Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South

Abstract

Brandi Clay Brimmer's Claiming Union Widowhood examines how African American military widows fought to receive federal pensions in the decades after the American Civil War. In her deeply researched and persuasively argued book, Brimmer offers a grassroots view of how Black women asserted their claims to citizenship, civil rights, and “worthy widowhood” in the face of persistent racial and sexual prejudice (1).Brimmer builds on the works of historians who have documented how the Civil War pension system foreshadowed the social welfare programs of the twentieth century. Originating in 1862, with substantial revisions in 1879 and 1890, the pension system commanded up to 45 percent of the federal budget at its apex. Although popular with Union veterans, the pension remained politically contentious throughout the late nineteenth century. As Brimmer notes, though, the federal pension system was not designed with emancipated African Americans in mind. Denied access to legal marriage in slavery, Black widows faced challenges documenting and legitimizing their marital relationships. They also often lacked access to the kind of medical records necessary to document their husband's war wounds. Moreover, Black conceptions of marriage and family did not always fit into the Pension Bureau's narrow definitions. Brimmer argues that African Americans saw marriage as a hallmark of freedom and key component of their claims to citizenship, yet also continued to embrace a malleable understanding of marriage and family, shaped by the brutality of slavery and by the need to mitigate the impact of poverty in freedom. The federal pension provided only very modest payments, but for poor widows, they offered a necessary lifeline.Brimmer's study draws on a close reading of thirteen hundred pension files from Craven County, North Carolina. Occupied by Union forces under Ambrose Burnside in 1862, the city of New Bern and the adjacent community of James City (which grew out of a wartime refugee camp) became sites of intense Black politics and community activism during and after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, it was the epicenter of the “Black Second” congressional district, which elected four African Americans to seven terms until a violent white supremacist campaign in 1898 intimidated and disenfranchised most Black voters. This political and social community provides an important backdrop for the Brimmer's examination of Black military widows.Brimmer's approach allows for the experience of a few individual Black women to come into focus. Using their pension records and other records, Brimmer illuminates the lives of Charlotte Banks, Mary Lee, Louisa Powers, and Fanny Whitney. These women (and dozens others like them) struggled to persuade pension bureaucrats about the legitimacy of their claims and their worthiness to receive modest pension payments. To help them navigate the complex bureaucracy, Black women in New Bern turned to a pair of pension professionals, Edward W. Carpenter and Frederick C. Douglass. Carpenter, a white lawyer, and Douglass, the son of a US Colored Troops widow, helped them craft applications to meet the Pension Bureau's requirements and file appeals when their applicants were denied or their pensions withdrawn. Brimmer emphasizes the role of the broader community in the pension process: friends, neighbors, and veterans provided important testimony to document the widows’ family relationships, their husbands’ military service, and their worthiness for a pension.Black widows faced constant threats that their pensions would be taken away. Fears that the system would be abused dominated the political conversation over the federal pension throughout its history, and Black pensioners faced more than their fair share of fraud accusations. Brimmer documents extensive surveillance of Black women in New Bern by pension agents. If they remarried, had children after the death of their soldier husband, or engaged in behavior that the Pension Bureau officials deemed immoral, they risked losing their pension. Black military widows fought vigorously to preserve their pensions, turning to the broader community to support their claims.In the book's conclusion, Brimmer provocatively draws connections between the struggles of Black women to secure pensions in the late nineteenth century and those faced by military widows and welfare rights activists in the twentieth century. She argues that persistent “racialized gender inequalities and class biases that stigmatized black women” have shaped federal policy and limited Black women's civil rights and citizenship (213).Claiming Union Widowhood is an important contribution that speaks to several significant historiographical conversations. Historians interested in the long history of emancipation, the African American family, the Black military experience, and Civil War veterans would benefit from reading this excellent study. It sheds new light on the relationship between race, gender, and poverty in Reconstruction and afterward that should inspire future research.