"Lots of them did that": desertion, bigamy, and marital fluidity in late-nineteenth-century America.

Introduction

In 1859, Caroline Dunkel married schoolteacher John Martin, whom she had known for two years. John was a black-haired, dark-complexioned man, as revealed in the small leather-framed tintype of him that Caroline saved. He enrolled in the service during the Civil War, and after mustering out prepared to work at a bookbindery in Pennsylvania. He went ahead of his wife, telling her "he was going to have me sel of [sell off] the things and come and move there. He left his soldiers clothes with me ... and went away and I never saw him again." John, apparently, had gone off to rendezvous with another woman, Mary Ellen Krant or Krone, who had done his washing and cooking during the war, and to whom he may have been married--bigamously--as John McAninch in 1863. Apparently he lived with Mary Ellen "as man and wife" until he died in 1878, while Caroline, retreating from the role of wife and returning to her role as daughter, moved to her father's house, where she remained as a family caretaker. (1)

The story of Caroline Martin is unremarkable, but quite remarkable is the way in which it has been passed down to us--through stories told in the records of the Civil War Pension Bureau. Although marriage was a legal contract with strict parameters that allowed no negotiation, thousands of American men and women did negotiate their marital status in practical, personal ways, outside of court-rooms. Their experiences demonstrate the ways husbands and wives forged--or found themselves forced into--alternative forms of family and household. The lives of Caroline, Mary Ellen, and John only begin to illustrate these choices. Theirs is a typical story in many regards.

Middle-class household ideology tends to dominate discussions of the "Victorian family." This article looks at the messier household and marriage patterns that underlay actual practice. Ideal marriages were lifelong, permanent, based in a home. But the economic realities of the late nineteenth century made such a model unreachable for many, and indeed, many working-class and middle-class families may not even have striven for the ideal. As historians of divorce have long noted, marriages could be bent or broken for many reasons: work, or lack of work, might cause men and women to migrate or leave their households for paid labor; domestic violence might force one partner to leave; a loss of love, or a new attraction, might create a desire for a new union; immigration or migration of a partner might mean that spouses were never reunited. Husbands abandoned wives, wives deserted husbands, and married folk living without their partners sometimes represented themselves as widowed or single and remarried. I call such patterns examples of "fluid marriage," for they demonstrate that the seemingly rigid marriage contract contained many escape clauses. This fluidity, which at first seems to suggest a cavalier disregard for marriage, was probably a better indicator of the high regard for and value of marriage in the late 1800s; indeed, as this article shows, some men and women married repeatedly even if the law did not allow them to do so. Fluid marriages bespoke a world where acceptance of marriage as a fundamental legal, social, and cultural institution was accompanied by a pragmatic flexibility that demonstrated both respect for marriage and a willingness to adapt households to meet need and fortune.

Identifying deserted, deserting, and otherwise separated husbands and wives is a difficult task. For some husbands or wives, there were few advantages to revealing they had been abandoned. Being deserted reduced social status; abandoned wives might qualify for charitable assistance, but single women and widows had higher social standing and more options, both economically and for remarriage. Personal shame led many others to hide their pasts, while others may have had no interest in remarriage. Perhaps Caroline Dunkel Martin found it easiest to remain in her father's home after being deceived and abandoned by her husband. Outside of requesting economic aid, one major reason for claiming to be deserted was to obtain a divorce, as many states did allow divorce on grounds of desertion. But some states made it almost impossible to obtain a divorce, and for the illiterate and the poor, the legal system presented serious obstacles. In no state could a couple obtain a divorce by mutual consent; the very scent of collusion was enough to cause a judge to dismiss any divorce filings where one party was not clearly at fault. Divorce, as Nancy Cott has pointed out, was a means to preserve the public good, not promote individual happiness. (2) Yet despite these legal restraints, stories like the Martins' demonstrate that marriage could have fluid boundaries rather than being a lifelong contract. Such marriages were rarely as short-lived as the Martins'. Many five-, ten-, or twenty-year unions ended with a separation, and, as nineteenth-century Americans clearly recognized, the separated spouses frequently remarried others.

Widows, Grass Widows, and Lawsuits: Method and Sources

The Pension System

By the late 1800s, the federal government provided a new reason for revealing marital identities that might have otherwise remained secret. The Civil War pension system, first created to support veterans disabled in service to their nation and the families of soldiers killed in the war, by 1890 applied to all invalid veterans and to the widows and minor children of deceased soldiers, regardless of the cause of death of the soldier. Federal pension law provided a unique incentive for families to come forth and reveal their stories in written form. A remarkable number of Americans, including many who never used legal means to resolve their marital instability, stepped forward to claim what the government said was rightfully theirs.

Most Civil War pensions before 1890 were covered under the "general pension law," established in 1862 and modified by a series of amendments over the next few decades. Compared with earlier American military pension systems, the general law "established a new standard of comprehensiveness and liberality in pension provisions for widows, children, and dependent relatives." (3) Pensions were specifically linked to a soldier's war-related disability or death, and for the first time provided for family members such as mothers and sisters. Widows' pensions were fixed as at least eight dollars a month for the widow of a private, with higher rates for officers' widows and an allowance of two dollars per month for each minor child. In 1886, the minimum pension for widows rose to $12 per month or $144 per year. (4) All widows had to provide proof of marriage to qualify for a pension, but the government quickly came to realize that there would need to be some exceptions in the standard of proof of marriage for Indians, who were not always governed by state laws on marriage, and former slaves, who had not possessed the right to form marriage contracts before emancipation. In 1864 Congress allowed free African-American family survivors to show proof of cohabitation for two years, rather than proof of marriage. In 1866 the law was revised to grant all African-American widows and children pensions if they proved that the "husband" and "wife" recognized each other and lived together as such. (5) The same law, Section 4705 of the general pension statute, guaranteed that widows of Indian soldiers were also entitled to a pension without the usual proofs of marriage, except satisfactory proof that they were joined in a ceremony they considered valid or that they, and their neighbors, recognized each other as man and wife.

The pension system grew with new legislation. In 1879, President Hayes signed a bill to award qualifying soldiers and survivors payments in arrears, if they had not applied as soon as they qualified. (6) The possibility of collecting a large lump sum payment in addition to regular future pension payments induced many veterans and dependents to file new claims or reopen past, denied claims, and the budget for pension payments more than doubled between 1878 and 1880, although ample federal surpluses, derived from tariff revenues, more than covered the cost. At the same time, a loosening of evidentiary standards led many critics to suggest that the pension system was wide open to fraud. (7) In the general law revision of August 1882, Congress finally agreed that wives or widows who lived in "open and notorious adulterous cohabitation" should be prevented from collecting payments. Yet the Pension Bureau itself was concerned that many cases might be wrongfully rejected: "Great care must be exercised in the rejection of applications for pension. Wrong action here cannot well be remedied," noted a circular distributed in the Bureau in 1885. (8)

Further pension liberalization, as advocated by the powerful Union veterans' organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), became an important issue in Presidential and congressional elections. The expansion of the military pension system, signed into law by President Harrison on June 7, 1890, granted pensions to all financially dependent widows of Civil War soldiers, regardless of the soldier's cause of death. A widow had to be dependent on her own labor for her support, with an income no higher than the annual amount of a pension ($96). (9) At $8 per month, this pension was smaller than a "general law" widows' pension, but it provided a generous subsidy for tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands, of American women simply as widows of soldiers, rather than as wives who had given up the support of a husband killed in the war. (10) Because the subsidy was lost with remarriage, women had an incentive to avoid new legal unions and pension agents a reason to be wary of fraud. Pensions granted to widows under this new law soon greatly outnumbered all other survivors' pensions. (11)

Identifying Cases

It was not always easy for applicants to obtain a pension. Many claims were rejected, and the Pension Bureau developed increasingly elaborate forms for filing claims. Statutes as well as investigative practices established legal and moral guidelines to be met by soldiers and their dependents. (12) Dubious claims might be dismissed or subjected to elaborate "special examinations," in which an appointed examiner would gather depositions from as many witnesses as possible, send written queries to postmasters and others, and travel the countryside searching for evidence. Special examiners were part of an extensive federal bureaucracy that investigated the personal circumstances of pension applicants. Numerous applications for widow's pensions were denied because the widow could not prove her marriage was legally sanctioned.

The Pension Bureau's considerations were complicated by cases in which multiple "widows" claimed a pension after an individual soldier's death. Indeed, the phenomenon was common enough that clerks in the Pension Bureau developed their own notation to identify these cases in the index. Marked "cont. wid.," the files contained claims from "contesting widows," two (or more) women who claimed to be the wife of the same man. It is in one of these contesting widow files that the stories of Caroline, John, and Mary Ellen appear. Both women sought support after the death of their "husband." And the federal government, true to form, required that each provide proof of marriage, testimony about their personal histories, and, in the case of this perhaps "mistaken" identity, pictorial or descriptive evidence that each was discussing the same man.

Unusual but not rare, "contesting widow" cases are scattered throughout widow's pension applications, which are organized into two record series. In the first, and larger, known as the "Widows' Certificate" series, where each file contains at least one successful application, contesting widow claims comprise approximately 1 in 102 files. (13) In the second series, or "Widows' Originals," which contains unsuccessful applications, (14) up to 1 out of 30 unsuccessful widow's pension applications contain contesting widows' cases. (15) Files in the Widows' Certificate series (estimated to be 950,000 to 1,200,000 files) outnumber files in the Widows' Original series (estimated at 150,000 to 250,000 files).

