State legislators wrote the law so that pension board members wouldn't need to labor over each case. Applications each year could easily number in the thousands, so the approval process had to involve a minimum of research and investigation. Board members were expected to act as judges, not jurors. Exactly how would the board determine that some veterans who took the oath of allegiance to the United States were worthy applicants, while others were not? Since pension grants involved disbursement of state funds, board members could be subject to prosecution if they applied the law other then as it was written.

Boards simply had no license to deviate from pension law. Jim Martin recently related an account of a Civil War disability denial because the disability occured from an injury received while recovering from wounds. Since the incident was unrelated to actual field combat, the veteran was denied benefits. In my humble opinion, denied pension applications like these are often more beneficial to descendants because they contain so much more information that standard fill-in-the-blank forms.