An innovative study of underage soldiers and their previously unrecognized impact on Civil War era America. The smooth faces of boy soldiers stand out in Civil War photography, their spindly physiques contrasting with the uniformed adults they stood alongside. Yet until now, scholars have largely overlooked the masses of underaged youths who served as musicians, carried wounded from the field, ran messages, took up arms, and died in both the Union and Confederate armies. Of Age is the first comprehensive study of how Americans responded to the unauthorized enlistment of minors in this conflict and the implications that followed. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant offer military, legal, medical, social, political, and cultural perspectives as well as demographic analysis of this important aspect of the war. They find that underage enlistees comprised roughly ten percent of the Union army and likely a similar proportion of Confederate forces-but these enlistees' importance extended beyond sheer numbers. Clarke and Plant introduce common but largely unknown wartime scenarios. Boys who absconded without consent set off protracted struggles between households and the military, as parents used various arguments to recover their sons. State judges and the US federal government battled over whether to discharge boys discovered to be under age. African American youths discovered that both Union and Confederate officers ignored their evident age when using them as conscripts or military laborers. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Americans expressed little concern over what exposure to violence might do to young minds, readily accepting their presence in battle. In fact, underage soldiers became prevalent symbols of the US war effort, shaping popular memory for decades to come. An original and sweeping work, Of Age convincingly demonstrates why underage enlistment is such an important lens for understanding the history of children and youth and the transformative effects of the US Civil War.
Show moreAn innovative study of underage soldiers and their previously unrecognized impact on Civil War era America. The smooth faces of boy soldiers stand out in Civil War photography, their spindly physiques contrasting with the uniformed adults they stood alongside. Yet until now, scholars have largely overlooked the masses of underaged youths who served as musicians, carried wounded from the field, ran messages, took up arms, and died in both the Union and Confederate armies. Of Age is the first comprehensive study of how Americans responded to the unauthorized enlistment of minors in this conflict and the implications that followed. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant offer military, legal, medical, social, political, and cultural perspectives as well as demographic analysis of this important aspect of the war. They find that underage enlistees comprised roughly ten percent of the Union army and likely a similar proportion of Confederate forces-but these enlistees' importance extended beyond sheer numbers. Clarke and Plant introduce common but largely unknown wartime scenarios. Boys who absconded without consent set off protracted struggles between households and the military, as parents used various arguments to recover their sons. State judges and the US federal government battled over whether to discharge boys discovered to be under age. African American youths discovered that both Union and Confederate officers ignored their evident age when using them as conscripts or military laborers. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Americans expressed little concern over what exposure to violence might do to young minds, readily accepting their presence in battle. In fact, underage soldiers became prevalent symbols of the US war effort, shaping popular memory for decades to come. An original and sweeping work, Of Age convincingly demonstrates why underage enlistment is such an important lens for understanding the history of children and youth and the transformative effects of the US Civil War.
Show moreAcknowledgments
A Note on Terminology
Introduction
Part I: Parental Rights and the Duty to Bear Arms: Congress,
Courts, and the Military
Ch. 1: Competing Obligations: Debating Underage Enlistment in the
War of 1812
Ch. 2: A Great Inconvenience: Prewar Legal Disputes Over Underage
Enlistees
Ch. 3: Underdeveloped Bodies: Calculating the Ideal Enlistment
Age
Part II: The Social and Cultural Origins of Underage Enlistment
Ch. 4: Instructive Violence: Impressionable Minds and the
Cultivation of Courage
Ch. 5: Pride of the Nation: The Iconography of Child Soldiers and
Drummer Boys
Ch. 6: Paths to Enlistment: Work, Politics, and School
Part III: Male Youth and Military Service in the Civil War Era
Ch. 7: Contrary to All Law: Debating Underage Service in the United
States
Ch. 8: Preserving the Seed Corn: Youth Enlistment and Demographic
Anxiety in the Confederacy
Ch. 9: Forced into Service: Enslaved and Unfree Youths in the
Confederate and Union Armies
Ch. 10: A War Fought by Boys: Reimagining Boyhood and Underage
Service after the Civil War
Coda: Young Veterans in Postwar America
Appendix A: Counting Underage Soldiers
Appendix B: Using the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels,
Disease, and Death database to Determine Age of Enlistment in the
Union Army, by Christopher Roudiez
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Frances M. Clarke is Associate Professor of History at the
University of Sydney. She is the author of War Stories: Suffering
and Sacrifice in the Civil War North.
Rebecca Jo Plant is Professor of History at the University of
California, San Diego. She is the author of Mom: The Transformation
of Motherhood in Modern America.
Ms. Clarke...and Ms. Plant...make important claims in this
excellent account...[of] the phenomenon of mass youth enlistment
during the Civil War...which is refreshingly clear of agonized
caution and formulaic wokishness....While young males had done
militia duty since Revolutionary times, antebellum Americans were
still largely hostile to the notion of a standing army and were
aggrieved to have their sons in it. Worst of all, once a boy lied
his way into the service, parents found it hard to get him out
again.
*Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal*
Of Age...explain[s] the history of the nation's changing view of
the appropriate age for military service and illuminate the
underlying debate about authority over the labor and lives of young
men that developed during the Civil War. The authors make it clear
that widespread underage service affected tens of thousands of
young men and families. They convincingly argue that the practice
of underage recruitment brought growing Federal power into direct
conflict with the traditional authority and sanctity of the home, a
potent symbol of the transformative nature of the Civil War....A
valuable work on an understudied topic....Its clear writing and
helpful chapter summaries help reinforce the authors' central
points about how the scale of the conflict led to a transformation
of the relationship between the military and families and how the
reliance on underage soldiers changed society's expectations of
youth.
*Creston Long, International Social Science Review*
It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, you know. You're
reading a book, and you sense that what you have in your hands is a
game-changer. This happened as I read Of Age....Frances Clarke and
Rebecca Jo Plant studied what many had long believed to be an
exaggeration at best and mythical propaganda at worst - the number
of underaged boys who fought in the Civil War - and discovered
something startingly different. The result is a work that changes
our understanding of the Civil War, arguably the most powerful
event in the history of the United States.... It changes our
perception and understanding of the war itself, through the lens of
how both the Union and the Confederacy used some of the most
vulnerable members of society to fight. These children...picked up
rifles and fought alongside men of legal age. Clarke and Plant make
sure their rightful story is told and their contribution
recognized.
*Glynn Young, Dancing Priest blog*
By taking seriously a phenomenon that other historians have too
often overlooked and underestimated, this landmark volume overturns
both popular and scholarly assumptions about the 'boy soldiers' who
fought in the American Civil War. Elegantly crafted and expertly
researched, Of Age breaks new ground in the history of household
relations, the law, popular culture, state power, labor, and the
boundaries of citizenship in the nineteenth century. It is a
must-read.
*W. Caleb McDaniel, author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story
of Slavery and Restitution in America*
Of Age is not simply a major revision of our understanding of
underage boys in the Civil War, although it delivers on that
promise in full; it is also a profound reinterpretation of military
service and of the soldiers' experience itself, one all Civil War
and military historians should rush to read. Clarke and Plant have
conducted extraordinarily intensive archival work to demonstrate
that roughly 10 percent of the U.S. Army enrolled underage. Even
more impressively, they develop a powerful analytic framework for
understanding how that service should reshape our understanding of
the history of childhood and the history of the Civil War Era. A
triumph.
*Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation
and the Ends of War*
This remarkable, groundbreaking history takes a subject of enormous
contemporary interest—the thousands of youths who serve in armed
conflicts as soldiers, sex slaves, human shields, spies, and
suicide bombers—and reveals with vivid detail the extent to which
the Union and Confederate armies relied on the young not simply as
buglers, drummers, messengers, scouts, or hospital orderlies, but
as combatants. This book not only recovers juvenile soldiers'
wartime experience but also shows how their participation in the
conflict intensified American society's age consciousness,
diminished parental authority, transformed attitudes toward the
young, enhanced teenagers' autonomy, and expanded the authority of
the federal government.
*Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American
Childhood*
Societies wage war with the twin currencies of money and soldiers,
often without scrutinizing the source of the soldiers. In Of Age,
Clarke and Plant explore how the Union and Confederacy raised their
respective armies during the Civil War by employing soldiers
younger than the accepted age of 18. This wide-ranging study
touches on military, political, economic, and family history before
concluding that both armies comprised a significant number of
troops considered children by today's standard, perhaps as much as
20 percent. Consequently, the use of underage soldiers raised
questions and challenges about the obligations of boy soldiers to
their families, especially their labor in agrarian economies; the
social ramifications of wartime definitions of adulthood versus
childhood; and the rights of enslaved peoples both before and after
the Emancipation Proclamation.
*Choice*
The authors make a series of complex arguments underpinned by
extensive archival work...the book is elegantly conceived and
compellingly written,...The authors must be commended for this
singular achievement.
*James J. Broomall, Shepherd University*
[This] impressively comprehensive and deeply researched study of
underage recruits both North and South...plunge[s] their readers
into the realities of the lives of the youths who comprised a
meaningful segment of both Union and Confederate armies... Of Age
is a masterwork, providing a panoramic view of the experiences of
child and teenage combatants in the Civil War. It is one of the
rare academic studies that does not just expand the field, it
redefines it. Anyone wanting to understand on-the-ground military
experience during the Civil War must from now on consider the sheer
numbers of young people among the troops, and how their presence
shaped not just the war but the direction of the country.
*Sarah E. Chinn, Civil War History*
Elegantly conceived and compellingly written... In a crowded field,
Clarke and Plant have achieved something quite remarkable. They
have written a groundbreaking history of an entirely neglected
topic. By so doing, they create an analytical framework that
reshapes our understanding of a society at war and the long-term
social, political, and legal consequences of wartime debates over
boy soldiers. The authors must be commended for this singular
achievement.
*James J. Broomall, History: Reviews of New Books*
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