Nathaniel Windon
Penn State University
Nathaniel A. Windon is a doctoral candidate in the English department at Penn State University and lives in Baltimore, MD where he teaches at Loyola University. His dissertation, “Gilded Old Age,” considers the social construction of old age in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century United States. This past semester Nathaniel was a Fellow at the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State; his work appears in Common-place and is forthcoming in American Literature.
As the largest non-contagious disease that afflicted Civil War soldiers, the most widely observed condition for successful pension applications, and the hardest disease to diagnose because its symptoms could be feigned,... [ view full abstract ]
As the largest non-contagious disease that afflicted Civil War soldiers, the most widely observed condition for successful pension applications, and the hardest disease to diagnose because its symptoms could be feigned, rheumatism plays an important, complex, and largely understudied role in the cultural influence of Civil War veterans in the late nineteenth century. This paper traces two conflicting uses of rheumatism. On one hand, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s “Comrades” (1911) portrays the heightened state of adulation and admiration for Civil War veterans like Reuben, who wages a battle against rheumatism—“what’s rheumatics? ‘Tain’t Antietam’”—on behalf of his fallen fellow soldiers, for whom he marches in a Memorial Day parade. On the other hand, Confederate veterans, themselves excluded from pensions, drew upon the racialized discourse of malingering to delegitimize Union veterans receiving pensions. Frequently used for comedic effect in the Plantation Tradition to describe the complaints of aging ex-slaves like Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus and Sherwood Bonner’s Gran’mammy, rheumatism was transposed to Union veterans to trivialize their illness and impute dishonesty.
These divergent representations of rheumatism destabilized the identity of veterans after the Civil War, which is of importance, this paper contends, because of the influence of veterans upon the elderly population of the United States, especially after the 1890 Dependent Pension Act, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, extended pensions to Union veterans on the basis of old age rather than disability incurred from active service. For American antebellum authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, rheumatism was not only synonymous with old age, but a meritocratic old age, where its aches and pains became so many badges of honor representing the accumulation of experience. However, the once intuitive value of old age became eroded as a result of the questionable legitimacy, value, and legibility of the veteran’s experience of rheumatism.
