1. A promise to “end welfare as we know it” was a Clinton campaign pledge in 1992. Large majorities in both houses of Congress voted to end the Federal “entitlement” status of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1995 or to abolish a long-standing, legal guarantee of direct, Federal aid to all qualifying individuals and to devolve responsibility for poor Americana upon the fifty state governments, which would receive lump-sum block grants to subsidize newly designed, subnational income maintenance programs. Public debate and Federal action centered around a moral opposition between “welfare” and the numerous other U.S. “entitlement” policies rather than any theoretical or budgetary distinction.

2. Clinton established the Bipartisan Commission by Executive Order 12878 in November 1993, which in turn charged Congress and the president with resolving the long-term imbalance between the Federal Government's entitlement “promises” and the funds it would have available to pay tor them. The commission not only disbanded without reaching an agreement on any specific, substantive recommendation for solving the entitlement “problem” but also, significantly, without ever reaching a consensus concerning which government policies “counted” as “entitlements.” This was reflective of broader societal confusion and conflict over the question of precisely what an “entitlement” is, which emanates from dis-agreements among experts over principles of public finance and policy; from public and scholarly assertions of an essential dichotomy between “contributory,” “social insurance” programs and “noncontributory,” “public assistance” programs; and from arguments of program advocates contesting the application of the label “entitlement,” which has pejorative connotations, to particular benefit programs (most often the “contributory” ones). Letter to President Clinton, William, Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform: Interim Report to the President (Washington, DC: 08 1994, 6–19)Google Scholar; Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform: Final Report with Reform Proposals and Additional Views of Commissioners Government Printing Office [hereafter, GPO] (Washington, DC: GPO, 01 1995)Google Scholar.

3. A “form” of public policy is usefully defined as a particular strategy for “structuring relationships and coordinating behavior” to achieve particular purposes. See Stone, Deborah A., Policy Paradox and Political Reason (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1988), 208Google Scholar. Entitlements are defined here as a generic form of public policy that creates, positive, substantive, rights to individual-level public benefits for those who satisfy statutory eligibility criteria. Selective entitlements are those entitlements that employ eligibility criteria to create a relatively restricted subset of “deserving” citizens out of the set of all citizens. In theory, entitlements can effectively be structured as “universal” or citizenship-based benefits, but this has not historically been the practice of the United States. Thus, the “problems” of U.S. entitlements inhere in their very structure and logic: in the nature of the benefits they bestow (individual-level, as opposed to collectively consumed, goods); in the discernibly selective manner in which the state categorizes particular groups of citizens as deserving of particular public benefits (or not); and in the set of expectations, or rights consciousness, that such selectively granted, individual-serving, legally guaranteed benefit policies engender, both among policy beneficiaries and in society at large. See Laura S. Jensen, “The Entitlement State: Rethinking the Development of Political and Legal ‘Deservingness’ in American Public Policy,” unpublished manuscript on file with author.

4. A notable exception to this observation is Milkis, Sidney J., The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, which chronicles the relationship between twentieth century entitlements and American state development.

5. See, e.g., Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Orloff, Ann Shola, The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880–1940 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993)Google Scholar; The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Amenta, Edwin and Skocpol, Theda, “Taking Exception: Explaining the Distinctiveness of American Public Policies in the Last Century,” inThe Comparative History of Public Policy, ed. Castles, Francis G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 292–333Google Scholar; Orloff, Ann Shola and Skocpol, Theda, “Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880s–1920,” American Sociological Review 49 (12 1984): 726–50;Google ScholarSkocpol, Theda and Ikenberry, John, “The Political Formation of the American Welfare State in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in Comparative Social Research: The Welfare State, vol. 6, ed. Tomasson, Richard F. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1983): 87–148Google Scholar.

6. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Bensel, Richard Franklin, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ixGoogle Scholar.

8. See Hall, Peter A., “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain,” Comparative Politics 25 (04 1993): 275–96Google Scholar; Pierson, Paul, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45 (07 1993): 595–628Google Scholar. Theda Skocpol's one-paragraph dismissal of Revolutionary pensions as “minimal” policies compared to Civil War pension benefits (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 105) is a curious oversight given her specific attention to policy feedbacks.

9. Skowronek's well-known characterization, Building a New American State, p. 24. It is critical that a fundamental distinction come to be recognized between “quintessentially distributive” forms of patronage like the installation of party loyalists into public office and redistributive measures like pensions and other entitlements, which require the state to procure (rather than merely create) the material benefits it intends to disburse (cf. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 81–87, quote p. 83). Unless the state can expropriate the resources of other nations or peoples, such measures necessitate internal forms of state resource acquisition (most often, taxation).

10. Although a detailed account is well beyond the scope of this article, it must be noted that veteran's pensions were not the only selective early American entitlements. In September 1776, the Continental Congress promised grants of land to officers and soldiers who engaged to serve until the end of the war (or until they were discharged by Congress). Entitlements to portions of the “public” lands would eventually become an important strain of U.S. policy whose expansion paralleled, then exceeded, the scope of military pensions. Policies selectively entitling various groups of military veterans and other citizens to portions of the public lands played a critical role in the conflicts that led to the Civil War. See Jensen, Laura S., “The Entitlement Mentality: American Expectations of the State” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1996), 122–201Google Scholar; Oberly, James W., Sixty Million Acres: American Veterans and Public Lands before the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

11. This was despite the fact that such rights were not only obviously discriminatory in their creation and direction of redistributive obligations but were also statutory rather than constitutional – what R. Shep Melnick has aptly termed “programmatic” rights. See Melnick, , “The Courts, Congress, and Programmatic Rights,” in Remaking American Politics, ed. Milkis, Sidney and Harris, Richard (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 188–212Google Scholar; Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994), chapts. 3 and 13 and esp. pp. 16–18, 274–76.

12. Cf. Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause,” 625.

13. Note Marshall's, T. H. definition of “citizenship” as “a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community.” All those who possess citizen status “are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.” Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays (London: Heinemann, 1963), 87Google Scholar. Such a notion of citizenship, despite its resonance in the ideas of those advocating the provision of social minima, fails to address the welfare state's inherent problem of squaring statutory citizen “rights” with the reality of unequal, contributory citizen “duties.” That U.S. entitlements have historically been designed as overtly exclusionary, nonuniversal benefit programs has exacerbated conflicts over distributive justice and redistributive inequity.

14. Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 1st sess (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834–) [hereafter, AC (15 / 1)], 12, December 2, 1817.

