A good deal of the American welfare states lies in the idea of providing pension for soldiers, their widows, and orphans. See Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.

Confederates were pensioned by individual states. This website gives an overview. As the intro to the site says, "The veteran was eligible to apply for a pension to the State in which he lived, even if he served in a unit from a different State. Generally, an applicant was eligible for a pension only if he was indigent or disabled." The first two states were North Carolina and Alabama, who both "began granting pensions to Confederate veterans who were blinded or lost an arm or leg during their service" in 1867. Most states also had some form of disability benefits by the early 1890's, though Missouri waited until 1911(!) and Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma apparently never offering benefits to disabled Confederate veterans. Georgia was the first to grant pensions to widows, in 1879, with almost all states granting widows pensions, though some only started as late 1915. The website is awesome because it lets you actually look at the primary sources of who was on the rolls!