Widows' applications for pensions--successful and unsuccessful--provide the two bodies of cases used in this article. (16) The first includes 64 files denoted by "contesting widow" marks on the index of Civil War pensions. (17) These files were identified from 11 reels of the 544-reel Civil War pension alphabetical index, and contain cases filed under the general pension law of 1862, which applied to all widows of soldiers who had died of war-related causes, and under the 1890 pension statute, which provided pensions to indigent widows of veterans, regardless of the cause of death of the husband.

The second set involves a sample of 152 unsuccessful pension applications selected from the "Widows' Original" series. (18) Despite its sobriquet as the "Widows' Original" series, the series includes all rejected applications from dependents, including children, parents, and other relatives. Since 1890-law pensions were available to widows who demonstrated financial need, most of these applicants were of the working classes, and the cases provides evidence particularly germane to women who were dependent on their own work and owned no significant amount of property or savings.

Evidence of fluid marriage was found in all types of Widows' Original files, however, and not only widows' applications. Marriage-related issues occurred in a large proportion of cases, even in files that did not contain any paperwork concerning a widow as applicant. Pension applications might be rejected for a number of reasons. Marital legitimacy might be only one part of a denied case but it was an important component in many cases. About 29% of all files in the Widows' Original sample involved questions about marriage or marital legitimacy. About 18% of these cases treated issues of family desertion, in one form or another. These statistics reveal not only cases of abandonment, but also the continued prevalence of traditional marriage practices, such as common-law unions, in the face of increasing licensing and regulation of nuptials over the course of the nineteenth century. (19)

Indeed, the presence of "contesting widow" cases presents strong evidence of separation and remarriage--in other words, bigamy--as a practice almost as common as divorce in the nineteenth century. There were many reasons for these multiple applications, for individual circumstances and adherence to the truth varied, but certain patterns recur. John Martin's case, which introduced this article, is sketchier than many but can serve as an archetype for several details. Indeed, its narrative appears almost simple compared to the complexities of the marital histories uncovered by the investigations of the special examiners who undertook to sort out the truth--or a truth, of sorts--from the tangled web of deceit, fabrication, and forgetfulness that characterized the evidence. Covered by a trail of new names, false claims, and new marital arrangements, deserters and bigamists often lurked just beyond the reach of the law.

"He Did Not Want Her to Find Him": The Use of Aliases

John Martin's case provides one common theme: he passed under at least two different names. Taking on an alias was almost certainly simpler in the nineteenth century than it is today in the age of Social Security numbers and credit ratings. Popular culture immortalized the anonymity of that great American identity frontier, the West. As California miners sang:

   Oh, what was your name in the States?
   Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?
   Did you murder your wife
   And flee for your life?
   Say, what was your name in the States? (20)

John Martin never went West. Yet, in changing his name, he reflected a pattern common to many Civil War pension cases, appearing in at least one-fifth of the sample cases. (21)

Not all soldiers were so bold as George Bagshaw, who "declared that he assumed the name of Whitaker because had had trouble with his wife and did not want her to find him." (Bagshaw did not indicate which wife--he happened to have had at least four.) It was not always necessary to make a great change: you could Anglicize your name, as Swiss immigrant George Schmidt did when he became George Smith. Or, like Samuel Hilderbrand, you could take on your mother's surname, and become Samuel Chambers. (22)

Identity, thus, was often a contested notion in pension cases. A claims attorney, representing a widow who had apparently remarried and was disqualified for a pension, attempted to use this knowledge to a quite different end. Arguing that a name change was meaningless, he posited that a woman should not be presumed married simply because she took on a man's surname: "And if she took the name of Bush, the act was not unlawful, for any person may change his name. No less a distinguished person than a vice-president of the United States changed his name. Jeremiah Colbath was the name his parents gave him, but he did not like it, and took the name of HENRY WILSON." (23)

Sometimes a changed name was but part of an entire fictional re-creation of identity. Such was the case of Henry (alias William) Hildreth, who died during the war. (24) In 1853 Henry married a young woman named Sarah, who bore him one child. Poor Sarah was sadly deceived: when he left her in Ottawa County, Michigan, around 1857, Henry promised that she would hear from him soon. Sarah noted in her deposition: "[M]y husband ... squandered the money my Mother left me, went away, said he would go to Kalamazoo, and as soon as he could get a house, would send for me. He never came for me, but left me alone in the hemlock woods, with my boy, 2 miles from any neighbor. After waiting and waiting a long time, I wrote to my father to come after me, and I went to [his house]." Like Caroline Martin, she returned home with her children to assume the role of daughter.

In 1859, Henry's father forwarded to Sarah a letter from one of his son's friends:

   Grand Rapids, Sept 29, 1859
   Mr. Hildreth Sir
   I am in ths place and thought I would do you a Kindnes to let you
   know that your Son Henry left hear last Spring for pikespeak with A
   compney and [he] ... died on the way he told those that was with him
   that his folks lived in Otway Co Michigan ...
   Josiah H. Flagg

Hildreth Sr. passed the letter on with the following note: "I Recieved this a few days ago[.] this is the Last we can expect to hear from poor Henry[.] it apers he is dead[.] you can se this Leter that I got[.] send it to Sary ..." Yet Henry had not died on the way to Pike's Peak in Colorado. Rather, he returned to Michigan, changed his first name to William, and enlisted in the 10th Regiment, Michigan Cavalry Volunteers. In 1861, he married a second wife, Delilah, who bore him two children before his death in the service in Kentucky in June 1864.

Some husbands embraced a more complete alteration of identity and locale. Why change just a first name or a last name if you could change both? German immigrant Robert Schmidt married Thesesa Voss Heissel in 1857. According to Theresa, her merchant husband went on a trip to buy goods and did not reappear for several months. Robert then wrote her, requesting that she sell all their possessions and meet him in St. Louis. With $800 from the sale in hand, Theresa ventured to Missouri, where she was reunited with him. As a neighbor commented in her deposition, "They were together about three days and then he said he had got work over the river and was going over there to see about it and he would take the money with him and put it in the bank and she gave it to him." Alone in the city, Theresa spent eleven days searching for her husband, "subsisting on charity," and finally returned to her family in Illinois. Robert Schmidt, in the meantime, moved to California, passed himself off as "Herman Weber," and met and wed another "green German woman" (in her own words) in San Francisco, probably in the 1870s. His abandoned first wife, Theresa, supported herself by "working out" as a domestic, eventually moving to California with a daughter. As a neighbor claimed, she refused to divorce Robert because a fortuneteller told her they would meet again. And so they did. In 1888 a friend told Theresa that her husband still lived. When she confronted him, "He told [her] that he was getting a pension and that he would give her one half of what he Recieved if she would not have him arrested for bigamy." (25)

But rediscovery must have been unusual. The opportunity for men--and surprisingly, for women--to assume a new name, and lose track of their old lives, was relatively great. While pension claims sometimes mention acquaintances who found people from their pasts, many absconding husbands and wives probably passed undetected. While a number of husbands in the sample maintained contact with their old homes and friends, others cut their past ties more decisively. Those who were abandoned, on the other hand, sometimes had little reason to try to find spouses who were abusive, financially irresponsible, or simply incompatible.

"He Simply Told Me He Was Free From Her": False Widowers and Single Folk

More often, however, men and women found no need to change their names. When questioned, they simply created a new identity and a new personal history. The ease with which they did so suggests the difficulty of ever quantifying the phenomena of desertion and bigamy. Yet their stories provide valuable clues about how individuals hid a past life and moved forward. The stereotype of the bigamist is a male swindler, perhaps a traveling salesman, who had separate homes and families in different towns. Almost no marriages in the two data sets, however, represent the actions of a confidence man or woman who maintained several households simultaneously. Rather than intending to damage the institution of marriage, these bigamists honored it by creating new marriages and using untruth to move easily into new lives.

Pension applications reveal how men also could have double identities as widowers and spouses. Veteran George Smith, for example, was a widower. His second, bigamous marriage had ended with the death of his wife. How was his third wife to know that he had deserted his still-living first wife? In another case, Barney Hill told Marie Savary that he was a widower before they married in Massachusetts. He really had abandoned his first wife in New York. In hindsight, Marie's mother remembered being a little suspicious because she had been told Barney still had a living wife and, more importantly, she did not want her French Catholic daughter to marry "an American." When examined by the pension officer, Marie and Barney's children also noted their father had been strangely unwilling to discuss his earlier life. (26)

Others did not even bother claiming that their unmarried status was legal. Spouses often accepted their new partners' claims of identity. Knowing that Eldridge Buxton had been married before, the Welsh-born Margaret Edwards accepted his statement when "he simply told me that he was free from her. No sir he did not say they were legally separated only that he was free from her. And I married him in good faith." She was 30 and he was 33 when they wed in Thompson, Connecticut, in 1879, and Margaret bore him at least four children before his death in 1886. Eldridge's first wife, Caroline, had married him in Rhode Island in March of 1867, when she was 17 and he was 22. For whatever reason, they separated, but Caroline still considered herself married, raising their one child and working to support herself and the child. She eventually was granted a pension as the rightful widow, collecting a monthly sum from 1890 to her death in 1905. (27)