15. “Inaugural Address of James Monroe, President of the United States,” March 4, 1817, American State Papers, Class I, Foreign Relations, vol. 4, ed. Lowrie, Walter and Franklin, Walter S. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834)Google Scholar, (hereafter, ASP, Foreign Relations), 126–29, 129.

16. AC (15 / 1), 19, December 2, 1817.

17. The following two paragraphs draw upon Glasson, William H., Federal Military Pensions in the United States, ed. Kinley, David (New York: Oxford University Press, 1918), 19–97Google Scholar. Glasson's account remains the preeminent study of U.S. federal military pensions before World War I.

18. The difference between “officers” and “soldiers” or “sailors” was significant not only in terms of eventual rates of pension compensation but first and foremost as an important social distinction. Monroe's request that Congress attend to the needs of surviving “officers and soldiers” of the Revolutionary army in 1817 was not redundant but, rather, a calculated policy recommendation based on previous conflict over selective veterans' pensions. See later.

19. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, vol. XXXIV (January 1788–March 1789), ed. Ford, Worthington Chauncey (Washington, DC: GPO, 1904)[hereafter, JCC (XXXIV, 1788–1789)], 209–10Google Scholar.

20. Extensions were passed in 1792, 1793, 1803, 1805, 1806, 1812, 1820, 1822, and 1828. Until about 1800, disability pension provisions were the same for members of the navy as for the army, but legislation in 1799 and 1800 established a navy disability pension fund from the sale of prizes taken by navy vessels at sea. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 19–23, 54–63, 100–101. As Glasson observed, the 1805 supplementary pension act was particularly significant in that it extended benefits to veterans wounded in the Revolution who had at any period since the war become and continued disabled so as to render them unable to procure a subsistence by manual labor. This opened the way for the tracing of the ills and disabilities of later life to wounds from which the claimants had apparently recovered. Glasson viewed this legislation as a precedent for similar provisions in the Civil War pension system that “were both open to great abuse and exceedingly costly” (p. 62, emphasis added, citation omitted). A similar provision in 1817 extended pensions to the widows and orphans of not only those dying in the line of service in the navy but also to those dying “in consequence of disease contracted or of casualties or injuries received.” It was repealed in 1824 due to “too large a demand” upon the navy pension fund (p. 101).

21. “An Act to increase the pensions of invalids in certain cases,” AC (14 / 1), 1851, April 24, 1816; Report of the House Committee on Pensions and Revolutionary Claims, March 18, 1816, ASP, Class IX, Claims, 473–74. This increase seems to have been the first U.S. “COLA” (cost of living adjustment).

22. Cited in Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 24. It should be noted that Monroe proposed benefits based on service and poverty, which will be discussed later. The Revolutionary officers' original pursuit of service pensions between 1778 and 1783 was often justified by the claim that the war had inflicted personal financial injury upon them, a claim that was highly contested.

23. Kohn, Richard H., Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 3–4Google Scholar; “The Creation of the American Military Establishment, 1783–1802,” in The Military in America: From the Colonial Era to the Present, ed. Karsten, Peter (New York: The Free Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 411, 410–20, 424–28, 506–7Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967), 23–26, 61–63, 112–19Google Scholar; Schwoerer, Lois F., ”No Standing Armies!” The Anti-army Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore; MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 195–97Google Scholar; Cress, Lawrence Delbert, “Radical Whiggery on the Role of the Military: Ideological Roots of the American Revolutionary Militia, ”Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (01 1979): 43–60, 54Google Scholar; Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 34–41.

24. See Shy, John, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 393–98Google Scholar.

25. This reference to the colonists is from the “Rules and Orders Regulating the Army of Observation,” Rhode Island, June 1775, cited in Royster, Charles, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 1979), 4Google Scholar.

26. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 6. See also Shy, Toward Lexington, 398. For a milder explanation of the colonists' view toward the standing army in 1770, see Cress, Citizens in Arms, 40–46. Cress asserts that even in the New England colonies immediately after the massacre, the core issue was not the existence of professional armies per se but, rather, that of their control. Only after the Coercive Acts of 1774 would the colonists come to link the profession of arms with the destruction of the political and civil liberties of a free society.

27. See Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750–1776, vol. I, ed. Bailyn, Bernard (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965), 71–5Google Scholar; Lane, Jack C., “Ideology and the American Military Experience: A Reexamination of Early American Attitudes Toward the Military,” in Soldiers and Civilians: The U.S. Army and the American People, ed. Ryan, Gary D. and Nenninger, Timothy K. (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1987), 15–26Google Scholar; Shalhope, Robert E., “The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment,” The Journal of American History 69 (1982): 599–614Google Scholar.

28. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 6. See also Schwoerer, ' No Standing Armies!”, 197.

29. Adams, Samuel to Warren, James, January 7, 1776, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. 3, ed. Cushing, Harry Alonzo (New York: G. Putnam's Sons, 1904–), 250Google Scholar; Otis, James, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: 1764)Google Scholar, in Bailyn, Pamphlets, 469.

30. Here the term Cincinnati refers generally to the legendary Roman statesman Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who is said to have resigned his authority as dictator of Rome after saving that city from an invading army in one day. It does not refer to the post-Revolutionary Society of the Cincinnati, named after Cincinnatus, which will be discussed later.

31. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 35–40; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 406, 507, 527–28; Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 83–84; Cress, Citizens in Arms, 54–56. Political rhetoric was bound with the language of evangelical Christianity in strengthening the pre-Revolutionary call to war. As Charles Royster has explained, Religious and political appeals to the [citizen] soldier combined the forces of the two most powerful prevailing explanations by which revolutionaries understood events.… By the time the war came, the religious call to seek salvation had taken on a political concern for the welfare of America and liberty, [while] the effort to secure liberty had acquired the emotional urgency of a test of righteousness. The failure of an individual to serve as a citizen soldier in the effort to preserve the nation against British corruption and enslavement was not only a failure of his politics, but a moral failing as well: to “shun the dangers of the field” was to “desert the banner of Christ.” It was God's will that the Revolution should succeed; virtue not only required, but necessitated, sacrifice. As one colonial preacher told his congregation, “the Man, who was able in this Country to wield a Sword and did not endeavor to stain it with the Blood of the King's Soldiers and their Abettors, would be renounced by the Lord Jesus Xt at the Day of Judgement.” See A Revolutionary People at War, 18, and 16, 21, citing John Murray, Nehemiah, Or the Struggle for Liberty Never in Vain, 1779, and Ambrose Serle to the Earl of Dartmouth, March 20, 1777. For an extended discussion of the role of religion in American attitudes toward the war and the Continental Army, see ibid., 13–23, 152–89.

