Creating a national home: The postwar care of disabled Union soldiers and the beginning of the modern state in America

The National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers was a network of soldiers' homes created after the Civil War to assist disabled Union veterans. This network, consolidated in the Veterans' Administration in 1930, sheltered over 120,000 Union veterans during its existence as an independent bureaucratic entity. Two-thirds of the Home's residents were either unmarried, widowed or divorced. In creating a "home" for disabled Union veterans, then, the nineteenth century American state demonstrated the capacity to create a generous form of public assistance for men defined as the deserving poor but lacking the domestic support provided by wives and mothers in the traditional family economy.;The rewards of close scrutiny of the history of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers are several. This study offers new perspectives on the late nineteenth century state and on the gendered character of the development of the state's war and welfare functions. The study also enriches our understanding of the social history of the war and of the late nineteenth century generally. This dissertation examines the role of political and bureaucratic structures in the creation of the National Home, but argues that the actions of state agents must be seen in their larger cultural context. By defining this institution as a "home," state officials used a preexisting domestic discourse in order to set the conceptual framework within which this institution was established and administered. This dissertation explores the reflection of the domestic discourse in both the architectural and landscape design of the National Home, as well as in the daily life of its residents. For Americans, including thousands of tourists, the homes were at once reminders of victory, places of leisure and recreation, and potent symbols of federal authority. This dissertation argues that by sheltering veterans in institutions defined as national "homes," nineteenth century state officials used a domestic language to strengthen the legitimacy of the central state, as well as deepen its penetration into the collective experience of the American people.