“If military physicians strongly opposed youth enlistment, and plenty of parents fought to retain authority over sons up to age 21, how did so many boys below 18 end up in the army?”
By Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke
THE FACT THAT children and youths fought in the U.S. Civil War rarely surprises people. Most have seen the poignant faces of boy soldiers, some with rose-tinted cheeks, that appear in ambrotypes and daguerreotypes from the period. And it is generally understood that poor and enslaved children were often subjected to punishing labour regimens in 19th-century America. Surely a society willing to send its young into mines, factories, and fields, the logic goes, would have few qualms about enlisting them in the military. The presence of underage youths in Civil War armies has therefore not been seen as a phenomenon requiring explanation.
But Americans did in fact harbor serious reservations about underage enlistment—just not for the same reasons that we abhor the use of child soldiers today. What makes the story of boy soldiers in the Civil War so remarkable is that large numbers managed to enlist, despite legal restrictions and strong opposition to their service from key constituencies. Our book Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era explains why this was so, examining the factors that facilitated mass underage enlistment and detailing its far-ranging effects.
How big was the problem? Much bigger than Civil War historians have previously supposed. According to much-cited scholars like Bell Irwin Wiley and James McPherson, only a tiny portion of Union army enlistees, between one and two percent, were below the age of 18. But these calculations rely on official military records that conceal an epidemic of lying on the part of youths desperate to join the fight. When soldiers’ reported ages can be checked against census data and other sources, it becomes clear that around half those who claimed to be eighteen at the time of their enlistment were actually younger. Drawing on a large Union Army dataset and a range of regimental and community studies, we show that roughly 11 percent of Union soldiers were underage when they enlisted. (The numbers for the Confederacy were most likely similar, but existing records allow for less certainty.)
From the war’s outset, military physicians decried the presence of boys in the ranks. Pointing to studies conducted by their European counterparts, they insisted that youths below age 20 were still growing and therefore liable to break down, becoming a hindrance rather than an asset to the army.
“[T]here appears to be no doubt that 18 years is altogether too low a minimum,” U.S. Surgeon General William A. Hammond complained in 1863. “Place it at 20 to 22, and we shall find fewer inmates of our hospitals, and consequently more men in the field; men, too, able to resist disease, to endure fatigue, and to bear up under the misfortunes and hardships to which all armies are subject.”
Although such arguments failed to convince Congress to raise the enlistment age for volunteers, they did influence the terms of the Enrollment Act of 1863, which set the minimum age at which a man could be drafted at 20.
Parents voiced even more impassioned resistance to youth enlistment. For many, the issue was not that they doubted young males’ capacity for military service; in fact, a significant number willingly allowed underage sons to enlist. The issue was consent: they wanted to be the ones to decide. Fathers legally owned minor sons’ labour up until the age of majority, then 21 for males, and many households relied heavily on older children to get by. But in February 1862, Congress enacted a law that waived the need for parental consent for those 18 or older, while banning the enlistment of youths below age 18 except as musicians. This in effect emancipated young males who wanted to enlist as soon as they reached age 18.
Parents who depended on minor children for their livelihoods were equally insistent in pressing their claims. A “poor” and “lame” widow, for instance, wrote that she was “intirely dependent” <sic> on her 19-year-old son, who had been “makeing Me a comfortable Home” <sic> prior to his enlistment. Demanding his release, she asserted, “He is all my dependance for support i claim him therefore.” <sic>
If military physicians strongly opposed youth enlistment, and plenty of parents fought to retain authority over sons up to age 21, how did so many boys below 18 end up in the army? In part, this seeming paradox can be attributed to the lack of official age documentation, which made it hard to verify enlistees’ claims; in most states, birth registration did not become a legally mandated practice until the twentieth century. But even more important in explaining the high rates of youth enlistment are certain features of the social world that Civil War era Americans inhabited. For starters, “age consciousness” was relatively undeveloped. Turning 21 was hugely significant for white males, but aside from crossing this threshold, precise age played little role in shaping personal identity or structuring everyday life.
Take the issue of labor. Male youths generally pulled their own weight in a household by around age 16—an assumption reflected in the U.S. Census, which in 1850 and 1860 required enumerators to record a “profession, occupation, or trade” for “each person over 15 years of age.” But work tasks were assigned according to a youth’s size, strength and ability rather than his age. As Elisha Stockwell explained at the outset of his Civil War memoir, he could “rake and bind and keep up with the men” by the time he enlisted at the age of 15. To youths accustomed to performing difficult and sometimes dangerous work alongside adults, the notion that they were too young to be of service to the military must have seemed absurd.
