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
• Sarah E. Chinn (bio)

Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-019601044. 448 pp., cloth, $34.95.

William T. Adams, who published under the pseudonym Oliver Optic (among others), was probably the best-selling children's writer of the mid-nineteenth century. Most of his more than one hundred books—filled with adventure and youthful slang—sold upward of a hundred thousand copies. By the mid-1860s, he was churning out two series featuring boy combatants, Tom Somers and his brother Jack, teenagers who enlisted in the army and navy. The "Soldier Boy" and "Sailor Boy" series were characterized by both bloody descriptions of battle and scenes of Christian virtue demonstrated by the young heroes, who never let military life seduce them into the sinful clutches of drink, gambling, and swearing.

The Somers boys' admixture of heroism, self-sacrifice, and piety would have been a familiar characterological brew to both child and adult readers by the time The Soldier Boy was published in 1864. As Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant point out in Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, their impressively comprehensive and deeply researched study of underage recruits both North and South, "whether underage boys featured as sacrificial young martyrs or precociously brave-hearted boys, the public found their stories irresistible" (10). From this imaginary narrative, however, they quickly plunge their readers into the realities of the lives of the youths who comprised a meaningful segment of both Union and Confederate armies.

Clarke and Plant have several intersecting arguments within the book. The first is that if we are to talk meaningfully about the involvement of minors in the Civil War, we should both understand what minority as an age category signified in the 1860s and how many boys actually enlisted between 1861 and 1865. The second is that the presence of underage recruits in both Union and Confederate armies shaped military and government policy in important ways, which have not heretofore been fully understood and cannot be understood unless we take boy soldiers into account. And the third, and I think most original, is that the presence of large numbers of teenagers and younger boys on the battlefield was made possible by, and hastened, the centralization of power in a federalized army, displacing the previous dominance of local militias as the backbone of US military force.

The authors establish a credible accounting of the number of underage soldiers, using regimental records, pension claims, and requests for disability [End Page 82] benefits (such as they were) as well as more qualitative sources, such as memoirs, letters, and newspaper stories. One major obstacle they faced in determining this figure was "an epidemic of lying" about age by both enlistees and recruiters, which is revealed only by recourse to census records (5). Ultimately, they conclude that there were more than two hundred thousand enlistees under the age of eighteen in the Union army: that is, about 10 percent of the fighting force, a proportion that seems to be reflected among Confederate troops as well. At the same time, the definition of underage was not immutable. Before early 1862, young men under the age of twenty-one needed the permission of a parent or guardian to enlist to fight for the Union. By February, that was downshifted to eighteen, showing that exigency trumped protection.

One fascinating finding in Of Age is the very different attitudes toward boy soldiers in the United States and in the Confederacy. Northerners were united in seeing them as the soul of the national project, uncorruptible and full of the promise of the future. Song sheets, children's books and magazines, newspapers, engravings, and other cultural products heroized them as paragons of democracy. In the Confederacy, by contrast, there was popular and governmental resistance to sending boys to the front; for the South, they represented future citizens of the Confederate States of America, who had to be preserved...