32. Kettner, James H., The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 9–10, 173–209Google Scholar. Kettner explains that while the colonists were committed to certain well-understood principles concerning the acquisition of American citizenship – that it began with an act of individual choice, and that there existed a right to choose – the meaning of the status “citizen” was not well developed. The unanswered question of whether allegiance to America meant membership in a state or a nation of states would become critical in post-Revolutionary decisions concerning naturalization and expatriation, court jurisdictions, the status of inhabitants of the American territories, states' rights, and slavery, as would the question of precisely who counted as “the people” of the United States (pp. 208–9). Schuck, Peter H. and Smith, Rogers M. have argued that questions about the nature of citizenship have yet to be adequately answered, despite their heightened importance due to the emergence of the American welfare state.Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Conflicts such as that which occurred over the provision of state benefits to illegal immigrants in California in the early to mid-1990s serve as proof that such questions continue to defy resolution.

33. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 107.

34. Chambers, John Whiteclay II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 21Google Scholar. Numerous slaves also chose to fight because military service sometimes, though certainly not always, could be exchanged for freedom. The Continental Congress actually adopted a plan to enlist slaves who would receive no pay or bounty but be emancipated if they served until the end of the war and returned their arms; it was rejected by South Carolina and Georgia. The British command in America and the king's ministers in London rejected a similar plan that sought to enlist slaves to fight on the side of Britain. See Quarles, Benjamin, The Negro in the American Revolution) Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 51–93Google Scholar.

35. Chambers, To Raise an Army, 21–22; Mark Edward Lender, “The Social Structure of the New Jersey Brigade: The Continental Line as an American Standing Army,” in Karsten, ed., The Military in America, 27–44; Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 58–189; Weigley, Russell F., History of the United States Army, enlarged, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 29–73Google Scholar.

36. Washington, George to the President of Congress, September 24, 1776, cited in American Military Thought, ed. Millis, Walter E. (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966), 9–16Google Scholar.

37. Letter of George Washington to the president of Congress, December 23, 1777, cited in Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 24–25.

38. JCC (X, 1778), 18–20; Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 12, 24–25. The proposal was modeled upon British precedent.

39. Sherman, Roger, Huntington, Samuel, and Wolcott, Oliver to the governor of Connecticut (Jonathan Trumbull), in Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, vol. Ill, ed. Burnett, Edmund C. (hereafter, LMCC, III) (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926), 25556Google Scholar.

40. Burke, Thomas to the governor of North Carolina (Richard Caswell), 04 9, 1778, LMCC, III, 160–63Google Scholar.

41. Lovell, James to Adams, Samuel, 01 13, 1778, LMCC, III, 31–33 (emphasis in original)Google Scholar.

42. Laurens, Henry to Livingston, William, 04 19, 1778, LMCC, III, 175–78Google Scholar.

43. George Washington to the president of Congress (Henry Laurens), cited in Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 27; Laurens, Henry to Washington, George, 05 5, 1778, LMCC, III, 219–21Google Scholar.

44. JCC (XI, 1778), 502–3. The service pensions for officers could not exceed the half pay of a colonel, and were not to extend to those “hold [ ing] any offices of profit under the United States, or any of them.”

45. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 30–35, citing George Washington to a committee of the Continental Congress, January 20, 1779, and George Washington to Gouverneur Morris, 05 8, 1779, 30–31; Burnett, Edmund Cody, The Continental Congress (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), 391–93Google Scholar; JCC (XVII, 1780), 772–73, August 24, 1780; JCC (XVIII, 1780), 958–61, October 21, 1780. The resolution enacted on August 24, 1780, constituted the first national pension law for widows and orphans in the United States. It granted half-pay for seven years to the widows of those officers who had died, or would thereafter die, in the service, or to their orphaned children if there were no widow surviving. Congress then also repealed the 1778 pension act's restriction upon payment on half-pay to veterans “hold [ing] any offices of profit under the United States, or any of them.” Burnett largely attributed the slow pace of congressional action on half-pay to its attention to other continental problems (particularly finances and foreign relations) and to a high turnover in its membership. Yet half-pay was also strongly and consistently opposed by certain northern states that produced significant numbers of enlistees. The New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island delegations all voted against the grant of half-pay for life.

46. Knox, Henry et al. , “The address and petition of the officers of the Army of the United States,” 12 1782, printed in JCC (XXIV, 1783), 291–93Google Scholar, as Paper No. 7 to accompany the “Address to the States, by the United States in Congress Assembled,” regarding the national debt (see later); Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 17–39.

47. Kohn, ibid.; Ferguson, E.James, The Power of the Purse (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

48. Buel, Richard Jr, Dear Liberty: Connecticut's Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 304–111Google Scholar.

49. JCC (XXIV, 1783), 277–83, 286, April 26, 1783; Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 42–49; Madison, James to Randolph, Edmund, 09 8, 1783, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 7, ed. Hutchinson, William T. and Rachal, William M. E. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962–), 307–8Google Scholar; Lovell, James to Whipple, William, 05 25, 1778, LMCC, III, 261–62Google Scholar (emphasis in original); “Massachusetts Legislature to Congress,” JCC (XXV, 1783), July 11, 1783, 607–9; Resolution of the Town of Farmington, August 4, 1783, Connecticut Courant, August 12, 1783, 2. See also Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 345–

47. The Massachusetts legislature's message actually went so far as to inform Congress “with great pain” that “the extraordinary grants and allowances which Congress have thought proper to make to their civil and military officers” had produced such effects in that Commonwealth that the dissolution of the union between the United States was threatened.

50. Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 171.

51. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 47 (see esp. n. 3), 52–53 (see esp. n. 1).

52. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 349, citing Samuel Adams to Noah Webster, April 30, 1784; pp. 357–58 and generally pp. 348–68. Adams had, of course, echoed radical Whig writings against standing armies less than a decade earlier. Webster began his career as a political writer with a series of essays condemning the anti-commutation movement in the Connecticut Courant. He justified the half-pay enactment as a reward for the officers' superior patriotism but admitted that it was discretionary distinction between the officers' reward of five years' full pay and the soldiers' one-year pay that was largely responsible for inciting and sustaining public outrage. See Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 46; Cress, Citizens in Arms, 73.

53. “An Act making provision for the debt of the United States,” August 4, 1790, AC (1 / 2), 2243–51.

54. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 49–50; Washington, George, “Circular Letter to the States” (copies sent to the thirteen state governors), June 8, 1783, in The Writings of George Washington, vol. 26, ed. Fitzpatrick, John C. (Washington: GPO, 1931–), 483–96, 492Google Scholar. Washington declared half-pay and commutation to be a “subject of public justice” (p. 493). The 1828 resolution of the issue of lost commutation certificates is discussed later.

55. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 327–68; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 282–83; Sarah Livingston Jay, Paris (After 3 September 1783), cited in Kerber, Linda K., “May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social Theory, ed. Elshtain, Jean Bethke and Tobias, Sheila (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 89–103, 89–90Google Scholar; Resolution of June 2, 1784, JCC (XXVII), 518–24.

56. Chambers, To Raise an Army, 23–29; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 40–88; Cress, Citizens in Arms, 75–109, 116–21; the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Sec. 8. Chambers argues that “an attempt to give the new central government such authority would have been unprecedented and might well have led to popular rejection of the Constitution.” Even the British Army did not draft, and although the framers had said little about conscription in Philadelphia, Edmund Randolph of Virginia had warned his colleagues that “draughts stretch the strings of government too violently to be adopted.” The Uniform Militia Act of May 8, 1792 (AC (2 / 1), 1392–95) did require all “free able bodied white male citizenfs]” between the ages of eighteen and forty-five to arm themselves and enroll in local militia units that the national government could ostensibly have called up, but because implementation was left in the hands of state governments and the act did not provide for any effective means of presidential or congressional oversight, the measure was largely ineffectual. Not until the Civil War would the first national conscription acts be produced, and then they were “widely denounced as tyrannical, oppressive, and un-American, and as class legislation designed to draft the destitute and make it ‘a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight.’” (Chambers, To Raise an Army, 26, 41). The citizen-soldier ideology continued to color the speech and actions of government leaders, even after national-level military drafts were instituted. President Wilson, Woodrow, for example, asserted that the World War I draft bill was “in no sense a conscription of the unwilling,” but, rather, a “selection from a nation which ha [ d] volunteered in mass.” Statement of May 18, 1917, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 42, ed. Link, Arthur S. et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–), 181Google Scholar.

57. AC (15 / 1), 158, January 29, 1818.

58. AC (15 / 1), 446, December 12, 1817. “Half-pay” was defined in the bill as “half of the monthly pay allowed” to the officer or soldier's “grade of service during the Revolutionary war – provided, that no pension thus allowed to a commissioned officer shall exceed the half pay of a lieutenant-colonel.”

59. AC (15 / 1), 497, 510, December 22, 24, 1817, remarks of George Strother of Virginia and Richard Johnson of Kentucky, respectively.

60. AC (15 / 1), 491–99, December 19, 22, 24, 1817 (emphasis added).

61. Remarks of Robert Goldsborough of Maryland, AC (15/1), 191–98, February 12, 1818.

62. Matthews, Jean V., Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800–1830 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 5–6. This paragraph draws upon Matthews's rich portrait of early American civic cultureGoogle Scholar.

63. Matthews, ibid., 21. The Large treasury surplus was undoubtedly another critical stimulus. The 1818 pension proposal also came at a time when the idea of public aid for the poor had become deeply ingrained in American culture, though opponents of public assistance worried that it fostered the attitude the attitude that relief was a “right” among the poor and encouraged a shift in public provision toward more “effocoent” institutional arrangements at the country and state levels of government. Some public and private welfare institutions had begun to appeal to the national government for support. In 1819, for example, Congress granted the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, a private institution, 23,000 acres of public land that it would sell for approximately $300,000. Trattner, Walter, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Society Welfare in America, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1984), 53–59Google Scholar. The Revolutionary pension legislation was nonetheless novel in its proposal to require the national government to provide individual-level benefits derived from the redistribution of national tax revenues. Such a scheme was inherently more conflictual than giveaways of “public” lands, variously acquired from Native Americans and/or other nations, to institutions and individuals.

64. Remarks of William Smith of South Carolina, AC (15/1), 140–47, January 29, 1818. James Barbour of Virginia also argued at length about the “impossibility” of providing for all veterans and the “impracticability of discriminating between the different classes provided for” (p. 140). Macon extrapolated: “If the pensions are to be given, because the army deserved well of the country, and some of them are now poor,” he asked, “would it not follow that if any members of the Congress…were now alive and poor, that they too, for the same cause, ought to have a pension?” It was, he thought, “difficult to give a reason for one, which would not apply as forcibly to the other” (same date, p. 157). Almost one hundred years later, AFL President Samuel F. Gompers would employ strikingly similar logic to argue against compulsory social insurance, which he found essentially “undemocratic” – a regulatory system through which the state could divide citizens into deserving and undeserving classes, and a potential source of bureaucratic social control. See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 208–10.

65. Remarks of Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, AC (15/1), 159, January 29, 1818.

66. Ibid., 155–56; see also the remarks of Smith, AC (15/1), 141–42, 148. The speech of Representative John Forsyth of Georgia was also notable in this regard. Although he was generally in favor of the pension bill, he was compelled to protest the claims of other House members that needy veterans had “claims upon the justice of the country for pecuniary assistance.” In his opinion, both the financial and moral obligations of the nation had been satisfied through commuted half-pay and the fact that the veterans had long been “the peculiar objects of the patronage of the Government, and of the people's love.” Forsyth was disposed to “vote for the bill without scanning too curiously the motives of this conduct,” for it was “enough for him to know, that there were men, the recollection of whose services always inspired the most grateful emotions,” but he stated: “We owe the Revolutionary officers no debt.” AC (15/1), 506, December 23, 1817.

67. AC (15/1), 147–48.

68. Ibid., 148–49, 157.

69. The vote on February 26, 1818, was 23 to 8. The eight recorded nays came from Senators Smith, Macon, Barbour, Dickerson (New Jersey), Morrow (Ohio), Taylor (Indiana), and Lacock and Roberts (Pennsylvania).

70. “An Act to provide for certain persons engaged in the land and naval service of the United States, in the Revolutionary war,” approved March 18, 1818, AC (15/1), 2518–19. The legislation used the word “entitled.” The bracketed “their” in the cited quote, which facilitated this paraphrasing of the act's terms, replaced the pronoun “his.” The pension legislation's gender exclusivity is discussed later. See also Resch, John P., “Federal Welfare for Revolutionary War Veterans,” Social Service Review 56 (2, 06 1982), 171–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a demographic analysis of the characteristics of the need-based Revolutionary pension claimants and their households. Resch must be credited for being the first scholar since Glasson to emphasize the importance of Revolutionary War pensions as national-level benefits.

