Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[B]ureaucracy is nothing new, just ask Patience Bennet. The widow of a Revolutionary War veteran, she hoped that her late husband’s pension would see her through hard times. Before she could get it, however, the federal government would make her live up to her name.
From their inception, veterans pensions were controversial. As the Continental Congress inched towards declaring independence, members debated how to hold the fractious army together. They hit upon the idea of offering pensions, which had been a common practice in England. That was just the problem. To some representatives, a pension system reeked of privilege. They viewed it as being like the British sinecure system, in which a well-connected group would get paid for doing little or nothing.
Furthermore, many people distrusted the idea of a professional army, preferring to rely on citizen militias. (Indeed, for years after the war was won, the public gave credit to the militias.)
But the cash-strapped rebellion had no other way of keeping its military intact. So, a month after adopting the Declaration of Independence, Congress agreed to offer pensions, equivalent to half-pay for life, to any soldier or sailor who suffered a disabling wound during the war.
Two years later, Congress acted to keep its military content, approving half-pay for seven years to any officer who served until the end of the war. Enlisted men who did so would receive a one-time payment of $80.
Congress couldn’t help tinkering with the law. In 1818, it voted to extend benefits to any indigent veteran. Given the economic decline after the War of 1812, the offer was generous, but applicants had to prove their poverty.
Then in 1832, Congress approved half-pay pensions to any veteran who had served from six months to two years, and full-pay pensions for anyone who had served longer. The widows and children of veterans could collect any unpaid portion of the pension.
Which brings us to Patience Bennet. In 1794, she had married Brister Bennet, who had served as a private in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. The couple married in Cheshire, Massachusetts, and later moved to Vermont.
The couple eventually fell on hard times, so Brister applied for a pension in 1818 when Congress made them available to indigent vets. To deter fraud, Congress required applicants to swear out affidavits detailing where the men had fought and what they owned, to prove that they qualified for a pension. They also had to swear they hadn’t divested themselves of any property after the pension law passed in order to meet Congress’ poverty standard.
Brister’s paperwork was apparently in order; records show that he started receiving a pension later that year.
His pension payments were interrupted later, when the family moved to New Hampshire. Money for the pensions came out of the federal treasury, but state courts were in charge of verifying who was eligible. Once the Bennets move, Brister had to prove again who he was, what he had done and what he owned.
In the days before photo IDs, indeed before photography, the government’s fastidious fact-checking is perhaps understandable.
Part of the problem might have been the sheer scope of the job of managing pension requests, approvals and payments, which involved local courts, the War Department, the Treasury and Congress. After Congress passed the 1818 pension law, more than 20,000 veterans won approval. The law’s expansion in 1832 added another 32,000 veterans to the rolls.
To handle the job, Congress created an evolving series of committees. First, in 1813, it established the Committee on Pensions and Revolutionary War Claims. As the task grew unwieldy, Congress split the committee in two in 1825, creating one committee to manage pensions, the other to supervise war claims, which were essentially petitions seeking compensation for war-related damages. Finally, in 1831, the pension committee was itself divided. Now one committee would handle pensions of disabled veterans and another would handle all other kinds.
In the midst of this bureaucrat muddle, the Bennets returned to Vermont, to the town of Benson. They were greeted with a fresh stack of paperwork to complete. Local Justice of the Peace John Kellogg took down the details of Brister’s service – that he had served in a company under Capt. Isaac Warren, which was part of a regiment lead by a Col. Bailey, and so on. At the bottom of the document, an obviously old and illiterate Brister left his mark. In a shaky hand he made his “X,” which it took him two tries to cross.
When Brister died six years later, it was Patience’s turn to deal with the bureaucracy. A friend of hers wrote a letter to Kellogg, who was a lawyer in Benson, seeking help with Patience’s application.
“(T)he difficulty, if any be yet in the way of her success, lies in the imperfect proof of their intermarriage,” the friend wrote.
The federal government needed proof, because frauds were besieging the country with pension claims based on fictitious marriages.
Patience faced a couple of obstacles. First, she and Brister were African-American. As the friend explained, “Colored people, who entered into that relation (of marriage) during the war and for some time afterwards, were not, perhaps, so much noticed upon record, as their white brothers.”
Secondly, if any records existed back in Cheshire, Massachusetts, they were probably destroyed by a fire that consumed many of the papers of the officiating minister. Unfortunately for Patience, the minister couldn’t vouch for her either, as he had died.
The friend – whose signature on the letter is illegible – suggested that the word of a respected man like Kellogg, who knew the Bennets, might be good enough for the Rutland County court and therefore for Congress.
Apparently it was, as Kellogg’s papers include a document from the War Department granting Patience her husband’s pension.
The decision came nearly 60 years after the fighting in the Revolution had stopped.
Patience Bennet, however, was far from the last widow to draw a Revolutionary War pension. That honor goes to another Vermonter, Esther Sumner Damon of Bridgewater, who at the age of 21 married a Revolutionary War veteran 54 years her senior. Her husband, Noah Damon, had enlisted immediately after the outbreak of fighting, in April 1775.
Esther Damon became a widow at the age of 39 when Noah died in 1854, just shy of his 93rd birthday. The next year, after completing the necessary paperwork proving her marriage, she began collecting her widow’s pension. The financial burden of the Revolutionary War on the federal government finally ended with Esther Damon’s death in 1906 – 123 years after the war had ended.
If veterans and their widows were patient in waiting for their pensions, then the government was equally patient in fulfilling that obligation.
