Between 1836 and 1855 Congress enacted several pieces of legislation
to grant pensions to the widows of Revolutionary war soldiers. These pension
were created to compensate widows for "hardships endured" and "for the
services they rendered by taking care of ... soldiers and their families."
As a result of these pension acts, aproximately 22,000 elderly white and
black women collected federal funds during the final years of their lives.
Most Revolutionary War widow pensioners were between seventy and eighty-five
years of age when they applied for pensions. Many were illiterate and infirm.
While the ranks of Revolutionary War widows included a small number of
southern slave owners and some middle-class officers' wives, Revolutionary
War widows, for the most part, were not affluent. Pensions, however, gave
widows an enhanced position in their communities and in the eyes of the
nation, regardless of their economic station in life.
This paper demonstrates that pensions offered widows not only financial compensation for their husbands' service, but provided recipients with a form of social currency as well. In collecting pensions, widows were elevated to the status of republican icons. Stemming from their husbands' participation in the War of Independence, Revolutionary War widows became symbols of national inception. Pensions enabled elderly women to access a cherished historical event and to gain the nation's appreciation and respect. For poor old women, who were especially vulnerable to long held Western stereotypes of elderly females as hags, shrews, and witches, the value of a pension extended well beyond its monetary worth.
Widows were not the only people to benefit from the creation of pensions laws. Younger men stood to profit as well. A widow's prestige as a revered survivor of the Revolutionary generation was realized because a younger generation of politicians, federal pension agents, lawyers, county judges, and court clerks - men who came of age after American independence - created laws and a bureaucratic infrastructure supporting the distribution of federal funds to her. By representing and assisting aged widows, these more youthful men were able to associate themselves with the founding of the nation and to project an image of themselves as loyal citizens of the republic. Power and status here flowed two ways: through pensions, widows achieved recognition for their ties to the War of Independence - and received much needed income - while a set of younger men forged a connection with an historical moment in which they never participated.
Research for this paper draws on a national sample from the historically rich, but largely ignored, National Archives' collection Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Application Files, 1800-1900. The widows' pension applications found in this collection are an invaluable source for understanding the lives of non-elite elderly women in antebellum America. Historians know little about the social and economic experiences of aged women in the 1800s and even less about their interactions with the federal government. Few Revolutionary War widows documented their lives in their own words. Were it not for pension records, their histories would be lost. This paper marks an important step toward developing an understanding old women in Young America.
Current scholarship on the Market Revolution focuses on the expansion of commercial culture as a defining feature of antebellum America without fully considering the manner in which nineteenth-century concepts of commerce and value could be applied to commodities not easily categorized as goods or services. In the mid-1800s, as this paper shows, connections to the American Revolution could be redeemed for both financial and social enhancement. Here, ties to the Revolution functioned not only as expressions of national loyalty, but as mediums of exchange.
Notes
1. Abridgement of the Debates of Congress from 1789-1856. 14 (July 1842), 458.
2. For the past two decades, historians have hotly debated the impact
of the American Revolution on the status of older men in the early Republic.
See David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977); W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land:
The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978); Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution
and the Historical Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Glenn
Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American
Culture, 1630-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
Significantly less attention has been paid to the position of old women
in the decades following the Revolution. One important exception is Terri
Premo, Winter Friends: Women Growing Old in the New Republic, 1785-1835
(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990). For negative depictions
of old women by writers in the mid-nineteenth century see the following
short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "The Gorgon’s Head" (1851) in A
Wonder Book and Tangelwood Tales William Charvat et al., eds.
(Ohio State University Press, 1972), 10-34 and "Feathertop: A Moralized
Legend" (1852) in Hawthorne’s Short Stories Newton Arvin, ed. (New
York; Vintage Books, 1946), 229-250.