71. AC (15/1): Goldsborough, 199, February 12, 1818; Smith, 150, January 29, 1818.

72. Resolution of Representative John Holmes of Massachusetts, AC (15/1), 1698, April 9, 1818 (emphasis added). Holmes's introduction of the resolution provides insight into the House's legislative strategy in the March pension bill. After “it was so severely opposed and criticized” in the Senate and returned to the House with amendments, “its friends feared to propose any alterations, lest, on a disagreement between the two Houses, the bill should be lost. It was however expected, that from applications under the act, cases would be developed which would require a supplementary act.”

73. The fact that Revolutionary pensions were consistently mentioned in contemporary newspapers as well as the circular letters sent by the members of the Fifteenth Congress to their constituents attests to their rank, along with internal improvements, the public debt, the reduction of the army, the Seminole War, the Bank of the United States, and slavery and the admission of Missouri, as one of the most important national issues of 1817–19. Five of the seven known circulars written at the end of the Fifteenth Congress's first session announced the enactment the revolutionary service pensions. (One of the other two circulars mentioned new invalid pension regulations; the other was written by a new member of only two months' duration.) See Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents 1789–1829, vol. 3, ed. Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 1015–45Google Scholar. This challenges Young's, James Sterling characterization of a “government at a distance and out of sight,” headed by a president with a domestic policy record “barren of any evidence of presidential leadership,” whose governance during the “era of good feelings” generated “not one memorable policy controversy at Washington that aroused significant citizen interest outside the capital.” The Washington Community 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 160, 186–87Google Scholar.

74. AC (15/1), 142–47, January 29, 1818.

75. It was not his purpose, Goldsborough maintained, “to detract from the merits of any”; it was just that, if there was “any one definite class of men more meritorious than another…who, by their services and sufferings, ha[d] rendered themselves most dear to our recollections, and most worthy of our gratitude, they were the officers and soldiers of the Revolutionary Army.” AC (15/1), 191, February 12, 1818 (emphasis added).

76. A few women actually did engage in combat in the army but only by disguising themselves as men. The most famous of them was Deborah Sampson, who is believed to have enlisted in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment in April 1781 under the alias Robert Shurtleff and fought at White Plains, Tarrytown, and Yorktown. Sampson survived both sword and bullet wounds and was only discovered when, succumbing to a fever after the battle of Yorktown, she was taken to a hospital. She was honorably discharged; married Benjamin Gannett in 1784, with whom she had three children; and died in 1827. Sampson Gannett was granted a pension from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1792. In 1837, ten years after her death, the Twenty-Fifty Congress of the United States granted her husband a pension as a Revolutionary soldier's widower. Stickley, Julia Ward, “The Records of Deborah Sampson Gannett, Woman Soldier of the Revolution,” Prologue 4 (Winter 1972): 233–41Google Scholar. For a different, and more critical, account of Sampson Gannett's history, see Laska, Vera O., “Remember the Ladies:” Outstanding Women of the American Revolution (Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Bicentennial Commission, 1976), 61–94Google Scholar. The language of the resolution of the Massachusetts legislature granting Sampson Gannett's pension is notable in that it constructed her moral deservingness as a military veteran in a manner simply not applicable to men: “…said Deborah exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism by discharging the duties of a faithful gallant Soldier, and at the same time preserving the virtue & chastity of her Sex unsuspected & unblemished, & was discharged from the service with a fair & honorable character.“ Resolve of the General Court of Massachusetts, January 20, 1792, Archives Division, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, photostatic copy in Stickley, ibid., 240 (emphasis added). Paul Revere's letter in support of Sampson Gannett's 1805 individual pension application to Congress employed a similar logic: We commonly form our Idea of the person whom we hear spoken off, whom we have never seen, according as their Actions are described. When I heard her spoken off as a Soldier, I formed the Idea of a tall, Masculine female, who had a small share of understanding, without education, & one, of the meanest of her Sex. – When I saw and discoursed with [her] I was agreeably surprised to find a small, effeminate, and converseable Woman, whose education entitled her to a better situation in life. … I think her case much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress have been generous. Paul Revere to William Eustis, Member of Congress, February 20, 1804, Massachusetts Historical Society, photostatic copy also in Stickley, ibid., 236.

77. Abigail Adams wrote:Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honours and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State of Government from having held a place of Eminence. Even in freest countrys our property is subject to the controul and disposal of our partners, to whom the Laws have given a sovereign Authority. Deprived of a voice in Legislation, obliged to submit to those Laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the publick Welfare? Yet all History and every age exhibit Instances of patriotic virtue in the female Sex; which considering our situation equals the most Heroick. Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 17, 1782, cited in Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 35Google Scholar.

78. Wells, Rachel, Petition to Congress, May 18, 1776, cited in Women's America: Refocusing the Past, 3rd ed., ed. Kerber, Linda K. and De Hart, Jane Sherron (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 87Google Scholar. Similar petitions from individual citizens flooded both the Continental and U.S. Congresses during the war and afterward, but, as Linda Kerber has documented, the “litany of women's petitions fell on unresponsive ears,” leaving the women of the republic to beg or turn to the states for assistance. State legislatures, already burdened with heavy war debts, only occasionally granted pensions, and then on a case-by-case rather than comprehensive basis. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 92–93.

79. It should be noted that Congress's new acknowledgment of the needs of American women during the Progressive era (the Sheppard-Towner Act) did not come in the form of national-level entitlements accruing to individual women but, rather, as a short-lived federal grant-in-aid program providing funding to subnational government agencies. Even when some women were Finally deemed “entitled” to individual national benefits in the 1930s, the programmatic definition of their deservingness still derived from the presence or absence of a worthy man in their lives.

80. See Crenson, Matthew A., The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy injacksonian America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

81. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 68. The next three paragraphs were inspired by Glasson, pp. 68–93.

82. AC (15/1), 491–2, December 19, 1817, and 196, February 12, 1818. If there was an error in his reckoning, Goldsborough said, it unquestionably was by “making the estimate too large.”

83. Miles' Weekly Register, September 19, 1818, 63–64; Calhoun, John C. to Bloomfield, Joseph, Chairman, Committee on Revolutionary Pensions, 12 22, 1819, ASP, Class IX, Claims, 682–83Google Scholar; Calhoun to James Noble, Chairman, Senate Committee on Pensions, February 8, 1823, ibid., 885. Total military pension expenditures comprised some 11.23 percent of U.S. government expenditures in 1819 and 17.54 percent in 1820. Calculated from figures in Dewey, Davis Rich, Financial History of the United States, 5th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1915), 169Google Scholar. In 1821, the War Department employed some twenty clerks to handle correspondence, record keeping, and pension claims. White, Leonard D., The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History 1801–1829 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), 234Google Scholar.

