Black Veterans and the New Auction Block

This paper uses the pension files of black veterans as way into rethinking the role of the federal government in the lives of freedpeople in the four decades after emancipation.  Years after their service, disabled veterans applied for support from the U.S. Pension Bureau, including over 100,000 former slaves.  Like their white Union counterparts, they were minutely examined by a board of physicians deputized by the Pension Bureau to perform the evaluations.  These examining boards measured levels of disability to perform manual labor and recommended dollar amounts for monthly pensions.  Although black and white applicants faced similar procedures, because the Pension Bureau staffed boards with local physicians, the situation for southern black veterans was profoundly different: many medical examiners had direct ties to the old slave regime.  Ironically, for thousands of freedpeople across the South, the very face of federal authority after the Civil War was a handful of former slave owners or slave doctors determining the laboring capacities of former slaves on behalf of the federal government.

Accordingly, this paper offers the idea of “the new auction block” as a way to provoke questions about continuity within a revolutionary process of change.  Under the slave trade, healthy slaves commanded higher prices; under the pension examinations, incapacitating disabilities gave applicants higher monthly stipends.  Former slaves fashioned a new politics from these face-to-face encounters, based at once on a pragmatic struggle for material benefits and a deeper struggle for justice and equality.  The paper will feature several case studies of formerly enslaved veterans in South Carolina protesting the composition of their examining boards in letters to the Commissioner of Pensions as well as the Secretary of the Interior.  Ultimately, the paper will offer new insights into the surprising landscape of freedom in the postwar South.