Another key factor in facilitating underage enlistment was the widespread tendency to differentiate service in the militia or voluntary forces from service in the regular army. Prior to the Civil War, many Americans took a dim view of regular soldiers, viewing them as desperate and dissolute men who had signed away their liberty for sustenance. Yet Americans historically valorized the volunteer militiaman as the embodiment of republican virtue. Regular army recruits signed five-year contracts, with those below age 21 requiring parental consent to enlist. In contrast, the U.S. Congress had made militia service mandatory beginning at age 18 in the early national period. Because militia service was typically short-term, confined to one’s own home state, and performed alongside relatives and community members, people rarely saw it as a threat to parental rights.
RIGHT: Serving in the same battery with Delavan Miller was Private William Phelps McNeil, who enlisted on his fourteenth birthday. Like Miller, his age was also recorded as eighteen on the muster roll. Private William Phelps McNeil of Co. H, 2nd New York Heavy Artillery Regiment. Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs (Library of Congress).
Although the militia was largely defunct by the time the Civil War began, this general conception of voluntary service profoundly shaped attitudes toward military mobilization. Lincoln’s initial call for a three-month commitment quickly gave way to three-year contracts that clearly spelled out that men would be serving in the “Army of the United States of America.” Even so, the community-based mobilization of troops, combined with the general culture of volunteer regiments, allowed space for able-bodied boys who wanted to serve.
Take James K. P. DeBord of Newark, Missouri. In the Spring of 1861, the 15-year-old was “learning the trade” in the shoe and boot shop that his father ran. When reports of war reached his politically divided region, the town’s men and boys rushed to establish home guard units. Along with his father and an older brother, James banded together with some loyal neighbors and began to drill. Then in December 1861, when a local man was commissioned to raise a Union army regiment, much of the Newark home guard enlisted in Company B of the 3rd Missouri Cavalry. Although James did not enlist at this time, he still participated in the fighting that engaged the regiment in August 1862, perhaps as part of the remaining home guard forces. Soon thereafter, his father took the then 16-year-old to enlist, having determined that it was too dangerous for him to stay home. James’s father fudged his age, claiming that he was 17—an age that still did not meet the legal requirement. But James was mustered into service, the only indication of hesitation appearing in the notes of the examining physician: “The young man seems healthy though slender.”
James’s story highlights several common factors that facilitated underage enlistment. Already employed in his father’s shop, he naturally followed along as the town’s men picked up arms. And because he first joined a home guard unit, the barrier to his military service was virtually non-existent; no one would have barred an able-bodied youth from drilling with a self-raised militia. That James was initially held back from enlisting in the Union army, most likely because of his age, indicates that the bar for federalized service was higher. But the fluid situation on the ground, which allowed him to fight alongside the regiment, put a target on his back and earned him a place in its ranks.
Other youths followed very different paths into the Union army. After the United States enacted a draft in 1863, rising bounties and dwindling manpower reserves fuelled what amounted to a market in young male bodies. Substitute brokers and corrupt recruiters employed all kinds of nefarious tactics to lure or strongarm newly arrived immigrants, recently emancipated slaves, and other vulnerable youths into the army. A far cry from the cases of plucky boys who asserted their independence by running off and enlisting; these instances more closely resembled impressment and coerced labour.
It proved much easier for underage boys to enlist than for distraught parents to get them out. Faced with thousands of such petitions, the War Department stonewalled, declaring that discharges on the grounds of minority were not in the “interests of the service.” Parents who turned to local and state courts initially had better luck. But after President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus nationwide in late 1863, the courts no longer offered a path of redress. This was by design. A large majority of underage soldiers (over eighty percent) enlisted at age 16 or 17, and many were performing valuable service. The Union army was simply loath to release them.
In later wars, boys still managed to sneak into the ranks: many underage youths served in the US military during World War II, and as late as the Vietnam War, a 15-year-old American Marine was killed in combat. But in the late 19th and 20th centuries, broad social changes—including mandatory birth registration and the rise of new conceptions of childhood as a stage of life worthy of special protections—would increasingly relegate underage enlistment to the past. Never again would the United States wage a war in which youths below age 18 composed a significant percentage of its combat forces.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant are the authors of the forthcoming Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Clarke is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney and the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North, which jointly won the Australia Historical Association’s biennial Hancock prize for the best first book in any field of history. Plant is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America. Their work on Of Age was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Australian Research Council.