84. See, e.g., Middlesex Gazette (Middletown, CT), July 16, 1818, 3, citing an article in the National Intelligencer regarding claims so numerous that they might reach 50,000, subjecting the government to an expenditure of $5,000,000 per year; and Niles' Weekly Register, December 12, 1818, and October 16, 1819. Middletown, the site of Connecticut's 1783 anticommutation convention, held a town meeting regarding national pension fraud on December 6, 1819, where it was resolved that whereas great impositions ha[d] been practiced by persons … who not only [we]re not needy, but who [we]re in fact in affluent circumstances…and consequently many in the community less able to bear the burthens of government [we]re compelled to pay heavy taxes to support their more opulent neighbors, the Town Selectmen should take measures to ascertain who was improperly placed on the pension list and report their names to a member of the Connecticut delegation in Congress. Middlesex Gazette, December 9, 1819, 3. That same issue of the Middlesex Gazette also reprinted a November 1, 1819 letter to the editor of the Pittsfield [Massachusetts] Sun from Representative Henry Shaw, member of Congress from the Berkshire district, asking Massachusetts Selectmen to report names of fraudulent claimants to him, so that he might transmit then to the Secretary of the War. “As we venerate the deserving and destitute Soldier of the Revolution,” he said, “we should frown upon the attempts of fraud and perjury to cover him with contempt, by sharing this bounty. The Law was not designed as a reward for services – the Treasury would be inadequate.” Ibid., 3. Shaw's letter also printed in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer of December 9, 1819, 2. It should be noted that in its second session the Fifteenth Congress had raised the issue of amending the pension act but did not. The House was described in a March 1819 issue of the Daily National Intelligencer as “of the opinion … that something ought to be done in regard to that law, though it is found difficult to determine what that something is.” Cited in the Middlesex Gazette, March 30, 1819, 3. As Glasson pointed out, the pension law also had its defenders. An editorial in the New York Evening Post of December 15, 1819, for example, maintained that the complaints about the act that had found their way into the nation's newspapers “were engendered by a few disorganizers in Connecticut, from the worst of motives.” The writer trusted that Congress, “in its wisdom and philanthropy,” would “let the subject pass undisturbed.” Cited in Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 69.

85. John C. Calhoun to Joseph Bloomfield, Chairman, Committee on Revolutionary Pensions, December 22, 1819, op. cit.; Calhoun, John C. to Allen, Heman, May 11, 1818, in The Papers of John Calhoun, vol. 2, ed. Meriwether, Robert L. and Hemphill, W. Edwin et al. (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 1959–), 288Google Scholar, and see also pp. li–lii. Calhoun specifically mentioned the difficulty of preventing mistakes or abuse given the vagueness of the legislation and the department's dependence on outside actors (many different judges) for the verification of service record and financial need.

86. Act of May 1, 1820, AC (16/1), 2582–83.

87. Annual Report on the State of the Treasury, December 1, 1820, presented to Congress December 4, 1820, AC (16/2), 487–99. Congressional action in May 1820 had authorized a loan of $3,000,000; the proposed additional $5,000,000 loan was authorized in an act of March 3, 1821 (ibid., 1807–8).

88. AC (16/2), 730, 822. The actual resolution introduced by Cobb on January 11, 1821, that was defeated in a 59 to 53 vote proposed to reduce officers' pensions in addition to the soldiers' (p. 822). None of the specifics of the debate on the resolution were recorded, other than that it met with “great objection.”

89. AC(17/1), 1372 and 409, March 26 and April 22, 1822, respectively; act of March 1, 1823, AC (17/2), 1409–10. The 1823 act authorized the secretary of war to reinstate any veteran stricken from the 1818 pension list who could prove that he had subsequently become “in such indigent circumstances as to be unable to support himself without the assistance of his country, and that he ha[d] not disposed of, or transferred, his property, or any portion thereof, with a view to obtain a pension” (p. 1409). As of September 4, 1822, the Act of 1820 had resulted in some 2328 claimants being rejected or dropped from the pension list, and another 4221 had either failed to exhibit required schedules of property or died, leaving 12,331 on the pension list as compared with 16,270 in December 1819. Calhoun, John to Noble, James, Chairman, Senate Committee on Pensions, 02 8, 1823, op. citGoogle Scholar.

90. In 1810, the House committee to which petitions from the surviving Revolutionary officers were referred that, in their opinion, “the contract entered into by Congress with the officers of the late Revolutionary army, for giving them half-pay for life, ha[d] not been substantially complied with by the Government.” “Half-Pay for Life in Lieu of Five Years' Full Pay,” January 31, 1810, ASP, Class IX, Claims, 372–73. This seems to be the first congressional reference to pensions as contractual obligations conferring property rights upon the veterans; a member of the Senate referred to the 1810 petition as the first of its kind [RD (20/1), 128, January 24, 1828.] But see Ferguson's description of the centralizing strategy of financier Robert Morris and the nationalists in 1782–83, in which the public debt (comprised mostly at that point of loan certificates) was portrayed as creating both a moral obligation and an implied contract between Congress and public creditors. The Power of the Purse, 143, 147. The pension-as-contract argument appeared full-blown in December 1818 – nine months after need-based Revolutionary service pensions were legislated – in a “memorial and statement” presented to Congress by attorney William Jackson, who as “Solicitor on behalf of the Officers of the Revolutionary Army of the U.S.” submitted Congressional records, financial and actuarial calculations, and George Washington's “price of their blood” quote as proof of the officers' claim. A former officer himself, Jackson served as secretary general of the Society of the Cincinnati from around 1800 to 1828; retained by the Pennsylvania state society (to be paid 4 percent of whatever Congress might give to each officer), he persisted for years in urging the other state societies to join in lobbying the national government. When the South Carolina society engaged Jackson as their agent in August 1818, they provided him with a memorial they had written to Congress “demanding as a right rather than soliciting as a favor a proper attention to their just and honorable demands.” Alexander Garden, vice president of the South Carolina society, observed that the memorial “certainly appear[ed] in a far greater degree the language of remonstrance rather than petition” – in his opinion, the form “more likely to ensure success.” AC (15/2), 350–59, December 7, 1818 (see also pp. 347–50 for the House committee's positive reaction to the assertion of rights in the memorial); Myers, Minor Jr, Liberty without Anarchy: A History of the Society of the Cincinnati (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 216–18Google Scholar; Garden, to Jackson, , August 6, 1818, and August 4, 1818, William Jackson Papers (Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)Google Scholar. The presence of a lawyer in the transformation of the pension issue from a political question into a legal one is also notable. See, generally, Scheingold, Stuart A., The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar, regarding the efforts of lawyers to use legal rights toward redistributive political goals.

