The Civil War pension system was the most comprehensive social policy in the late nineteenth-century United States. Between 1880 and 1910, approximately a quarter of the federal government’s expenditure was devoted to this enormous system of military benefits. Scholars have typically charted the development of the pension system through a series of legislative watersheds, detailing its gradual expansion and liberalization. Yet, as this article shows, this was not the only path that the pension system could have followed. By investigating Commissioner of Pensions John Bentley’s five-year administration of the Pension Bureau during the late 1870s, this article explores a story of suppressed – rather than successful – state-building. While Bentley attempted to administer the pension system according to the shibboleths of the contemporary civil service reform movement, the nation’s veterans and their allies pursued a pension system predicated upon an incipient theory of veterans’ entitlements and rights. The Civil War pension system, this article thus reminds us, was not simply the sign of a precocious nineteenth-century state, but the product of a specific type of state, one that reflected a preference for distributive policies and decentralized administration rather than administrative centralization and broad grants of bureaucratic discretion.

This article examines working-class views of the Tammany Hall political machine and its main opposition parties between 1870 and 1924. Previous historians, relying mostly on accounts from machine politicians like George Washington Plunkitt, have tended to argue that Tammany Hall enjoyed popularity among working-class New Yorkers in this period because it offered them effective forms of material aid through the practice of job patronage and informal acts of charity. This article complicates that assertion by examining accounts and voting records from working-class individuals themselves. It finds that, while patronage and informal charity were indeed popular with working-class voters in this period, they were often dissatisfied with most other aspects of Tammany Hall governance, such as its reputation for corruption or inefficient delivering of city services. Working-class voters only continued to vote for Tammany Hall because the machine’s political rivals were generally led by wealthy reformers who repeatedly and openly disparaged members of the working class in their speeches and supported policies that were even more unpopular with working-class voters than Tammany Hall’s governance.

When Ulysses S. Grant succumbed to cancer on July 23, 1885, the nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest generals and the first president to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. As scholars are increasingly recognizing, many Republicans remained committed to the protection of Black suffrage as late as 1890, but in exploring the reaction to Grant’s death, Civil War memory scholars have overlooked the importance of memories of Grant’s presidency. Through an examination of newspapers and biographies in the months after Grant’s death and the immediate years thereafter, up to 1890, this article demonstrates that Americans of all political stripes used their memories of Grant’s presidency to aid their long-term political goals of either restricting or promoting Black civil rights. Democrats and reform-minded Republicans tried to denigrate Grant’s administration for supposed corruption while still applauding his magnanimity at Appomattox. In contrast, their Republican opponents, Black and white, contested this memory by constructing a politically purposeful memory of Grant’s Reconstruction-era politics as part of their ongoing fight to enforce Black voting rights and by extension secure the fruits of Union military victory. In doing so, Americans demonstrated that they remained unreconciled and divided on both the battlefields of Civil War memory and Reconstruction.

This article explores Eugene V. Debs’s experiences at the Moundsville prison and the federal penitentiary in Atlanta (1919–1921). It looks at his relationships with other inmates and his supporters outside of prison and examines the effects prison life had on Debs and his ideology. Most importantly, it closely examines his only book-length work: his prison memoir, Walls and Bars. It explores Debs’s critique of the prison system, the jailing of drug addicts, and the interconnectedness of capitalism and the penitentiary system.