The Confederate government never got around to establishing a pension system for widows and orphans of soldiers who died in service. Certainly, they would have, had the war ended differently. However, the deceased soldier's survivors could make an application to the Confederate War Department for payment of the soldier's accumulated pay and allowances, and there are many documented instances of that in the Compiled Service Records. Most of the cases I've looked at amounted to less than $200, paid in Confederate currency and therefore subject to its ever-decreasing valuation. It was the best that a fledgling nation, fighting for its very survival, could do under the circumstances.

Some thirty years or so after the war, all of the former Confederate states enacted State pension systems for disabled and indigent Confederate veterans and widows.