91. See, e.g., the failure of a House bill in the Sixteenth Congress that would have “adjust[ed] and settl[ed7rsqb;” the officers' claim. AC (16/1), 1845–46, April 14, 1820; and the debates of the Nineteenth Congress, Second Session, in which a bill to benefit the officers was variously criticized and stalled for its failure to include soldiers, widows and orphans, and members of the militia. Significantly, arguments were also made for the inclusion of the heirs of deceased officers, upon whom the purported legal rights of original claimants should have devolved. RD (19/2), 602–34, 636–37, 654–69, 672–714, 717–32, 777–78, January 3 22, 1827.

92. “An Act for the relief of certain surviving Officers and Soldiers of the Army of Revolution,” May 15, 1828, RD (20/1), Appendix, xv. The act provided officers with full pay retroactive to March 1826, less any pension monies received since then; any other pensions they received would also cease payment with the receipt of the new benefits. Noncommissioned officers, musicians, and privates were also entitled to received full pay from March 1826, unless they were already on the federal pension list, which disqualified them from the benefits of the 1828 act. The phrase “debt of justice” is drawn from President John Quincy Adams's December 4, 1827, message to Congress, in which he recommended consideration of “the debt, rather of justice than of gratitude, to the surviving warriors of the Revolutionary War,” a subject “of deep interest to the whole Union.” Ibid., 2785.

93. RD (20/1), 703–9, 228–34, 187–96, April 25, February 1, and January 29, 1828, remarks of Webster, Tyler, and Smith, respectively. Webster had also argued the merits of the officers' legal claims from a lawyer's perspective in the previous Congress as a member of the House. RD (19/2), 685–90, January 12, 1827.

94. Remark of Senator Thomas Cobb of Georgia, RD (20/1), 215, January 30, 1828.

95. The following table, drawn from Secretary of War Calhoun's report of February 7, 1820, illustrates the geographic inequity of pension distribution under the Act of 1818 before its 1820 amendment [House Doc. (16/1), no. 77]: 1829, allusions to those divisions were few, and outright accusations of sectional partianship rare, though some were registered. In January 1827, for example, House member James Clarke of Kentucky, while intending “no offensive reflections” nor “insinuating no reproach,” asked how it had happened that out of all of the representatives from New England, New York, and New Jersey, only four had voted to recommit a much-debated pension bill. “Could it be,” he asked, “because it is there these great disbursements are to be made?” Peleg Sprague of Maine replied to Clarke's “inference” of “interested motives” by questioning whether those in the west had voted in favor of recommitment because “the disbursements were not to be made among themselves.” He too then disclaimed, “as cheerfully and sincerely” as had the gentleman from Kentucky, “any intention to impute interested motives.” RD (19/2), 708–9. Despite such interchanges, the circular letters written by members from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky between 1827 and 1829 all cited the unequal treatment of different classes of veterans as the main problem with the 1828 pension law. Cunningham Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents 1789–1829, op. cit., vol. 3, 1351, 1373, 1374, 1428, 1437, 1550.

96. “Message of the President to Both Houses of Congress,” December 8, 1829, RD (12/1), appendix, 14.

97. Forsythe, Dall W., Taxation and Political Change in the Young Nation 1781–1833 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 62–86, cited phrase p. 82Google Scholar; Taussig, F. W., The Tariff History of the United States, 7th ed. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1923), 68–108Google Scholar; Stanwood, Edward, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 200–290; Dewey, Financial History of the United States, 161–81. The Tariff of 1828 was enacted days after the 1828 act that granted further relief of the Revolutionary officers and soldiersGoogle Scholar.

98. RD (21/1), 397, 400–401, April 29, 1830. Presenting a detailed analysis of the trajectory of U.S. pension legislation from pre-Revolutionary times (when “a deep, settled, and salutary prejudice against pensions almost universally prevailed”), Hayne argued that Congress's post-1818 expansion of the pension system beyond the principle of disability (“a wise and safe principle, limited in its extent, and almost incapable of abuse”) had been an unjust and unprincipled enterprise that had established benefits for a “large class of persons whose services were in no respect more valuable than those of the great body of the people.” That policy history of selective entitlement convinced Hayne that Congress was about to “commence a new system” that would not and could not “stop short” until it extended beyond military benefits to civil pensions, precluding any reduction in the “enormous amount of indirect taxation with which the people of the United States [we]re … burthened, and under the weight of which the whole South [wa]s fast sinking into ruin” (pp. 396–403). According to Hayne, the south had “never complained” of their unequal tax burden when the pension system had been confined “to the proper objects of national bounty,” but when it degenerated into a “mere scheme for the distribution of the public money,” they had a “right to complain of the gross inequality of the system.” Forsyth asserts that despite the south's contention that pensions and the tariff were linked, the debate over the tariff made it clear that “most congressmen had no idea what the effect of the proposed bill might be on revenues” (Taxation and Political Change, 76–77). Yet, a narrow majority of the Senate voted soon after Hayne's peroration to postpone the pension expansion bill under consideration indefinitely. When the House voted in the next session of the Twenty-First Congress to proffer additional pension benefits to the militia, state troops, and volunteers of the Revolutionary service and to grant the widows and children of deceased pensioners the balance of their benefits, the Senate again took no action. RD (21/1), 405, May 3, 1830; RD (21/2), p. 745, February 17, 1831.

99. RD (22/1), 2498 and 2372, April 5 and 3, 1832, Johnston and Bouldin, respectively; Davis, 2386–87, April 4; House passage, 2713, May 2. All of the House members voting from New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Louisiana, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky were in favor of the pension bill. Of the 126 affirmative votes, only 35 came from southern and western states [Maryland (5), Virginia (5), North Carolina (3), Tennessee (2), Ohio (8), Kentucky (9), Louisiana (3), Indiana (3), Illinois (1), and Missouri (1)]. House members from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi voted unanimously against the bill. All of the 48 negative votes came from Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Ohio.

