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Last Person to Receive Civil War-Era Pension Dies
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- teruakohatu 6y agoA friend of a friend married his carer or nurse instead of paying her wages. He was not expecting to live long and needed 24/7 care. It was agreed that she would be written out of the will, so his children got all the inheritance which was not diluted due to years of a full time carer. She got a lifetimes worth of pension payments, in exchange for a few years work (and forgoing other romantic relationships). She lived with him so I assume her living expenses were covered. Risky for both sides, she could contest the will or the pension provider could find a loophole or accuse her of fraud.
- seibelj 6y agoMy uncle got engaged to his carer when he had cancer, but he thought it was genuine love even though she was 20 years younger. He wound up recovering and she dumped him, and then he fell into alcoholism for a year. He did eventually pull himself out of the hole and lived another 15 years before another cancer got him.
- purplezooey 6y agoThat's quite a story. I guess you never really know when your number is up.
- SamReidHughes 6y agoI think this might also be a way for any two people, not too closely related such that the marriage is illegal, to dodge estate tax.
- stormdennis 6y agoCivil partnerships, brought in for the purpose of giving the same legal rights for gay couples as married ones had, presumably also granted these rights. Since then gay marriage has rendered these redundant for their original purpose but they still exist. Some overtly non-romantically involved, long term, co-habitees are now using civil partnerships to protect the surviving person from estate duties upon the other's death. The anomaly now is that the people have to be of the same sex and there is pressure to allow people of the opposite sex to form them.
- SamReidHughes 6y agoWhat's interesting is that this and some other loopholes could be fixed pretty well by making estate tax apply to married/partnershipped couples and also making it directly proportional to the age gap between the deceased and recipient (with appropriate tax credit measures in the opposite direction).
- stormdennis 6y agoPersonally I don't see them as loopholes, they should be brought in, in my view. I think it's awful that when two people have shared a house for as long as many married people have, can be facing homelessness for other when the "wrong" one dies.
- SamReidHughes 6y agoWhat are you talking about? Estate tax doesn't kick in until $11.8 million.
- stormdennis 6y agoI don't live in America, didn't know it was so different there, I think it's a quarter of a million here and that's if you're a child of the deceased, it's a lot worse if your unrelated
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y agoWild. Especially now, it's important to remind ourselves that American slavery isn't a thing of the the distant past - there are old people alive today whose fathers literally fought in the war to keep slavery legal. And the last former slave died in 1971 [1], which means there are probably tons of middle-aged people going about their lives who personally knew and had conversations with ex-slaves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Magee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Magee
- lsh123 6y agoI would be curious to find out how many Americans today have ancestors who lived in America during Civil war. Even more detailed question is with percentages cohorts based on how many ancestors were in America vs somewhere else during that time.
- hodgesrm 6y agoThere's a lot of us, especially in the South. My great-grandfather was a child in the siege of Petersburg. My mom still tells the story of how the family house was struck by a Union cannonball as they were sitting outside it. She heard it directly from her grandfather when she was a child herself.
- mleo 6y agoPossibly a lot, given the potential exponential descendants 1 person could have. I have several ancestors and their relatives that fought for the North. My kids could trace 5-6 generations back to the civil war, meaning 32-64 ancestors to consider.
- irrational 6y agoMy earliest ancestors came over in 1620, the last came over in the 1850s. So during the civil war, all my ancestors were already on this continent. However, none of them participated in the war since they all lived out west, beyond the boundaries of the USA, throughout the war.
- 6y ago
- xwdv 6y agoHow is such a pension delivered? A direct deposit? Is there somewhere in an interface or a check where the words “Civil War pension” would be displayed?
- RobRivera 6y agoIts a line item via direct deposit labeled "VA Payment" or something along those lines.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoAgreed, I think this is such a good reminder that slavery wasn't that long ago. There are many people alive today who grew up under legal segregation. In fact, it's not hard to see how today's modern Republican Party grew out of the "Southern Strategy" of the late 60s.
- irrational 6y agoThe Democratic Party used to be the party of the south/segregation. What year (or decade) is the point where the two parties flipped places on this issue?
- mehrdadn 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_or_fact_did_the_us_political_parties_switch/dwvtxuk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8a43tp/myth_...
- Spooky23 6y agoThe solid south flipped in the 1960s. LBJ through force of his will basically betrayed the senate democrats and pushed through significant social legislation. (Voting, civil rights, great society, etc) The solid south types saw the writing on the wall and started breaking away. The “Southern Strategy” as implemented by Nixon and perfected by Reagan basically started as a collaboration of conservative southerners (“rehab Democrats”) and western resource extraction interests. Eventually they took over the GOP and you have the circus that we see today.
- chrisco255 6y agoNo it didn't. The South was split in 1968, with deep south voting for Wallace, a Democrat, and most other states going to Nixon. Finally, after Ford, in 1976 you had Jimmy Carter, a southern Democrat who carried the south entirely: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/ElectoralCollege1976.svg/1200px-ElectoralCollege1976.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/El... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=images&iax=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F4%2F41%2FElectoralCollege1968.svg%2F1200px-ElectoralCollege1968.svg.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1968+election+by+state&t=brave&ia=...
- stormdennis 6y agoThis reminds me that at least until recently, two grandsons of President Tyler (born in 1790) were still alive.
- bishnu 6y agoHere's an interview with one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiL2PgC17A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiL2PgC17A It seems like a lot of elderly men in the late 1800s/early 1900s married younger women to essentially be caregivers.
- stormdennis 6y agoThe grandson comes across as a nice sensible countryman, no airs or graces despite the extraordinary lineage and the wealth he seems to have, judging by his house.
- Klonoar 6y agoHuh, they completed a loop in time.
- Threeve303 6y agoHow long will it be before we start the civil war 2 pensions?
- nixass 6y agoStimulus cheques are start of it.
- flomo 6y agoNopay 2016 article about the recipient and other war funds: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-08/civil-war-vets-pension-still-remains-on-governments-payroll-151-years-after-last-shot-fired https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-08/civil-war-ve...
- teabee89 6y agoThis reminds me that there is video footage online today of a person who witnessed President Lincoln's murder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4
- uniqueid 6y agoThis one is lively. Civil War vets chatting in 1929 https://youtu.be/4qGX0XM84Ck https://youtu.be/4qGX0XM84Ck
- achow 6y agohttp://archive.is/Ksohd http://archive.is/Ksohd
- Mary-Jane 6y agoOne aspect of this that doesn't seem to be getting much attention is the law of unintended consequences. It's easy to contribute other people's money to an inarguably noble cause, but I wonder how many of the authors of the budget that set aside these funds appreciated that their great great great great great grandchildren, many of them _descendants of slaves_, would be paying for this benefit?
- throwawaygh 6y agoAs long as pensions aren’t inflation adjusted and we have near-constant low level inflation, it’s just not a big deal. This article is about an approximately $1000/year benefit received by a single person. It’s an extreme outlier and its cost is many orders of magnitude from being even a rounding error. To your question, though, designers of pension funds definitely do understand that pensions which survive the original recipient can start to look like perpetuities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y agoThe headline is a bit weirdly qualified. “X-War-Era” usually refers to something from the time of but not directly associated with the war. This is, in fact, a Civil War pension.