During the Civil War, over 80% of the Union Army’s underage enlistees were ages 16 and 17, but some were much younger.
Most underage youths signed up as privates, except the youngest ones who typically enlisted as musicians. The most famous, Johnny Clem, tried to enlist at the age of nine. He was rejected but nevertheless tagged along with the 22nd Michigan Infantry Regiment, finally making it on the rolls by age eleven. Orion Howe enlisted as a drummer at the age of twelve and was fourteen when his heroics at Vicksburg earned him the Medal of Honor.
“Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant looks at this underage history. They’ll be the recipients of the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, to be presented on Oct. 17 at the American Civil War Museum at Tredegar during the annual Lincoln Prize Lecture.
The prize is awarded annually for the finest scholarly work published the prior year in English on Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier, or the American Civil War era, one that also enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era.
Clark had just started working on a second book, based on a massive collection of letters written to U.S. officials during the Civil War. The letters concerned all sorts of problems, everything from mothers seeking the discharge of hospitalized sons to wives facing destitution after losing touch with enlisted husbands.
But a third of the letters from the early part of the war concerned parents seeking the return of underage boys who’d run off to enlist. “Why were so many parents writing to the government in such desperate terms about their sons, and why couldn’t the military simply release them?” Clark wondered. “And why did parents speak so often about the critical importance of boys’ labor to the family economy while ignoring whether it was appropriate for boys to go to war?”
The two women had been friends since grad school when they’d created a writing group with two other colleagues to swap and comment on each other’s work. After working for some years on a different project, Clark ended up showing some of the letters to Plant, who convinced her to tackle the question of why so many parents were trying to retrieve their sons from the military and a shared project was born.
They dove into scores of memoirs, diaries, and letter collections written by individuals who’d enlisted before age eighteen, as well as writings from adult soldiers who discussed their observations or interactions with boy soldiers.
Additionally, the women drew on cultural artifacts such as drawings, paintings, lithographs, patriotic stationary, poems, and stories that depicted underage drummer boys and boy soldiers, along with other works that aimed to educate young readers about the ongoing conflict.
As they researched, Clark and Plant were surprised by their sheer number of underage soldiers in the U.S. military and their importance to the war effort. Ultimately, they concluded that the U.S. military couldn’t afford to release the boys precisely because there were so many of them and their service was quite valuable. “We quickly came to appreciate that many of these boys, having grown up on farms shouldering significant responsibility didn’t find it particularly remarkable to be serving with much older comrades,” Clark says. “In some respects, it wasn’t so different from the lives they’d led before the war, when many of them labored alongside adult men.”
What’s surprising from a contemporary perspective is the extent to which Civil War-era Americans celebrated young soldiers in songs, lithographs and paintings.
In particular, the Unionists imagined drummer boys and young soldiers as representatives of the Union cause. “Confederate leaders also worried about ‘grinding the seed corn,’ an expression that conveyed their acute awareness of their population disadvantage,” Plant says. “They counseled against enlisting boys too young, depleting the reserve of young males who’d be needed in the future, not only to fight but to build the nation they envisioned.”
Of course, large numbers died during the war. Two-thirds of all wartime deaths were caused by disease, which felled old and young alike.
Most underage soldiers also served in the ranks, so they faced similar rates of battlefield wounds and death as older men. “But long-term physical and psychological injuries were a different matter,” says Clark. “Studies based on postwar pension applications reveal that age at enlistment had a huge impact on postwar mental, physical, and economic welfare, with young enlistees worse off in the long run.”
The authors ultimately came to view the war as an experience that could either make or break the young, to an even greater extent than their older comrades. Many suffered lasting ill effects due to the exposure and hardships they endured. But for a lucky minority of boys, early military service helped to propel them forward, contributing to successes later in life.
Interestingly, former underage enlistees appear to have played an outsized role in the nation’s political life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “We identified some two dozen U.S. Congressmen who’d enlisted in the Union army as underage boys, and an even larger number who’d served in the Confederate army,” says Plant.
Regardless of outcome, these were children and teenagers experiencing the unimaginable. A lithograph in the book, “The Last Call,” shows a curly-headed drummer boy leading troops, oblivious to the fact that a cannonball has just landed at his feet and will imminently explode. Says Plant, “It’s impossible to imagine a boy soldier’s death being sentimentalized in such a manner today.”
The Lincoln Prize Lecture, “Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, takes place Thursday, Oct. 17 at 6 p.m. at the American Civil War Museum- Historic Tredegar, 480 Tredegar St. Tickets here.