1 - What Is a Union Veteran?

Summary

Our initial objective is to gauge the extent to which Union veterans’ lives were ruled by the Civil War. Censuses registered the junctures of the life course, where readapted veterans should be indistinguishable from their peers. There is evidence that they were not: some census-takers more readily assigned occupations to dependent veterans, acknowledging a contrast between them and their neighbors. White veterans were considerably poorer in 1870 than were their peers, while African-American veterans were better off than black men in general. Mortality for white veterans without disability discharges was similar to that of the overall population, but those with disabilities carried a discernible burden. They ran a higher risk of death in the 1870s than did their peers, a risk that accelerated with age. In keeping with the wealth comparison, black veterans’ mortality was less severe than the estimate for all black men. Nonetheless, African-American mortality provides a kind of worst-case perspective on the nineteenth-century risk of death. There was no “Union veteran” who epitomized the experience of more than a million former soldiers. There were instead forces, some rooted in their era and some timeless, that molded lives long after Appomattox.