Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post-Civil War America

Using data from more than 40,000 soldiers of the Union army, this book focuses on the experience of African Americans and immigrants with disabilities, investigating their decision to seek government assistance and their resulting treatment. Pension administrators treated these ex-soldiers differently from native-born whites, but the discrimination was far from seamless – biased evaluations of worthiness intensified in response to administrators’ workload and nativists’ late-nineteenth-cent...