Likewise, the widow Martha Caroline Hosea accepted the story of her new husband. "I [knew] Jasper Butler only about three months before I married him.... When I married him he told me he had never been married before. Then after we had been married about a year he said he had been previously married. He said he left his first wife when he went into the army and that he did not know what had become of her.... He just said he did not know what had become of his first wife and that the law could not hurt us. He did not say why it could not." In fact, Jasper's first wife had also lost track of her deserting husband, and told the pension examiners several stories: that she had heard of his death in Andersonville, that he had returned after the war. By the time of the investigation in 1890, she seemed less concerned with his long-ago disappearance than with his pension benefits. (28)

Veterans misrepresented themselves in the periodic questionnaires or "family circulars" they returned to the government. Daniel Bailey claimed to be a widower when he applied to the Leavenworth, Kansas, soldiers' home in 1899, although his first wife was still living, and he may have had a second wife as well. Another veteran, Samuel Hilderbrand, said that his wife was named Eliza in answering a circular when he entered a sanitarium in 1910, but in an earlier circular, dated 1899, he claimed that Eliza had died in 1888. As the special examiner dryly noted about Samuel's "fumbling" in the family data circulars, in particular with regard to his claim that Eliza was dead: "In the language of Mark Twain, this later report appears to have been very much exaggerated." In fact, Samuel had married three times, the last time to a woman who was "reputed" to be a widow. This case also highlights how public records, such as city directories and the census, might easily be manipulated by deceit: when Samuel abandoned this third wife, she listed herself in the city directory as a widow. (29)

The most famous wartime family story, of course, is the archetype of Martin Guerre, who returned after years away and was accepted, at least initially, when he claimed an identity. (30) Memories faded, especially in pension claims filed years after an individual's disappearance. Oscar Lindsay disappeared to his family from the 1850s to the 1880s. His stepmother, who reported mostly from hearsay, noted: "My husband was not satisfied that the man who came here was Oscar. He had some doubts about his identity as his son." He did not look like his brothers, and had brown hair as a man when he returned, although he "was white haired or very light brown when he was a small boy." Furthermore, acquaintances noted, "he was pretty close mouthed about his affairs," "was a great man to roam about," and, according to his stepmother, would not discuss his life away from his father's home, or his previous marriage or children: "If we began to question him he would turn the subject or get up and walk away." (31) He may have been close-mouthed, or he may have intended to deceive.

"Life Is Too Short To Fool with a Divorce": Legal Experience, Deception, and Bigamy

Some individuals, like veteran Fenton Butterfield, simply told their second spouses that they had been divorced. When asked about this by his friend Richard Palmer, Fenton replied: "Life is too short to fool with a divorce." Butterfield knew full well what he was doing. His daughter from his first marriage visited once. "When ever I spoke about mother or his domestic relations he would change the subject. I remarked to him at one time that there were so many Mrs. Butterfields around that I thought he would feel like a regular Brigham Young." Fenton was embarrassed--"He colored up but did not reply." (32)

Others, less familiar with the practice of law, believed their separations gave them the legal status of divorcees. Such claims reveal that men and women were familiar with the expanded grounds for divorce available in late nineteenth-century America, and used them in informal ways even as they avoided the court system. Anna and William Baum, whose marital history became a part of a federal pension dispute, separated after eight or nine years of marriage. William apparently believed that living apart from a wife for seven years meant they were no longer married. (33) Unfortunately for William's second wife Augusta, the Pension Bureau did not agree with her husband's interpretation of the law, and awarded a pension to the first wife, Anna, as the legal widow.

Some separated spouses tried to obtain divorces, but were stymied by the demands of state divorce laws, which insisted that there be a guilty party. Pension claimant Mary Havener Hill said she had applied at least twice for a divorce from her husband Albert. She dropped the first petition because Albert said he would oppose it. When she filed again, she did not want to pay for the newspaper advertising necessary to serve papers on him after personal service was attempted and failed. (34) Albert Hill, however, went on to a more successful second marriage, and a new family of four "bright and beautiful children." Albert began his new life in Canada; the special examiner suggested that because divorce laws were stricter there than in Connecticut or Massachusetts, his other homes, Albert probably chose not to pursue a divorce before he married Elizabeth Hill in 1884. Ultimately, however, even his second marriage met a bad end; he turned out to be "an eratic [sic] sort of a fellow who got to gambling, and failed in business, became abusive to his family," and, according to the special examiner, who seems to have recorded his comments with relish, Albert "finally went off and died which appears to have been the most decent act he had performed for some time."

Others purposely attempted to deceive investigators. The Pension Bureau was especially vigilant against such fraud, checking local court records and collecting affidavits in special investigations. Despite her daughter's statement that "mother never believed in divorce; and I think she would have suffered any torture before getting one," Emeline Highfill did divorce her husband Philo in 1873 (and herself remarried). Still, she pursued a pension claim as a deserted wife while Philo still lived and then for her "orphaned" children, protesting perhaps a bit too much that: "this soldier has a little boy left to me[.] is there No law providing for sutch minor children of a soldier and does the law [p]ut the children out becaes I thought the Government would all ways be wiling and ready to Pay its Honest debts ..." Philo himself seemed unclear about being divorced, as when his second wife Synthia confronted him, he first admitted, then denied, the earlier marriage. Synthia decided to ignore the law, making a more pragmatic economic and social choice: "I had a child by him and told him I would continue to live with him as long as he treated me right." (35)

Although American divorce has been the topic of numerous monographs, pension cases demonstrate legal history from a different perspective. In some instances, individuals did not understand the law. In others, they took advantage of the idea of the law, without particularly respecting its practice. While it increased over the course of the late nineteenth century, divorce was not common. Yet people certainly knew about divorce and, when pressed, individuals might claim to be divorced. This form of "self-divorce" is but one means by which husbands and wives shaped their marital destinies. False divorce was part of the fabric of a mobile society.

"He Was A Miner and You Know How Miners Float Around": Geographical Mobility

The very commonness of assumed aliases in the data suggests that taking on a new identity was not difficult in a nation of people increasingly "on the move." In some cases witnesses and special examiners commented on the difficulty of tracing individuals. Geographical mobility made possible all sorts of opportunities, including the opportunity to make a new family or leave an old. Miners, industrial workers, and agricultural laborers, in particular, were transient, especially with the growth of new industries, the opening of mineral sites in the West, and the development of commercial agriculture and ranching that depended on seasonal migrant labor. Migration was not limited to the poor, of course, (36) although existing studies of tramps and hoboes present intriguing questions. John Demos, for instance, once suggested that for each divorce, "unrecorded others dissolved through tacit agreement between the parties themselves or through simple desertion of one by the other" in the nineteenth century. For each person who was left behind was another who "ran away." The lure of running away also drew some individuals to, and others from, America. Mobility reached beyond national boundaries, both for immigrants and emigrants. Such cyclical movement patterns make difficult the task of identifying how husbands and wives really lived.

As pension records reveal, the Civil War itself provided opportunities to leave home, as did the changing nature of American settlement. One special examiner noted in the case of Jasper Butler: "There have been great development and influx of strangers in Dunklin Co. Mo. since 1876 and it would be difficult to trace soldier without particular data." (37) Ever vigilant against fraud, special examiners also performed detailed research to track down marriage certificates and allegations of divorce, writing to church officials and the county clerks of sometimes over a dozen counties in attempts to substantiate the tales of one party or another.

Other men and women lived remarkably peripatetic lives. Late in his life, veteran Fenton Butterfield, who had not "bothered" with a divorce, resided in the Napa (California) Soldiers' Home and drew an invalid pension for a leg injury. The Pension Bureau received a letter from his wife, Margaret J. Butterfield, in 1910. She wanted to know if Butterfield was still drawing his pension, "or has it Been Stoped for any cause for a time and if So what for Will you please Let me know the particulars?" she asked. A few weeks later, a sharp-eyed individual in the Pension Bureau's Law Division penned a note that landed in Fenton Butterfield's file: "Memo-Wonder if this pens'n [pensioner] has two wives? He told Mr. Sues his wife is Cornelia Amy." (38)

Fenton J. Butterfield was a young man when he joined Company D of the 17th Indiana Infantry and served his country during the Civil War. An English immigrant, he had remained in the United States when his mother took his other sibling and returned to Britain. On furlough in the fall of 1862 he married an old family acquaintance, Margaret J. Palmer. Fenton and Margaret moved frequently after the war, shifting from country to town, and from county to county within Indiana about every two years. Eventually they moved on to Kansas, but Fenton was bitten by the prospecting bug, and traveled on to Colorado. After a year, he sent for Margaret and their three children, and the family resumed housekeeping in Del Norte. But after another two years, Fenton was on the move again. Despite Margaret's urging him to get steady employment he moved on from job to job and place to place. The final separation seemed temporary: "He just left as he had left at other times and I supposed he was gone on a prospecting trip," noted Margaret later. He traveled about Colorado, moved up to Idaho, and finally settled in Utah. He wrote to Margaret occasionally, requesting that she and the children join him. But they never did, and he began to live as husband to another woman.

Left alone, Margaret never filed for divorce but tended for her family by taking on a variety of jobs. At least one of the children was sent to live with grandparents. Moving from job to job and boarding house to boarding house, she was even more transient than her husband, relocating from Del Norte to Ouray, then Montrose, Durango, Gunnison, Cripple Creek, Pueblo, Trinidad and Telluride in Colorado, up to Idaho and Montana, to four different places in Kansas, then to Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego in California, Shreveport, Louisiana, as well as Houston and El Paso, Texas, sometimes not even long enough to "gain a residence."

