When the American Revolution ended in 1783, the United States soldiers went home to a society, which although admiring their bravery and commitment to the cause of freedom, generally looked upon these returning men, including those wounded in action, as having done nothing more than their expected duty to God and country.  

And so, initially, the financial assistance that was provided a destitute or disabled veterans would come from the personal

charity of a friend or from a sympathetic local government. But as the decades past, America began to feel a greater moral

obligation to extend aid to at least the remaining disabled war veterans who had suffered so much for the cause of liberty.

As a result, on April 10, 1806, twenty-three years after the end of the Revolutionary War, the 9th U.S. Congress passed a military pension Act which provided:

That any commissioned or non-commissioned officer, musician, soldier, marine or seaman, disabled in the actual

service of the United States, while in the line of his duty, by known wounds received during the Revolutionary War…shall,

upon  substantiating his claim…be placed on the pension list of the United States. 

Over the following twenty-six years, various sessions of the U.S. Congress, with ever increasing public support, expanded

little by little, the Federal governments' financial assistance to the ever shrinking population of the now cherished veterans.

Doing its part, on June 7, 1832, forty-nine years after the end of the American Revolution, the 22nd U.S. Congress passed

the Military Service Pension Act, which provided: 

That each of the surviving officers, non-commissioned officers, musicians, soldiers and Indian spies . . . be

authorized to receive . . . the amount of his full pay . . . according to his rank . . . and shall continue during

his natural life

Although this new Federal law provided what was considered to be a generous subsidy to the individual surviving veteran,

the legislators of course knew that the total cost would be modest. After all, the commonly recognized unhappy reality

was, that a full half century after their war ended, few veterans of the American Revolution would still remain alive to take

advantage of the new pension.

Or so they may have thought before May 29, 1834.

For on that day, Senator William Campbell Preston of South Carolina rose in the Senate of the 23d U.S. Congress

to propose a resolution which would require Secretary of War Lewis Cass to report to the Senate a listing of all

individuals who were receiving a pension for their service as a soldier or sailor in the Revolutionary War.

Senator Preston then stated:

 In [my] judgment, there was some radical mistake, mismanagement, or fraud, in the pension system, which called on the Congress to minutely look into it.

Most significantly, Senator Preston wanted the pension lists to be published in each county of the United States "for public investigation,” reasoning that any living veteran of the Revolutionary War would be a known and honored resident of the county where he resided and that any surprise names found on the military pension roles roll would justly arouse suspicion.

What happened

next shocked the country and is

the subject of the

chapter entitled

"The Known And Honored"

of my book

BEFORE MADOFF

The Forgotten Frauds Of American History

 Volume I