31st Congress                                                                     Rep No. 57.                                                                            Ho. of Reps.

2d Session

                                                                                      JAMES FRAZIER

                                                                                           --------------

                                                                                        March 3, 1851.

                                                                                   Ordered to be printed.

                                                                                           ---------------

                                        Mr. Waldo, from the Committee on Revolutionary Pensions, made the following

                                                                                             REPORT

               The Committee on Revolutionary Pensions, to whom was referred the petition of James Frazier, respectfully report:

The petitioner represents that he was a volunteer in the war of 1812, and served in Captain John Morris's company, in a regiment commanded by Colonel Mountjoy, in the year 1813, a period of a little more than two months, and he asks for a special act of Congress allowing him to receive from the treasury the sum of one hundred dollars for said service. Accompanying this petition is a certificate, signed by sundry of the inhabitants of the county of Graves, in the State of Kentucky, that the petitioner is very needy and unable to labor, and recommending the petitioner to the favorable consideration of Congress. The petitioner does not furnish any other evidence in support of his claims.

The committee are not able to discover any merit in this application. The petitioner does not claim to have served his country but about two months, and if he can make proof of this service, he is entitled to forty acres of land under the act of September 28, 1850. No soldier of the war of the Revolution was ever entitled to receive a gratuity, unless he could prove a service of at least six months, and it will scarcely be claimed that service in the war of 1812 is more meritorious than service in the war of Revolution. The petitioner does not claim to have performed any extraordinary service, and should he obtain a gratuity, it would be a precedent for all similar service, and would also make an invidious distinction in favor of the soldier in the war 1812 over those who served in the war of the Revolution-- a distinction as unjust as it is unprecedented and unreasonable. The committee therefore recommend that the prayer of the petitioner be denied.