100. Remarks of Representative Henry Hubbard of New Hampshire, RD (22/1), 1925, February 29, 1832. The notions of rights conceived toward the passage of the 1828 act also subtly infused the debate, though no firm consensus was reached as to whether an additional “debt” was still outstanding.

101. RD (22/1), 761–66, April 11, 1832; Hayne, 708, April 5; Foot, 924, May 11.

102. “An Act supplementary to the 'Act for the relief of certain surviving officers and soldiers of the Revolution,'” June 7, 1832, RD (22/1), appendix, xvii; Senate passage, RD (22/1), 933. The 1832 act extended the May 1828 grant of full pay for life to surviving officers, noncommissioned officers, musicians, soldiers, Indian spies, mariners, and marines who had served during the Revolution for a total of two years in the continental line or state troops, volunteers, militia, or naval service, who were not already entitled to benefits under the 1828 act. It originally required applicants to relinquish all other federal pensions to claim its benefits but was amended in 1833 to exempt invalid-pensioners from that restriction. The sectional distribution of the Senate vote was similar to that of the House. The Senators voting from New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hamp-shire, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio unanimously favored the bill. Those from Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri voted unanimously against it. The Senators from Kentucky and Louisiana split on the issue. Although the sectional battles over Federal pensions of the late 1820s and early 1830s were clearly implicated in the larger contemporary debate over nationalization, it would be difficult to demonstrate with any precision where specific arguments about the Revolutionary pension system gave way to, or actually represented, arguments over states' rights. South Carolinian Warren Davis, for example, warned fellow House members against expanding the pension system in language that simultaneously decried the practice of selective entitlement and the increasing discretionary power and activity of the national government: [T]his system of transferring property by legislation, of giving pensions and gratuities to individuals, companies, corporations, and States; of squandering, like a young heir, the public lands, which belonged to the people, on deaf and dumb asylums, and other local institutions; of destroying commerce and agriculture, to benefit a comparatively small number of capitalists, who had embarked their funds in manufacturers; of making gifts to States and sections of the Union, for roads and canals; would degrade and demoralize the people by making them dependent on the Government; would emasculate the free spirit of the country. Both pro- and anti-pension members of the Twenty-Second Congress explicitly took issue with the practice of selective entitlement, albeit from different perspectives premised upon policy outcomes resulting from its use. Northern advocates of the 1832 supplementary pension bill like Rufus Choate of Massachusetts argued that Congress's previous enactments had been too selective, unjustly denying many deserving veterans of benefits granted to others. Southerners on the other side of the issue, including Davis and Senator Hayne, accused pension advocates of not being selective enough: of employing an unprincipled, ad hoc, “add-a-group” approach to arbitrarily entitle too many veterans, thereby benefiting the “receiving States” at the expense of the “paying” ones. Antagonists from the west argued against the 1832 bill's mode of enlarging the pension system because it would not extend as far as their own constituents – veterans of battles with Native Americans on the frontier. Clearly, any growth of the Revolutionary pension system would expand the reach of the central state apparatus, but participants on both sides of the debate registered too much concern over problems arising from selective entitlement per se for it to be concluded that they were not as concerned about the appropriate use of state power as they were about its location. Remarks of Warren Davis, RD (22/1), 2396, April 4, 1832; Choate, ibid., 2446–58, April 9, 1832; Hayne, RD (21/1), 401, April 29, 1830.

103. RD (22/1), 930, May 11, 1832. According to Dall Forsythe, Clay had reopened the tariff debate in Congress with reduction proposals in January 1832 in hope of securing some support from the south for his presidential bid but failed in that effort when he rejected a compromise amendment from Hayne. Taxation and Political Change, 99–100. The tariff of 1832 was enacted within days of the pension bill, which Clay voted in favor of. An obvious linkage between protective tariffs disadvantaging particular areas of the nation and military pension expenditures advantaging others would contribute to sectional conflict throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Bensel, Richard Franklin, Sectionalism and American Political Development (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 60–73Google Scholar. Once the individual income tax became a primary source of national revenue, however, disagreements over entitlement expenditures became more interest group-oriented and interpersonal, particularly when national fiscal stress suggested selective benefit reductions for some of the variously entitled.

104. Based on Dewey's figures, pension expenditures comprised 19.94 percent of total U.S. government expenditures in 1833 and 18.06 percent in 1834. Financial History of the United States, 169, 246.

105. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 83.

106. Congress responded to Cass's recommendations in March 1833, providing for a commissioner of pensions who would be appointed by the president and the Senate and would execute the pension laws under the direction of the secretary of war. The Pension Office became a bureau of the Department of the Interior when it was established in 1849. Land entitlements also contributed to increased workload and administrative misbehavior in the General Land Office, leading to executive branch growth and reorganization. “Letter from the Secretary of War,” House Doc. 22/2, vol. 1, no. 34, January 7, 1833; Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 86; Crenson, The Federal Machine, 136–137, 162–65, 115–31.

107. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol. 9, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1876), 124, April 7, 1834; Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 87–91. Glasson (p. 90) notes that in 1834, more than fifty years after the end of the war, there were approximately 40,000 Revolutionary pensioners receiving benefits under the invalid acts, the act of 1818, and the act of 1832, as compared to the Pension Bureau's estimate of a total individual enlistment in the Revolutionary army, including the militia, of 184,038.

108. “An Act granting half pay to widows and orphans where their husbands or fathers have died of wounds received in the military service of the United States in certain cases, and for other purposes,” July 4, 1836, RD (24/1), appendix, xlvii; remarks of Representative Ratliff Boon of Indiana, ibid., 4285. The act of 1836 was not the last of the Revolutionary pension legislation. Further benefits for surviving patriots were granted during the Civil War, while specific pension provisions for Revolutionary widows culminated in the War of 1812 pension act of 1878. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions, 92/93.

109. Wiebe, Robert H., The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 183–84Google Scholar. See also pp. 16, 46, 98–99, and 235–36 regarding the sanctity of the Revolutionary gentleman's honor code.

110. Albert Gallatin to Matthew Lyon, May 7, 1816, cited in White, The Jeffersonians, 10. See also Matthews, Toward a New Society, 16–17.

111. Skowronek, Stephen, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 86Google Scholar. As Skowronek notes, Monroe's habit of dressing in the clothing of the Revolutionary era reminded everyone who saw him of his past service to the nation, providing a symbolic linkage between the past and his nationalistic administration's sponsorship of new works. See also Ammon, Harry, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 368, 371–78,385–95Google Scholar.

112. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 151.

113. See Melnick, Between the Lines, and Milkis, The President and the Parties.