many pension agents (who were all white men) inherently viewed Blacks as untrustworthy seeking to defraud the federal government out of money. To be clear, application deception occurred but it transcended race. Even so, pension agents often approached USCT dependent applications with a heightened sense of skepticism with negative consequences for Blacks. Illiterate applicants also faced challenges due to their inability to comprehend the necessary documents fully. Lawyers, who received varying fees, were critical of those hoping to navigate the complex pension system. Traveling to and from locations to provide evidence and track down a witness was a costly endeavor. The Bureau of Pensions’ overemphasis on collecting documentation throughout an extensive and sometimes invasive examination procedure that could span years, even decades, led to detailed data on people who did not have the resources or time to document their lives.