It is a regrettable if obvious truth that those identities that are rewarded by governments will encourage those identities to be adopted. We have seen this process play out in contemporary politics, as the rewarding of people for being minorities has led to all kinds of fraudulent claims of people being Native American or black or something else. Wherever identity brings a benefit, there are going to be intense fights over who gets to be included in a privileged category that receives financial benefits from government or social benefits within a community, and these differing rewards for identities can drastically shape the way that the past is remembered and presented, encouraging people to adopt privileged identities and to shed less desirable ones that are not serving any useful or beneficial purposes. It is no surprise to see this in the contemporary age, but it is remarkable to see this process occur in the past as well.

At the time of this writing, I am reading a book that discusses the aspects of misrepresentation of the past in the development of the myth of the Lost Cause, specifically as it relates to the state of North Carolina. North Carolina was the last of the 11 states of the Confederacy to secede, and only did so reluctantly, after it was surrounded by states that had already seceded with the secession of Tennessee and Virginia after Fort Sumter. North Carolina’s record during the Civil War, which included a civil war within the state with piedmont areas showing a marked reluctance to volunteer for military service, the federal conquest of a large amount of the eastern part of the state, and a high degree of desertions and absences without leave, has attracted some negative commentary in comparisons with the martial record of other states in that same conflict. One of the aspects of the Lost Cause myth, and the loss of the Southern Unionist record from historical memory, that I had not previously considered, though, was the issue of pension fraud.

After the Civil War, for decades, the argument of military pensions on a state and federal level was a major public issue. The Civil War led not only to an estimate of deaths that ranges from 600,000 lives lost up to the range of 850,000 or so in higher estimates, but also includes many hundreds of thousands of people who were physically and psychologically harmed for life as a result of the wounds and trauma of war. Barbaric medical practices, the experience of captivity in prisoner-of-war camps that were overwhelmed by the amount of people inside them once prisoner exchanges broke down over arguments about the status of black Union soldiers, as well as diseases contracted while at war were immensely damaging to a great many of the menfolk of all parts of the United States. In this atmosphere where soldiers on both sides of the Civil War and their families sought both financial compensation for their losses as well as social honor for having participated in the war from their neighbors and communities, pension fraud was a huge problem.

If one was disabled and impoverished, unable to take care of one’s family, or one at least wanted to be seen as such in order to receive benefits from the government, the widespread presence of state and federal pensions for Civil War veterans was an attractive resource for people to obtain. It appears that federal pensions were a bit harder to obtain and required the demonstration of loyalty that proved to be difficult for many people in the South, even those who were reluctant rebels or engaged in shirking and desertion or even became galvanized Yankees, given the levels of loyalty to the Union that were required to obtain such aid from the federal government. Many southern states, though, appear to have been far more generous to those who claimed status as rebel soldiers, and a great many people who deserted, who shirked their duties during wartime by evading the draft, or were born too late to fight at all and fudged their birthdates engaged in various forms of pension fraud in order to obtain benefits from the state.

These acts of fraud, which may have included up to 20% or so of those who obtained state pensions for rebel Civil War veterans in Southern States, had some dramatic effects. For one, it appears to have been looked at as a means of rewarding those with the right (i.e. Democratic) politics. It appears to have reduced the burden on poor communities and counties which would otherwise have been responsible for providing care to indigent citizens by putting that burden on the state, which then got to claim itself as dealing with the burden of the Civil War, and using its numbers of pension recipients as proof of its contribution to the Civil War effort. Similarly, it encouraged those who received pensions from their states to subtly massage or even transform their military service from reluctant, limited, or even nonexistent service to the rebel army to records of intense bravery in combat that many of these soldiers would have never seen. By getting money for false claims of Confederate military service, people were incentivized to make their stories more pro-Confederate in nature, which gives many historians the illusion that Confederate unity, military participation, bravery, and competence were far greater than they really were. This ought to give us pause about the implications of money on identity as well as in the conclusions that we draw from fraudulent data in the past as well as in the present day.