Fenton's second and much younger wife, Cornelia Amy Drabble, was born in Utah the year after Margaret and Fenton Butterfield married. She was probably a Mormon, but Fenton was not, and religiously based polygamy was not a part of the equation when they wed around 1882. She believed him to be a bachelor, although she found out his true status within a short time. Cornelia's mother was already suspicious: "I know mother used to think he acted like a man that had been around a family, like a married man." His new wife developed her own suspicions when he talked about his children, Ernest, Clara, and Gladys, in his sleep. When confronted by Cornelia, who "did not feel very good when I found out about this former marriage," he told her he was divorced. (He was not.) She accepted this notion, but as she noted in commenting on his earlier mobility, "he was a miner and you know how miners float around." Cornelia and Fenton themselves floated around Utah, then to Idaho for four years, to Kansas for seven and a half years, and eventually returned to settle in Ogden, Utah. Fenton must have continued to wander, however, as Cornelia remained in Odgen when he was in the Napa Soldiers' Home.

Other soldiers crossed national boundaries to build new lives. Francis Bagot, married to Abigail Hayes in Ireland in 1851, emigrated to the United States in 1854. Winding up in "Cincinata," he obtained a good job as a clerk at the courthouse and fathered two children with a woman who later claimed to have married him in 1854. Abigail never seemed interested or able to emigrate herself, despite the advice of a friend who wrote her, suggesting that she write Francis to "tell him you are coming to America to see him now" and to "tell him if he do not Send you Means to soport you and your child you will expose him in the Cincinti papers. I bet he will send you what ever you want." After learning of his death following the Battle of Stone River in 1863, Abigail promptly applied for a widow's pension. (39)

These cases point to a similar conclusion. As nineteenth-century pundits noted, it was not difficult to move on and start another family. The United States was not only a nation of immigrants, but a nation of migrants. Studies of nineteenth-century economic mobility have amply demonstrated the omnipresence of geographical mobility. The existence of such tremendous opportunities for "moving on" (if not up) presents a tremendous challenge for the historian. Desertion and extralegal remarriage were not new behaviors; their presence has been noted in colonial America, early modern Europe, and countless other societies. But in the late nineteenth century new social spaces and economic niches for unmarried men and women, whether in cities or growing communities, and accessible means of transportation made such behaviors even more possible and less traceable. In nearly all the "contesting widow" data examined, spatial movement played some role.

"Lots of Them Did That": Serial Marriage, Bigamy, and "Civilized Polygamy"

The French observer Duvergier De Hauranne noted in 1866 that in the United States "legal chaos gives [remarkable facilities] for bigamy, and the great number of double, triple and quadruple marriages discovered each year by female jealousy." (40) Other nineteenth-century writers commented on the significance of the laws regarding divorce and bigamy without recognizing bigamous marriages that never found their way into court. Pension investigations concerning "contesting widows," however, provide richly detailed cases of bigamy. For not only did some men have two wives; a number of them had three or four. Many men took serial wives, living with only one at a time, and moving on when widowed or simply tired of the old life. In very few cases were either first, second, or subsequent marriages (or marriage-like relationships) short-lived. Almost all lasted several years; most lasted over five, and a number survived ten, twenty, or more. The actions of bigamous husbands speak less of disrespect for marriage itself than a desire to move on to a new life. To state this is not to deny that many bigamists were irresponsible scoundrels (41) and left wives and children without support. (However, as the next section demonstrates, deserted wives were not necessarily passive themselves.)

In a number of cases, men took on serial wives, abandoning one and living with another until her death. George Schmidt married his first wife Magdalena (Lena) in New York in 1861, immediately before he left to join his regiment in the Civil War. To support her application Lena produced letters that George had written her from Germany in 1869. At some point he left her. (42) He married Hannah Pfaff in a bigamous second union (perhaps while still acknowledging his marriage to Magdalena), and upon Hannah's death in 1882, married the woman who agreed to serve as his housekeeper, Sarah Ann Robinson. (43) Because Hannah died leaving an infant, Sarah was willing to marry George after an acquaintance of only three weeks, and they moved to McKeesport, Pennsylvania. She learned little of his past life but refused to "keep house with him ... unless he married me." Sarah discovered his earlier marriage when she opened a letter from the pension office and found out that Magdalena had requested half his invalid pension.

Evidence pointed against what Lena claimed to be a copy of her marriage certificate. The government mailed "family relations circulars" to veterans, asking them to identify their family members. These questionnaires, found in some pension files, demonstrate the government's concerns with family and inheritance. The forms appear to have been sent to men after 1890, perhaps in hope of staving off claims from widows married to veterans after the new pension law went into effect.

In his responses to the family relations circular, George made no mention of the marriage to Lena. Later, when pressed by an investigator, he changed his story. First he said that he had sexual relations with her; then he said, "I can't swear that I was never married to Leena Schmidt and I can't say that I wasn't," but that he lived with her for three months before being mustered into the army and for several years after leaving the service. He claimed never to have heard of the church where they allegedly were married. Eventually he claimed Lena had tried to kill him. (His third wife Sarah said, "he claimed that the woman Magdalena stabbed him in the side and showed me the scar in the side and that she drove him off and that she was a great hand to drink beer." Yet Sarah also commented: "He .... was a man who thought he knew a great deal but he did not know much.") Finally, he appears to have thrown up his hands, eventually writing to the Commissioner of Pensioners "I have no escuse to make and if you think this women [Lena] is intittled to a Pension give her have [half] of mine."

Family circulars sometimes suggested marital irregularities to sharp-eyed investigators. Samuel Hilderbrand listed Eliza E. as his wife when he was admitted to the Battle Mountain Sanitarium in 1910. Eliza, when pressed, could produce no papers documenting their union. (44) Because Hilderbrand traveled for his work as a steamfitter, Eliza apparently experienced life as a grass widow more than once. As she recalled about their final split, "I think it was before Christmas, but he went away and returned so many times that it is pretty difficult to recall.... he just walked off and never returned. There was no disagreement or quarrel. He just walked away." (Bear in mind that Eliza might well believe that she would stand to benefit if the separation was not perceived as her fault, but also that she probably had no compelling reason to lie.) Her daughter supported her in recalling her father's departure when she was thirteen: "It was not a separation. Father was a steam-fitter by trade and in connection with his work frequently went away to other places and the last time he simply went away and she heard from him a few times and then the correspondence discontinued."

As previously noted, Samuel prevaricated about his earlier lives. In one marital circular returned to the federal government, dated 1899, Hilderbrand reported that he had married (Eliza) El[l]en Trobe, mother of their five children, but that she had died in Iowa in 1888. In a second questionnaire, dated 1915 or 1916, he reported that Eliza passed away in 1898. (Actually she was still alive in 1925, two years after Samuel's death.) The special examiner's exhaustive research, attempting to find records of a death or divorce, also managed to reveal another possible marriage to Mary J. Williams in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the river from his later home in Omaha, in 1879, and a subsequent divorce.

Samuel moved to Red Oak, Iowa, and sent home money to Eliza for a while, and next appeared in Omaha under a new name. Upon hearing this news, his son James moved to that city. Samuel's new wife, Avis Post, was "reputed to be a widow." (45) (Son James himself eventually took a wife, but like his father, drifted from married life. He told the special examiner about his wife Katie: "I have heard she is dead." The special examiner promptly decided that James was a "chip off the old block," especially after it was "intimated ... he is not married with the woman with whom he is living.") Avis lived with Samuel until about 1901, when, as she noted, "he deserted me and the children." She refused his occasional overtures at reconciliation: "There were several times that [Samuel] wanted me to take him back and made all kinds of promises but I thought that as long as I was in the clear that I had better remain so." The entire case provides a cautionary note for those who would accept self-reporting as accurate, since Samuel made numerous false claims, and even his beleaguered last wife presented herself in a manner that best supported her reputation. By the time this case was settled, the year was 1925 and even the best memories were growing dim; Samuel (although he claimed to have been underage for enlistment when he joined the Union forces) must have been well over seventy at the time of his death, and his widows the same age.

Perhaps more remarkable than the presence of these cases is the off-hand way they appear in the records--rarely as a criminal complaint related to a serious "offense against public morality," and often as part of case that only wound up in official channels for peripheral reasons. Apparently the first wives of bigamists did not always care to chase down their absconding husbands. This lack of response sometimes stemmed from the fact that women, as well as men, embarked upon bigamous relationships with surprising frequency.

"She Supposed She Had A Right to Marry Too": Bigamous Wives and the Limits of Women's Choices

Local and state records do not reveal many instances of wives who embarked on bigamous remarriages. Their actions might be labeled "adultery," which was grounds for divorce in some states. They may appear in criminal prosecutions of bigamy, but it was more likely that a wife--who depended on an absconding husband for support--would file a complaint with authorities than would a man, whose losses might be limited to his pride and household support. Even in the Civil War pension cases examined, bigamous women might be supposed an uncommon phenomenon. After all, the method for uncovering these cases pointed only to contesting widows of bigamous husbands. Yet other cases of marital irregularity appear in the context of the narratives within pension files, indicating that there may have been multiple illegal marriages, but that one wife died before her husband and thus never filed a claim, or that one widow did not bother to apply for a pension. Such cases and others reveal that women were also bigamists, in part because they sought economic ties with new husbands, and in part for other personal reasons. (46) Several wives, like their husbands, turned out to have a series of marriages, some more legal than others.

