Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant (review)

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• Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant
• Christopher S. DeRosa

Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. By Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 434. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-760104-4.)

If what we call childhood makes up half of a person’s felt history, then the growing field of the history of youth should command our attention. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant’s new work, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, is an illuminating addition to this literature. The authors are not primarily concerned with trying to see through the eyes of the boys who served in Civil War armies (although the book contributes on this level nevertheless). Rather, their goal is to explain how nineteenth-century American society weighed private and public demands on young males, navigated those boys’ own aspirations, and differed on these issues sectionally.

By taking an admirably long view of their topic, Clarke and Plant uncover underage enlistment as a major flashpoint of U.S. civil-military relations going back to the War of 1812. Fathers considered themselves the owners of their sons’ labor until the age of majority, twenty-one before the War of 1812, eighteen after. By this age their children were capable of full, able-bodied work: work that could be rented out, realized for profit, or simply needed for family survival. Able-bodied youth went to school with children of all ages and served in the militia under community guidance. All of these things made youths in their late teens—unable to vote or to make contracts for themselves—cognizant of their ability, their worth, and their personal stake in American politics and wars.

If militia service was part of a local upbringing, enlisting in the U.S. military was more in the nature of making a contract for oneself. In Of Age, we learn how in the Civil War, the federal government in the Union gradually broke the power of parental ownership of youth labor and further eroded local control of militias. The major blow in this fight was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Clarke and Plant argue that historians, by interpreting the suspension in light of Copperheads’ antiwar activities, have missed its central importance in squelching parents’ attempts to reclaim their sons from the army. Thwarting parental claims may be considered another part of the radicalizing of the northern war effort. Through a careful comparison of regimental records and nonmilitary records, and corroboration with the Early [End Page 616] Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death database, the authors argue convincingly that soldiers under age eighteen made up about 10 percent of the Union host.

Even though the Confederate army also drew eager underage enlistees, the rebel states never embraced the legal diminishment of parental rights. Plant and Clarke demonstrate that the free-labor North, though ambivalent to youth enlistment, lent itself more easily to the idea of a patriotic and independent vanguard of the young. Despite the Confederacy’s dire manpower shortage, patriarchal ideology prevailed. Likewise, conditions differed greatly for Black youths who went to war. Enslaved boys faced both careless and cruelly attentive treatment at the hands of the Confederates. Underage volunteers in the North were vulnerable to unscrupulous brokers seeking to capitalize on the bounty system.

Clarke and Plant make a persuasive case on these regional and racial variations through their analysis of stories and primers written for children and the portrayal of boy soldiers in sheet music and cartes de visite. They offer subtle readings of the familial dynamics at work in individual enlistment cases. Of Age is alive to nuance: the authors explain how seemingly conclusive rulings and laws were messy in implementation. Clarke and Plant achieve a unity of voice that reads engagingly. The book’s somewhat sprawling epilogue perhaps starts as many arguments as it follows out, but it also makes the reader look forward to these historians’ next works.

Christopher S. DeRosa Monmouth University Copyright © 2024 The...