Clipping of the Day

Clipping of the Day
Grinding the Faces of the Poor
From the New York Herald (New York, New York), 16 March 1870, page 5

Slow Progress of the Pension Payments--A System of Extortions that Aggregates Handsomely for the Pension Agents and Robs the Poor Widows.

Payment of pensions to widows of soldiers killed during the war, begun on the 4th instant in a basement room of the Custom House, is still daily continued under the direction of General Lawrence, Pension Agent. Thus far about 2,500 have been paid from the list of 6,000 whom General Lawrence has to pay. . . At the present rate of progress it will take about two weeks longer to get through the list. Too frequent description has been given in the Herald of the poverty-stricken appearance of the widows and mothers who put in their semi-annual appearance here for the pensions allowed them by the government on account of husbands and sons killed in the late war to render further description necessary. Wretchedness and poverty in their most pitiful phases stare one in the face, and stony hard is the heart that is not moved at the spectacle.

Paying these pensioners is not to be characterized as an act of humanity by the government. It is an act of duty, and most pitiful is the amount paid. And this is not all. The most unjust extortions, though made legal by Congressional enactment, accompany the payment. Every widow has to pay seventy cents, or rather this sum is deducted from the amount due her before she can get her pension. In the first place, twenty-five cents are exacted for making out the papers, and then fifteen cents each for three oaths respectively of two witnesses, and the one to whom the pension is to be paid. One woman came there yesterday from Forty-second street. She was told that she must bring two witnesses to swear that she has not remarried since her husband's death, on whose account the pension was claimed. It was a new arrangement, and the first she had heard of it. The result was that she had to hunt up her witnesses and pay two car fares each for them, besides her own riding, altogether putting her to an outlay of $1.12 before she got her pension. . .