Separated wives sometimes embarked on new marriages of their own. Amelia Van Gedler and William Bacon were married in Southport, New York in February 1865, but he deserted his sixteen-year-old bride six months later. Amelia learned he took another wife, Cordelia. When asked "how he could marry again without getting a divorce," William apparently told another friend, "lots of them did ... that." (47) Amelia was of a like mind: "when she heard that soldier had married Cordelia A. she supposed she had a right to marry too." Amelia married a second husband, who died in 1876, and a third, who died in 1900. After the death of her third husband, some 35 years after being deserted by William, and probably not coincidentally after the creation of more liberal widows' pension laws, "she learned that she had no right to get married, and since remained single," applying for a pension as William's widow.

The number of marriage-like unions revealed in a single pension case went as high as twelve marriages between all the partners, revealing situations where the family tree resembles a tangled kudzu vine more than an oak. As one witness noted of the case: "They parted on and off like lots of people will." Sallie Prater, from eastern Kentucky, attempted at least three times to claim a pension as the widow of William Johnson, whom she had married when she was sixteen, probably around 1879. In 1926, over forty years after his death, she wrote to the pension commissioner: "I have worked my finger nails off trying to raise my children, waiting, watching, and longing for help, that sometimes seems just in sight." The claimant had four marriages; in addition, her first husband had a previous wife; her second husband, two other partners; her third husband, at least two other wives; and her fourth husband, at least two wives in addition to Sallie. Many of these partners also had other spouses during their own long marital careers. (48)

Apparently, irregular marriage patterns and short-term cohabitation were not uncommon in Appalachia. (49) After the death of her first husband, the solider Johnson, in 1886, Sallie remarried a man named Henry Prater. Said Sallie: "We could not get along, he would not provide for me and my children and my daddy had to keep us, so I left him and moved into the home of my father." Sallie alleged that Prater got a divorce from her, but "I don't know where he got it." (The story grows more complex: Prater then married Clarinda Luster, with whom he had a child who died in infancy, and when Clarinda left him to return "home" Sallie "made up" with Prater and moved in with him but did not remarry him. After a month, she left again, and Prater eventually moved in with a woman named Marth Mounts, who fatally shot him in 1905, an event that at least provided a point of reference for all witnesses. Mounts was never prosecuted and moved back to West Virginia where she remarried.)

Sallie's subsequent unions show the informality of marital entrances and exits. She next married William Hatfield--a potentially dangerous union in mountain Appalachia, since, as she noted, her mother was a McCoy. (50) The marriage to Hatfield was not long lasting. She left after a month, and moved to her oldest daughter's home in West Virginia, where she received notice that Hatfield had applied for a divorce, and then heard that he married another woman (for whom it was also a second marriage). Sallie next married John Robinet, with a "license" issued and ceremony conducted by a man named Jim Dotson. But when Robinet left her after a few years, she asked Jim Dotson about getting a divorce, and he "told me I was already divorced from John Robinett ... he just meant, I reckon, that we were not lawfully married, because he had never put our marriage on record." Divorce, legal or not, seemed to prevail in the family narrative. Robinet, explained Sallie, had been married at least twice before he "married" her. His first wife "divorced" and remarried "some old man," and his second wife had been "divorced" from her first husband, who later married another McCoy. "A possible explanation as to why Henry Prater did not prosecute his divorce cases," noted the special examiner, "is that in that section it is not uncommon for the ignorant to believe that the filing of a petition for divorce is all that is necessary to dissolve the marriage."

Other women were unintentional bigamists. Their responses when they discovered their true legal status, however, reveal a willingness to seize the opportunity for freedom from an onerous union. Sarah Hildreth, who believed her husband to have died on that expedition to Pike's Peak, took the next logical step for a young widow with a child: she married a new husband the year after she believed her first husband had died. But Sarah discovered sometime in the 1880s that Hildreth had not died on his way to Colorado, and indeed that he had served and died in the army. What then should she do? As the special examiner noted, "It is a peculiar case." She decided to leave Alex Deyarmond, her second husband, when it became apparent that their union was not legal. When advised by a lawyer to go through another, this time legal, marriage with Deyarmond, "She replied that if she was not legally married she would not be, as she had been fooled enough." (51)

Likewise, abandoned wife Theresa Schmidt found a new husband. Already a widow when she married Robert Schmidt, she was then deserted by him in the Midwest. After two decades of single life, she bigamously married saloonkeeper Henry Teaman or Thiemann in California. She lived with Teaman for a number of years, and it is unclear what happened next. At some point, she discovered that Robert Schmidt was still living. In one version of the story, she confessed her turmoil to a priest, who suggested that she leave her second husband. In another version, she knew her first husband had taken another wife, and continued to live with Teaman until she "feared he might poison us." The attorney who filed the second wife's pension claim became somewhat distraught upon hearing Theresa's stories: "I told her she was liable to a criminal prosecution for bigamy if she was not divorced, and perjury if she was divorced." (This attorney recommended that the Pension Bureau throw out all the claims.) (52)

These cases often turn on the legal definition of marriage, which as already noted varied from state to state, as well as "decision by decision" within the Law Division of the Pension Bureau. Some women and men lived in adulterous relationships and never bothered to even claim them as marriages. After separating from her husband William, Deborah Butters said that she was forced to support herself by day work. She claimed to have been a housekeeper, but the special examiner found that the hovel where she and her male "employer" resided provided no space for separate rooms, much less separate beds. The examiner disdainfully noted her reputation was "that of a very loose woman, she being regarded as one of the lowest of the low, and her consorts are all drunken, worthless, or disreputable." (53) She did not qualify for a pension as the legal wife, for the pension law of August 1882 prevented the payment to wives or widows who lived in "open and notorious adulterous cohabitation."

Yet, ironically enough, women who had lived in such relationships could qualify for pensions if their adultery ceased before their first husband (whether abandoned or deserting) died. Such was the case in the complex story of William and Marion Butler, who each (probably) married at least three times--once legitimately, to each other, and the other times as bigamists. (54) Marion, William's first wife, lived with him for about five years, but as one witness testified, "she married below her station when she married Butler" and she left because of his "ill treatment." He tried to persuade Marion to send their daughter to live with him, but she refused. William then married a Miss Grove, who bore him four children. When she died around 1883, Butler and his entire family were living in the county poor house. He then married Nannie, with whom he lived in Maryland. Some time later, Nannie apparently became the second wife to leave William. The pension bureau examiner who had handled William's invalid pension anticipated the confusion that would ensue when he died. "I was prepared for this case, as I knew the soldier for some three years prior to his death, and had heard several times the story of his various marriages, and the desertion by the soldier of his final and last wife." Nannie may have left William, but she was driven to do so, "as he removed every stick of furniture from the house, and locked she and her children in, and had it not been for neighbors, they would probably have died from exposure." Nannie also commented on his cruel treatment; she had left him once and then returned, but after being threatened with whippings, left for good. He apparently also once filed divorce papers but abandoned the complaint. Nannie believed that William had been married once before, to Hattie Wagoner, a widow, but several years into the marriage learned of his other wife.

The special examiner then probed the legitimacy of William's first marriage to Marion. Marion had some adventures of her own, but it was not immediately clear whether she had taken on a bigamous spouse as had her first husband. She called herself Mrs. Niece for some time and claimed she was to marry Andrew Niece, but he left her when their son, born out of wedlock, was only nine months old. To the special examiner, however, the relationship between Marion and Andrew was to be considered marriage. It was not a lasting union, for as Marion recalled, "I determined not to have any more family and as we didn't care to marry, we separated. I have no idea where he went and have never heard from him since." Still, she called herself Niece's widow (in order to prevent her children being taken away by William Butler, she said). Marion then turned to a third relationship with a man named David Griffith. Griffith said that he married the "widow" Marion Niece in the 1880s after a brief acquaintance ("don't know much about her and nothing about him," he noted). "No sir," he told the examiner, "it was through no fault of hers that I left her, but after I got settled elsewhere I furnished a house and then wanted her to come to me but she refused, saying I was not making enough to support a family (she had three children) and that was the last of our correspondence." Marion at first claimed that they had never married in a ceremony nor lived together as husband and wife, though Griffith boarded in the same house; but two weeks later she changed her story and admitted that she had married him. (55) Nonetheless, Marion Butler collected a pension until her death in 1918. Perhaps because she was not living in "open and notorious adulterous cohabitation" at the time when William Butler died, or subsequent to his death, the pension office made no comment on her morals, and accepted the state of West Virginia's circuit court decision that Marion was the legal widow of William.

Friends who knew the truth about earlier spouses might disguise that truth to preserve later, more successful marriages. Emily Butler, whose "dead" first husband Jasper went and married a second wife, also took on another spouse, J.W. Ramey. Ramey himself might have been a bigamist, according to the testimony of Emily's sister, who noted that he had been previously married and separated, perhaps without a divorce. Charles Curtice, a mutual acquaintance, ran into Jasper, who told his friend that he had heard Emily had died, and he had remarried. Curtice withheld this news from Emily until her second husband died--"I did not care to disturb her peace," he noted. Emily, who applied for Jasper's pension under the liberal laws of 1890, was firmly caught by the morality requirements for widows, however. Because she had been living with Ramey at the time her first husband died in 1876, she could not qualify for a pension. (56)

The legal complexities presented by slave and post-emancipation marriages could be significant. (57) They were among the few Union pension cases investigated in the South. While no single case represents any larger trends, marriages and family relationships could prove convoluted. Furthermore, as in the case of Rebecca Bailey, special examiners could be especially disdainful: "her case is a very simple one and very common in this region. Her husband.... left her for a younger woman. After living with this woman for a time, he took up with another woman, and then with another and then with still another." Special examiners' moral judgments often had an effect on the end result of the case, and this was particularly true for African-American widows. Rebecca had united with her "husband" Dennis under the Mississippi slave codes in 1861. (Dennis later claimed they were not married, but that "he used to stay" with her.) As usual, each party blamed the other. Dennis took up with another woman, Silla Hall, for a short time, and then married a third, Adaline Connor. The relationship between Adaline and Dennis did not have a happy end. Adaline next lived as man and wife with Mack Weekley, at least until he married another woman. Dennis then married a woman named Hattie in 1892. Hattie had prior marriages as well. (58)

Rebecca was the victorious claimant in this small pension war among the three wives: Adaline, Hattie, and herself. Yet policies were applied inconsistently; in other cases of slave marriages, widows were denied benefits by the Law Division. Similarly, not just differing state laws but differing legal interpretations--as well as the culture of patronage surrounding pension awards--could mean that some common-law or putative wives were granted pensions and others were not. While pension laws provided legal and moral guidelines on what constituted a legitimate marriage, (59) the quality of the investigation, interpretation of policy, and complexity of the circumstances dictated widely differing policy decisions.

