ii To my parents, Joe and Karen Donovan iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my family, my committee, and my friends, especially Eric Colvard and Matt Reardon. Thanks and love especially to my wife, Jen.iv ABSTRACT Hundreds of thousands of men were permanently disabled by the Civil War, mostly from the chronic effects of camp diseases like typhus and dysentery. This one fact created both endless problems and vast opportunities for politicians, activists, and disabled veterans themselves in the Gilded Age. The attempts to deal with the scope of the war's human devastation are a crucial and heretofore under-studied part of American disability history. This dissertation highlights the role of disability in the expansion of the American state, and politics' reciprocal role in expanding the "medical model" of disability which is the subject of so much pointed critique in the field.The medical model itself, however, and especially its proliferation are underexamined. This dissertation argues that it should more properly be termed the "political model" or even the "bureaucratic model," as government action is the primary driver of this understanding of disability. The Union Army carried out a vast survey of its serviceeligible population beginning with the 1862 Militia Act, sorting and rating bodies according to their presumed combat effectiveness. The 1862 Pension Act, which would become the basis of all future American military disability pensions, extended this evaluation process to those disabled in the service -with "lesser" conditions scaled by their proportion to total disability, the government effectively decreed itself not only the arbitrator of a body's worth, but the precise dollar value each appendage contributed to the total. By 1890, the Pension Office was doling out more than 100 million taxpayer dollars per year, based on little more than a physician's affidavit and a series of increasingly abstract guidelines handed down ad hoc by Congress.v Veterans are also voters, and disability issues moved millions of votes in the Gilded Age. Republicans flogged the image of the country's broken-down defenders languishing in poorhouses or even prisons for lack of government support, and the "soldier vote" can be plausibly credited with swinging both the 1888 and 1896 elections for the GOP. In the process, the public's understanding of disability was shaped by campaign rhetoric, and more importantly by the sight of old soldiers living out their lives as wards of the state in state and federal soldiers' homes.These homes, especially the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS) were major tourist attractions throughout the Gilded Age, and they faced a similar problem to the Pension Office: As so many disabilities were the result of disease, and therefore not visible to the naked eye, how could the public tell a truly disabled man, honorably incapacitated in the service of his country, from a "bummer" or loafer or, worse, an addict who had brought it on himself? Neither party could afford to alienate the soldier...