National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers

In 1865, Congress passed legislation to incorporate the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers and Sailors of the Civil War. Volunteers were not eligible for care in the existing regular army and navy home facilities. The Asylum was renamed the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in 1873.

This legislation, one of the last Acts signed by President Lincoln before his assassination, marked the entrance of the United States into the direct provision of care for the temporary versus career military man. This departure from tradition recognized several significant factors:

• The traditional benefits had been pensions and land grants. Land grants had been rendered superfluous by the passage in 1862 of the Homestead Act which made public lands available to all.

• Facilities for the small body of Regulars had been supported through regular payments by the troops and various military "prizes." The Civil War volunteers, usually raised by the States, had made no such contribution and by sheer weight of numbers, far exceeded the capacity of existing facilities.

• The carnage of the war and deprivations of prison camps had left thousands of shattered and maimed men. Even those not requiring acute medical care needed an extended period of sheltered domicile during their period of retraining or readjustment for civilian life.

• Americans were still a rural, agrarian and labor intensive society. Farmers, teamsters, coopers, recent immigrant laborers, many of them poorly educated and now with an empty sleeve or pant leg were ill equipped to ever return to their former occupations.

The concept of a National Home for the large corps of disabled returning from war was contained in a series of recommendations from the Sanitary Commission. These were based upon a study of veterans benefits in major European states by a member of the Commission.

The Congressional solution called for 100 incorporators to guide the National Home. The list of original incorporators, contained in the Act was a veritable Who's Who of contemporary political, military, financial, publishing, religious and abolition leaders. Included was the Chairman of the Sanitary Commission. The inability to assemble a quorum of such scattered movers and shakers forced Congress in 1866 to establish a 12 member board of managers to conduct the business of the Home. The original managers were ex-officio, President Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Chief Justice Salmon Chase and, appointed by the Congress, Generals Richard J. Ogelsby, Benjamin F. Butler, Fredrick Smyth, P. Joseph Osterhaus, the Honorable Lewis Gunckel, Messrs. Jay Cooke, John H. Mortwalder, Horatio B. Stebbins and George H. Walker. Funds for the operation of the Home were provided by fines and stoppages of pay for courts martial, forfeitures of pay for desertion and moneys due and unclaimed for three years. Pensions for disabilities due to Members could be required to be paid to the Home if the veteran had no dependents.

By 1875 the size of and demands upon the Home had so increased that Congress replaced the complicated and uncertain funding system with direct appropriations for the Home. Even when federal funding became available and pensions were no longer assignable to the Home by law, the managers continued to depend upon pension funds collected through fines, stoppages and limits upon the amounts allotted to pensioners to prevent "squandering" until Congress forbade the practices in 1881.

The Board of Managers were empowered to establish the Home at such locations as they deemed appropriate and to establish those programs that they determined necessary. Members (or residents) of the Home were to be governed by the Articles of War.

While the Managers included, ex-officio, the President of the United States, the Secretary of War and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it was not a part of the Executive branch of government. The Home was a unique creation of the Congress. Its budget requests in later years were submitted in conjunction with the War Department. But throughout its existence, until 1930, the Managers consistently defended its independence of the Executive Branch.

Between 1867 and 1929, the Home expanded to ten Home branches and one sanatorium:

General Benjamin Butler was the guiding force during the early years of the Home's development, serving both as President and Treasurer of the Board of Managers.

During its life the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers was also known "officially" as the National Military Home and colloquially as the Old Soldiers Home. The formal organizational name was not changed by statute, but the mailing address for most branches became National Military Home, the city and state. In the early days the designation of "old soldier" had no bearing on an individual veteran's age. The appellation was use for all former members of the Union forces from their teens to their seventies.

The immediate priority of the Managers was to provide shelter for the veterans. From this basic need the Home evolved into complete planned communities. Veteran members, organized into companies on the military fashion lived in barracks and dined in large mess halls. Entrances to the grounds boasted gate houses and federal cemeteries provided the final bivouac. This foundation was augmented by chapels, schools, hotels to house family and other visitors, libraries, beer halls, band stands, amusements halls, theaters, farm buildings, laundries and shops which provided training and employment. The scope of facilities, far beyond those then common at military installations appears to constitute the first non-religious planned communities in the country. The scope of training, education and readjustment activities appears to be the earliest federal venture into large scale rehabilitation programs. The chapels are reputed to be the earliest non-military construction of religious facilities by the federal government.