Pension cases document not just the attitudes of women and men toward remarriage, but the true hardships that many deserted wives faced. Remarriage or the establishment of an independent household was not a possibility for all "grass widows," a popular term for deserted and divorced women. (60) Like Caroline Martin, whose story introduced this chapter, some wives returned to extended family households. These homes presumably provided mutual support in a marriage where the spouse was absent for work reasons or because of marital separation or desertion.

Pension cases make visible women's paid labor in an age when other statistics about women's participation in the labor force renders them relatively invisible. Because of the detail recorded in individual depositions, pension files uncover paid work that was generally hidden in the federal census, city directories, and other records. Economic hardship probably outweighed social shame for some deserted spouses, and widows placed financial considerations high on list of reasons for writing to the Pension Bureau. Women's pension files demonstrate how widows and deserted wives survived, in part because pensions under the 1890 law could only go to widows with financial need who supported themselves by their own labor. Margaret Butterfield, the most transient of laborers, at first had received some support from her family, but as she realized "I could not depend upon my father altogether, I started out to get work." Her jobs included working in a restaurant and in a laundry, washing dishes, serving as a chamber maid in a hotel, selling books, day work cleaning houses, being a janitress for a church, taking in washing, and apparently peddling silk, laces and ribbons to "the Mexicans" in California, an occupation that caused the Pension Bureau to characterize her as "incorrigible," perhaps because she crossed the boundary not only of "proper" womanly behavior in her work, but because she crossed ethnic boundaries as well. (61)

Factory work was less common but provided another possibility. Elizabeth Bailey was abandoned by her husband William in the late 1860s. After she was deserted, Elizabeth worked in the textile capitals of New England, first as a weaver in the mills at Salem, Massachusetts, then at the Pacific Mill in Lawrence and the Merrimack and other mills in Lowell, living in a "Corporation" boarding house. She received no support from her husband's family, for her haughty mother-in-law would not communicate with Elizabeth or child: "They were yankess [sic] and you know they don't associate with the Irish, and catholics." Her career as a factory laborer lasted about 40 years, and neighbors testified she lived a "seclusive" live, reading, going to church, and enjoying the company of her sisters. (62) Hannah Hill, abandoned in Cohoes, New York, likewise "had to work in the mill" to raise her "four little ones" and "never received a penny from" her absconding husband, even though he returned for a few months about five years after he had left. (63)

Domestic work was most common. According to her neighbors, Magdalena Schmidt lived "in necessitous circumstances and depend[ed] upon her own labor for her support, which is that of washing and ironing, and doing house-work." Sarah Hildreth "went out to work" until her son could support her. Mary Havener Hill, deserted by her husband, supported herself as a laundress and cared for their three children. Rebecca Bailey, a freedwoman reduced to poverty when her husband Dennis took off to live with (and sometimes marry) a series of other women, found herself supported by the Lanier family, her former owners in slavery. (64) Others, allegedly, were prostitutes, but the nature of testimony in these cases, with each widow crafting a story so that she could qualify for a pension, the skepticism of special examiners, and the presence of conflicting evidence, calls into question some of these judgments. (65)

More common in widows' pension files (and, indeed, common to almost all pension requests) were references to poverty and pleas for help. These requests, often scrawled in pencil on scraps of paper, recorded widowhoods of penurious desperation as well as concerted efforts to have the federal government provide rewards. Some widows were particularly indignant to discover that previous wives had submitted claims. Cordelia Bacon was skeptical, even critical, of the claim of her husband William's first wife Amelia. "I believe this woman is a fake," she wrote. "No[w] where is the nature of the government if a woman can be married 41 years and raise a family and then when they grow old and need help some one else can Step in and deprive her of it?" She added: "It seems to me if she had been Mr. Bacon['s] Wife she would have interfered before he was dead." (66) Others were more realistic, or at least more suspicious, and gave up their claims when confronted by their husbands' misdeeds.

"I Think That When a Child Sticks Its Finger on a Stove and Burns It, It Is Very Careful": Conclusions

These cases do not necessarily represent a cross-section of the U.S. population. However, even though the age cohort is restricted for pension cases, and the men limited to Civil War veterans, the data may be wider and deeper than they first appear. Because pension laws became so broad in the 1890s, some scholars have argued that Civil War pensions became the first national form of old age support. Theda Skocpol, in demonstrating the rising "take-up" rate of pensions from the restrictive policies of the 1870s to the later generous, politically motivated laws, suggests that over 90% of those eligible attempted to obtain pensions by the 1910s. (67) Because the pension system's reach was so extensive, its records do provide an extremely large and geographically wide-ranging body of documents about individual lives. Because so many applications were filed under the 1890 law, which provided pensions for needy widows, the records also contain a great deal of detail about working-class lives that is often missing from court records and personal writings.

Pension files, however, do not represent "disinterested" narratives. The husbands and wives who applied for pensions were specifically interested in financial reward. "I ... drop you a few lines to ask you if my Clame has bin aloud or Not," went one typical letter to the Pension Commissioner in 1901. In telling their stories, some of the applicants expressed long-buried shame or anger. Indeed, a number of deserted wives expressed bitterness and disgust. These women were much less likely to attach themselves to the institution of marriage again. Like Sarah Deyarmond, some wives believed "that if she was not legally married she would not be, as she had been fooled enough." Other wives were even more cautious. Sarah Hildebrand, who got a divorce when all she wanted was alimony or financial support, noted she had no interest in a divorce "as I did not want to get married anymore." When asked if she had worried after her husband disappeared, Hannah Hill noted that she had not after the first week: "I did not want to bother with him." Elizabeth Bailey's sister noted that after her sister had been deserted, "She has never cared for men since" (although another witness testified "I know she has often expressed a wonder whether [her husband] is still living"). After being deserted by her husband, Margaret Butterfield told the special examiner, "I never cared much for men's society." She continued, "I think that when a child sticks its finger on a stove and burns it, it is very careful."

But these cases demonstrate that some wives--and some husbands--embraced marriage again (and again and again), sometimes for obviously economic reasons and other times for emotional or social reasons. The records are not most valuable for uncovering the causes of a bad marriage, the secrets to a happy marriage, or even for telling who received a pension and who did not. Rather, they open up a view of marital practice among ordinary people that did not always follow the conventions of law and culture. They suggest a more fluid world of marriage than many personal documents, legal records, and prescriptive literature reveal. Bigamists were not exactly commonplace, as far as we know, yet these records suggest how they might easily be hidden to historical view. By assuming an alias, a man or a woman might "lose" an earlier identity and forge a new life. By telling a simple untruth, women and men could enter new, often life-long matrimonial unions. Further, some witnesses had a remarkable lack of outrage about bigamous marriages. One friend declined to become involved in a case were both wife and husband remarried other spouses: "I thought they were old enough to know themselves." It is not so much that a cavalier attitude about marriage existed in the United States as that some individuals acted outside of strong ideological norms and that some communities recognized and accepted such behaviors as typical. Divorce was increasing in late nineteenth-century America, but still relatively uncommon compared to twentieth-century standards. Yet marital dissolution proceeded anyway.

Husbands and wives appeared to have separated for all the "usual reasons." One or another party was footloose, drunken, or conniving; spouses tired of each other; a husband might resent being forced into marriage by an "early" pregnancy; a wife might fear her husband's abusive behavior. There were family objections to marriages, especially if potential husbands seemed somewhat suspicious: "I like to have cried my eyes out" when Lou Bagshaw married the wandering George, said her sister. "She was too good to get married to anybody." Given the adversarial nature of some of the testimony, character attacks were not infrequent, and certainly these cases contain their fair share of unsavory accusations: "He bore the reputation here ... of being a good for nothing, worthless drunken man and a lover of fast women," said one witness of a bigamist.

The list could be continued, for only in storybooks do all marriages represent a happy beginning and a happy ending. In many of the actual stories, the husband appears to have been the party at fault, abandoning a wife, who then was forced to return to her family, or, if without family support, became dependent on her own labor. In part, such stories appear because the nature of the law; divorce required a guilty party, and pensions were given according to a husband's military service and a widow's need. There were clearly other reasons for telling stories in a particular way. Because in divorce, pension, and other cases, there were rewards for "virtuous" abandoned women, first wives often constructed stories about their innocence. So too did second wives describe their blameless ignorance, and husbands and wives their vulnerability to deceit or confusion. Used with care, however, pension applications reveal a pattern of personal histories that demonstrates the significant degree to which marriage among the working class was a fluid practice during the late nineteenth century.

Such marital behaviors were certainly not unique to the time, place, and socioeconomic cohort, yet specific historical circumstances shaped individual choices and fates. Deserted (and deserting) women, who had often remarried in the past, were not inevitably fated to do in the late 1800s, because they had some economic opportunities and they could survive as single women in cities and towns in ways that they may not have been able to on farms and in villages. The experiences of the pension system's contesting widows identify the limits of such independence at the same time as they suggest the possibility of survival without a spouse. Husbands who had left marriages obviously had greater opportunities. "Single" men found communities in urban areas, changing their names and personal histories, but the examples considered here are not disproportionately urban. Others found new chances on the frontier; they sometimes altered their identities, and some became part of a mobile labor force across the nation. Despite the new geographical and social space for adults living outside of marriages, however, many separated partners chose to remarry or live in marriage-like unions, not just for love and out of economic necessity but because they inhabited a society that valued marriage as a cornerstone of political and personal security and virtue. These tales demonstrate both a commonplace disregard for the laws of marriage and divorce and a backhanded recognition of the social and cultural importance of matrimony. Many people in the community may have known or suspected their stories, but kept silent. Separated and bigamous men and women often lived in the shadow of the law, and without a compelling reason--such as a pension investigation--they rarely made their stories public.

ENDNOTES

1. Caroline McAninich, File 253,555, Widows' Certificate Series; Civil War and Later Pension Application Files, Widows' Certificate Series, Entry 25; Records of the Veterans Administration, Record Group 15; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. For fully indexed references including soldiers, minors, and other widows application numbers, see Beverly J. Schwartzberg, "Grass Widows, Barbarians, and Bigamists: Fluid Marriage in Late Nineteenth-Century America" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara), chapter five.

2. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, 2000), and Nancy F. Cott, "Giving Character to Our Whole Civil Polity: Marriage and the Public Order in the Late Nineteenth Century." U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, 1995).

3. William H. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States (New York, 1918), 126.

4. Glasson, 126-128, 140. According to the 1862 formula, war widows received the same payment as husbands would have received for total disability; the amount was higher for officers ($30 per month for lieutenant colonels or higher in the army, for example).

5. Megan McClintock, "Binding up the Nation's Wounds: Nationalism, Civil War Pensions, and American Families, 1861-1890" (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1994), Appendix, summarizes pension legislation relating to dependents. For pension guidelines under the general law, before 1890, see also Calvin B. Walker, ed., A Treatise on the Practice of the Pension Bureau, Governing the Adjudication of Army and Navy Pensions, Being the Unwritten Practice Formulated (Washington, D.C., 1882).

The "former slave" clause, Section 4705, was modified slightly in 1873 to state that widows of "colored or Indian" marriages may offer proof that they were joined "by some ceremony deemed by them obligatory, or habitually recognized each other as man and wife, were so recognized by their neighbors, and lived together as such up to date of enlistment [if soldier died in service] or ... to date of death." For a summary of Section 4705, see "Revised Statutes Now in Force," Decisions of the Department of the Interior in Cases Relating to Pension Claims, and the Laws of the United States Granting and Governing Pensions, volume I (Washington, 1887), 9. On pensions and African-American marriages, see Elizabeth Ann Regosin, "Slave Custom and White Law: Ex-Slave Families and the Civil War Pension System, 1865-1900" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Irvine, 1995).

6. Glasson, 154-163. A widow could collect the accrued pension of a husband, provided there was a pending claim for invalid pension at the time of death. Walker, 73.

7. Glasson, 238; Ann Shola Orloff, The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940 (Madison, 1993), 234.

8. Circular May 27, 1885, volume 1, page 78; Entry 5, Miscellaneous Order Books, 1866-1932; Records of the Bureau of Pensions and Its Predecessors, 1805-1935, Record Group 15; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

9. In 1900, this amount was raised to $250 per year. Glasson, 244. Theda Skocpol states that the annual pension of $144 ($12 per month, under the 1908 inclusive widows' pension act) represented 25% of average annual earnings (for all Americans), although this does not mean that it represented 25% of pensioned widows' average annual earnings. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, 1992), 134.

10. See Donald L. McMurry, "The Bureau of Pensions during the Administration of President Harrison," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 13:3 (1922): 362; Skocpol, 128; and Mary Rulkotter Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR (Baton Rouge, 1952).

11. Between 1861 and 1885, a cumulative total of 335,296 dependents' pension claims (including widows, children, and other relatives) had been filed, with about two-thirds of these granted over the twenty-four year period and the remainder denied or pending. "Act of 1890" widows quickly began to outnumber widows granted pensions under the general law; in 1891, there were eight times as many widows collecting under the general law than under the new law, but as early as 1896, widow's pensions granted under the new, expanded law outnumbered the older type. Such numbers heightened public anxieties about fraud, and especially about young women who married elderly veterans in hopes of securing a lifetime pension. In 1891, there were 111,128 widows collecting under the general law and 13,645 under the new law, but by 1896, there were 99,520 widows collecting general law pensions and 107,103 widows collecting "1890" pensions, a number that increased to 184,863 in 1907 and 236,725 in 1917 (including the even broader act of 1908). The fact that several of President Harrison's appointees as Pension Commissioner left that office under shadow of fraud or incompetence added to the apprehension. Glasson, 204.

Pensions were a significant income support policy, based heavily on patronage politics. See McClintock, "Binding ...," 48, and Skocpol, 120-124. The bureau itself came to have over 6,000 employees in the 1890s, the peak decade for applications. (McClintock, "Binding ...," 37.) By 1910, estimates Skocpol (132), 28.5% of all men over age 65 and 8% of all widows over age 65 were collecting federal military pensions.

12. Megan J. McClintock, "Civil War Pensions and the Reconstruction of Union Families," Journal of American History 83:2 (September 1996): 456-80.

13. The Widows' Certificate series contains at least 60,000 boxes. The series' size is given at 31,627 feet in Frank E. Bridgers, Louise Southwick, and Evelyn Wade, Preliminary Inventory of Pension Case Files of the Bureau of Pensions and the Veterans Administration, 1861-1942, Record Group 15 (Washington, D.C., 1963). I estimate that there are between 950,000 and 1,200,000 files in the series. A single file can include applications from many individuals, including invalid veterans, dependent parents, children, siblings, and widows, and "contesting" claims. In addition, soldiers' files that do not include applications from dependents are filed in two separate series, the Soldiers' Originals and Soldiers' Certificate series. For additional explanation of size of the Widows' Original and Certificate series, see Schwartzberg, "Grass Widows, Barbarians, and Bigamists," chapter five.

14. The series' size is estimated to be 3,040 feet in Bridgers, Southwick, and Wade; I estimate there are 150,000 to 250,000 individual files in the series.

15. This measurement comes from a review of 4,481 index cards on a single microfilm reel of all Civil War pension applications, including soldiers' pensions and all dependent pensions, from the full set of 544 reels containing alphabetized index cards for all Civil War-series pension applicants. Files are indexed according to soldier's name; thus contesting widows' applications appear on the same index card and are filed in the same folder. Generally, contested widows' cases resulted in one widow getting a pension (70.6%), although in nearly a quarter of the files (23.5%) neither claimant received a pension, and in 5.9% both widows received a pension (generally, this would happen after one widow was granted a pension, and upon the application of the second, if legitimated, the first would be terminated; sometimes the first pensioner died before the second application.

There are other ways to view these statistics. Each case jacket may contain applications from a soldier, any widow(s), and all other dependents such as children or parents. If, in this sample, we were to include the unsuccessful widows' applications from contested widows' cases (which are physically stored with the successful applications in the "Widows' Certificate" series), the frequency of contested widows cases is quite high: given all unsuccessful applications, contesting widows made up 1 out of every 30 applications in the index sample. Yet if we look at them as being part of the "Widows' Original" series, where they are filed, they would have been represented in only 1 out of every 125 "Widows' Original" files (although each file contained at least two applications from widows).

16. Successful widows' claims also hold information about multiple marriages, common-law unions, and desertion. A deserted wife, for example, might receive a pension if she provided the appropriate proof of marriage, soldier's service, and her economic status. On the other hand, a wife who always believed in the legitimacy of her marriage might find her claim unsuccessful when the Pension Bureau challenged legal evidence or uncovered a husband's earlier marriage to another.

17. Using the microfilm index for eleven reels of the 544-reel Civil War pension series alphabetical index (every fiftieth reel), I identified 119 cases involving contesting widows, of which 64 case files were located at the National Archives. (The remainder of the files were missing, often because they were still active in the 1920s and 1930s, and thus remain with the Veterans' Administration.)

Of the 119 cases, at least 25 (21%) involved a soldier who used an alias name, as indicated on the index card.

18. The sample including the tenth file out of every fiftieth box in the entire Widows' Original Series, part of Civil War and Later Pension Files, Entry 24; Record Group 15; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

After 1890, most widows did not need to show that the soldier's death was due to service. When such proof was required in sampled cases, about 37% of the applications were rejected because of insufficient proof that death was war-related.

19. On the tension between common-law standards and legislative regulation of marriage, see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1985), 79-102.

20. Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 (New York, 1963), 26.

21. Women as well as men changed their names, returning to maiden names, taking on the surname of a later, bigamous husband, or simply taking on an alias.