While each of these indicates a new direction in Federal programs, the National Home made one much more significant departure in federal programs. Eligibility for admission to the Home was based upon a disability contracted as a member of the volunteer forces of the Union. Membership in the Home was available equally to white veterans and former members of the U.S. Colored Troops. Eighty years before the United States military forces were integrated, white and black veterans lived together as members of the National Home. The style of integration was rudimentary by today's standards. When numbers permitted, there were separate barracks and separate tables in the dining hall in the early years. But it was the same meal, the same dining hall, the same uniform and the same Home.

The National Home was never a static organization. Throughout its existence the Managers looked for innovative means to provide for the members. By the enabling legislation, admission to the Home was limited to volunteers disabled as a result of the Civil War. But when the Northwestern Branch at Milwaukee opened, veterans of the War of 1812 were admitted in accordance to an agreement with donors to the Home that all members of the Milwaukee Soldiers Home would be accepted. While facilities were being acquired and constructed the Managers provided "out of door" relief by way of funds to disabled soldiers to tide them over until housing was ready for them. In 1871, admission was opened up to veterans of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War and in 1884 a disabled veteran need no longer prove that his disability was a direct result of service. He need only prove his disability was not incurred in service against the United States.

Uniforms for staff and members were available to the Home from military surplus. So were field pieces and ammunition for ornamentation of the grounds and the firing of salutes. The Home attempted to operate a shoe manufactory to supply all the member and teach a trade. This was not successful. But the knitting of stockings for all members at the Central branch was a successful operation. In time the Central branch also developed a printing plant which printed all official reports and documents for the Home. Farming operations at all of the branches supplied significant amounts of the ration and a brick factory at the Western Branch provided most of the brick used in the initial construction.

By 1888, Congress had authorized the Managers to make payment of $100 per annum to an approved state veterans home on behalf of each veteran residing in state facilities who was otherwise eligible for admission to the federal Home. This practice continues today in per diem payments by the VA on behalf of veterans in State Veterans Homes and VA grants for specific categories of construction at State Homes. In 1900 admission was extended to all honorably discharged officers, soldiers and sailors who served in regular or volunteer forces of the United States in any war in which the country had been engaged and who were disabled, who had no adequate means of support and were incapable of earning a living. As formal declarations of war were not the rule in the Indian Wars, Congress specifically extended eligibility for the Home to those who "served against hostile Indians" in 1908. Veterans who served in the Philippines, China and Alaska were covered in 1909.

Following World War I, a new governmental agency, the Veterans Bureau, was created to provide for the hospitalization and rehabilitation of this much younger group of veterans. Not only were their numbers in excess of the capability of the National Home to absorb, by the second decade of the 1900's the reputation of the National Home had dimmed considerably. No longer was it the creative institution being lead by the most prominent names in military affairs. It had truly become an old soldiers final resting place, publicly criticized for poor management, bad food, favoritism for the officers over the needs of the members and a lack of concern for the human needs of its charges.

In an almost last gasp effort to overcome the criticisms and correct the deficiencies, the Home undertook a major new construction program for modern hospital facilities and additional quarters for expanded staffing. During the Twenties the Veterans Bureau requested authority to construct and operate facilities for World War I veterans at various of the National Home Branches. In a final assertion of its independence from the Executive Branch the Home claimed that title to the property of the Home was vested in the Home as a federally created institution but not directly in the federal government. The Home won this battle but lost the war for survival.

By 1930 the dwindling numbers of Civil War and other pre-World War I veterans, the scandals of the Veterans Bureau under the brief administration of Director Charles Forbes and the need to eliminate duplication and confusion in the delivery of veterans benefits had created a new climate. Congress authorized the President to combine all veterans benefits into one agency. The National Home and the Veterans Bureau, were combined into the United States Veterans Administration by President Hoover in July of 1930. The Home continued briefly to maintain a distinct identity as the Home Service of the VA. But the construction of new home or domiciliary facilities by the VA, a uniform admissions policy for all VA facilities and the passage of "The Boys in Blue" brought the inevitable final chapter to a close.

Send inquiries about this page to kathleen.schamel2@va.gov.