22. Lou Bagshaw, Widow's Certificate, 818, 172.

Sometimes a claimant's double names added to unresolvable confusion. This might be particularly true of African-American claimants, who might change "slave names" after their military service, and illiterate or less-literate claimants whose name appeared differently according to who was writing. See Melvina B. Henry, Widows' Original Series, file 1,011,252.

23. Widow's Original 982, 117, Sarah A. Bush; see "Claim of Appeal." It seems clear that this claimant was trying any argument to demonstrate that her second marriage was illegitimate so she could claim her first husband's pension. "It is true that the claimant went through a form of marriage ... with Thomas M. Bush, but she was never divorced from Brown, nor did he ever obtain a divorce from her. Nor was there in her mind any thought of immorality. Neglected and deserted by her husband, in want of everything, fearful of the future, ignorant of law, and thinking not of consequences, she innocently believed she might accept the protection of an honorable man, if offered, and thereby gain a home. She might even have imagined herself his wife but she was not. She could never be his wife for she had an undivorced husband living." Here, the applicant's attorney critiques the notion of the invented identity: she may have "imagined herself his wife" but she was wrong.

24. Delila Hildreth, Widow's Certificate 83,226.

25. According to the 1882 pension law revision, the deserted wife of a soldier collecting an invalid's pension was entitled to half. Theresa Schmidt, Widow's Certificate 578,687.

26. Mary Hill, Widow's Certificate 671,969.

27. Caroline Buxton, Widow's Certificate 330,786.

28. Emily Butler Ramey, Widow's Original 819,521.

29. Bailey, Widow's Original 1,727,966. Eliza Hilderbrand, Widow's Certificate 971,323.

30. The film version was remade as "Sommersby," the story of a returned Civil War soldier. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, 1983).

31. Whoever he was, he left his second wife an indigent widow in Lodi, California: all she earned since his death, she wrote, was in picking berries for "20 cents a crate, for a total of nine dollars." Widow's Original 657,950, Lydia R. Lindsay, now Crosby, widow of Oscar F. Lindsay.

32. Margaret J. Butterfield, Widow's Certificate 901,036.

33. Some states did have such laws. Anna Baum, Widow's Certificate 458,033.

34. Although Albert never got his chance to make a case, she claimed good reason for a divorce: as a neighbor testified, "Hill used his wife mean, dont think he provided for her long the last. It was natural for him to be mean." Using another plea that appeared regularly in nineteenth-century divorce cases, she also swore that "I lived with the soldier until [about 1882] when he contracted a Veneral disease ... On account of his contracting such a filthy disease I was in fear that he might disease me and so we separated and I have not lived with him since, although we never divorced." Mary Hill, Widow's Certificate 548,925.

35. Emeline Ritenour, Widow's Certificate 629,169.

36. See Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870 (Urbana, 1978) for a discussion of how "new men" might take their place in the community, and Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millenium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1937 (New York, 1978), on the meanings of new work patterns.

37. Emily Butler Ramey, Widow's Original 819,521.

38. Margaret J. Butterfield, Widow's Certificate 901,036.

39. Margaret Allen, Widow's Certificate 384,042.

40. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family, volume III (New York, 1960 reprint of 1919 original), 217.

41. The most scurrilous of all bigamists in pension files was exceptional for his middle-class British background. Anna M. Trafford, Widow's Original 865,240. The lack of "transparency" that disturbed the examiner sounds much like the fears among middle-class Americans described by Karen Halttunen in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982).

42. In one version of the story, a daughter testified that George had told her that he and Magdalena quarreled, that she had stabbed him, and that "one time that he told her he was going to leave her and she told him to 'go' and he left." (He also had a war wound, so the origin of this scar was unclear.) Anna Weber, Widow's Certificate 578,687.

43. George sometimes acknowledged and sometimes denied this marriage in questioning, leading the special examiner to conclude "he can't be relied on to make a truthful statement when his own interests are involved."

44. Eliza claimed the courthouse had burned--a rather frequent claim in pension cases--but it had not. The field inspector reported his suspicion that she and Samuel were never married but instead were common law spouses under the laws of Iowa and Illinois. As he learned from another source, when she met Samuel in 1866 Eliza had been living with her sister (and her large family), who "was making a drudge of her, whereupon she left with the soldier." Eliza Hilderbrand, Widow's Certificate 971,323.

45. When asked for evidence of her first marriage, Avis claimed she had had the certificate, but "the mice chewed it to pieces," and the examiner was content to leave this claim without further investigation.

46. In at least one-sixth of a smaller sample of twenty-four "contesting widow" cases I initially examined, further investigation revealed more than two spouses per husband. Even more remarkably, there were at least thirteen cases where a wife was apparently a bigamist herself. (Note: this total of 13 is drawn from a higher total, for among the 24 soldiers' cases there were at least 48 wives.)

47. William was married to his second wife for over forty years, although he was of a "wandering disposition" and gave up his responsibility to Cordelia and their thirteen children, not even taking "notice of their affliction" or providing assistance at the death of a child. Amelia A. Bacon, Widows' Certificate 736,807.

In a similar case reported in the press, one wife "said she knew she was committing a crime, but thought that she could not be punished, as both her deserting husbands had remarried before she had." New York Times, 9 August 1889.

48. All details from Sallie Prater, widow of William P. Johnson, Widow's Original case 537,312. Pension cases often detail the spiraling number of marriages involving all parties, but newspaper reports of such examples related to bigamy trials were much rarer; see "A Mixed Bigamy Case: The Tables Turned on Mrs. Gilchrist--Another Husband Turns Up," New York Times, 11 November 1882.

49. See Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 66-69. Waller points out that partnerships did not always come in the form of "legal marriage" in Appalachia, and that the popular focus on a failed romance as a linchpin of the families' feud says more about middle-class American values than regional values. Waller identifies "greater ... sexual freedom" for mountain women and "tolerant attitudes toward premarital sexual relationships and illegitimacy" (69).

50. On the role of male-female relationships in the Hatfield-McCoy feud, see Waller, who places the feud into an economic and cultural context; for the more traditional view of personal vengeance, see Otis K. Rice, The Hatfields and the McCoys (Lexington, 1978).

51. Delila Hildreth, Widow's Certificate 83,226.

52. This case had more interesting turns. Robert Schmidt/Herman Weber, the veteran, had been hospitalized for mental illness and eventually committed suicide; his second wife, Anna Weber, "went crazy" after her husband's death. Anna Weber, Widow's Certificate 578,687.

53. Deborah Butters, Widow's Original 614,824.

54. Marion Butler, Widow's Certificate 664,481.

55. Her mother added a new twist to the story, again attempting to clear Marion's reputation by claiming that two months after the marriage "a constable walked in the house with him having arrested him for getting a girl in trouble ..." She claimed that Griffith "got away from the constable" and wrote to Marion from West Virginia, but "she did not go" to him.

56. Emily Butler Ramey, Widow's Original 819,521.

57. 18 out of 119, or 15%, of the contesting widows sample were from U.S. Colored Troops; approximately 10% of Union troops were African Americans.

58. Her first husband left her after five years of marriage and took up housekeeping with a widow. She did take her case to a local "squire," who sent the first husband to jail for a few days, and eventually obtained for her a paper signed by a judge. As Hattie noted, "The paper was that me and him was not to have any thing more to do with one another as long as we lived.

"I thought it was a divorce," she said. She then remarried, but her next husband "got in some trouble and had to run away." Rebecca Bailey, Widow's Certificate 466,400.

59. A widow might be required to show records of a ceremonial marriage or witnesses to a marriage, proof of dissolution of former marriages or death of former spouses, witnesses who could testify to her reputation, and, if required for minors' pensions, proof of the birthdate of her children. See, for example, Mary Burlingham, widow of William T. Burlingham, Widow's Original 789,075.

60. "Grass widows" included women "separated from [their] husband[s], either permanently or temporarily for some reason other than death." A certain vagueness characterized the term; it might apply to the divorced, it might refer to a discarded mistress or an unmarried woman with children, and it could apply to men--"grass widowers." Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume II, D-H (Cambridge, 1991), 776. See also Sylva Clapin, A New Dictionary of Americanisms: Being a Glossary of Words Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of Canada (New York, 1902, reprinted 1968); Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated Treasury of American Words and Phrases (New York, 1976); and citations in The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Volume VI (Oxford, 1989). Norma Basch cites the term "grass widow" in Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley, 1999), 62.

61. Margaret J. Butterfield, Widow's Certificate 901,036.

62. Elizabeth Bailey, Widow's Certificate 668,295.

63. Mary Hill, Widow's Certificate 671,969. Because most widows' pension applications were filed late in the applicant's life, there is relatively little evidence about the children of fluid unions. In many cases, they stayed with mothers, but in some others, they lived with fathers. There are some references to wives being deserted with small children, but in general applications do not reflect on these experiences because the children were grown by the time the request was made and the description of a woman's economic and social circumstances was noted. Although under the original pension statutes minor children of a deceased soldier qualified for pension payments in their own right, the presence of minor children neither helped nor hindered a widow's claim under either major pension policy.

64. Rebecca Bailey, Widow's Certificate 466,400.

65. Delila Hildreth, Widow's Certificate 83,226; Caroline Buxton, Widow's Certificate 330,786; Emily Butler Ramey, Widow's Original 819,521; Mary Hill, Widow's Certificate 548,925.

66. Amelia Bacon, Widow's Certificate 736,807.

67. Skocpol, 109.

By Beverly Schwartzberg

Independent Scholar

Santa Barbara, CA