The SHCY awarded Frances M. Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant’s Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era the 2024 Grace Abbott Prize, honoring the best English-language book published the prior year in the history of children and youth. To celebrate Of Age, Digital Childhoods editor Hannah Stamler talked with Clark and Plant about their groundbreaking research and their process for writing history collaboratively.
Of Age is the first comprehensive study of the unauthorized enlistment of minors in the US Civil War. To start us off, could you tell us more about the status of youth in the conflict: What were the official age restrictions of the Union (northern) and Confederate (southern) armies and how did underage boys circumvent them?
Frances M. Clark (FMC) and Rebecca Jo Plant (RJP): At the start of the war, US regulations stated that enlistees had to be between 18 and 35, or above 12 to join as a musician. Those younger than 21—the legal age of majority—were supposed to obtain their parents’ or guardians’ consent, but many recruiters simply ignored this stipulation, especially when the enlistee was 18 or older.
Almost immediately, the War Department was inundated with parents’ petitions demanding the return of minor sons. In late 1861, the War Department simply decreed that it would no longer release soldiers on the grounds of minority. Then, in February 1862, the US Congress enacted a law stating that males who had reached 18 no longer needed parental consent to enlist, while those below 18 could not enlist, musicians excepted. This same law, however, included a poison pill: it decreed that whatever age an enlistee swore to at enlistment would be considered legally “conclusive.” The practical implications were stunning: minors now could emancipate themselves by swearing a false oath.
The Confederacy followed US enlistment policies almost to the letter at the start of the war. But in April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed a conscription act that required all white males between 18 and 35—with a few exceptions—to enlist for three-year terms. Eventually it lowered the enlistment age to 17-year-olds, but those youths served in state-controlled reserve units.
It was fairly easy to circumvent age restrictions. If the enlistment officer pressed a boy to provide proof of consent, he might claim to be an orphan, falsify his father’s signature, or even convince an unrelated adult to vouch for him. If that didn’t work, he might try a different regiment. If everything else failed, he might simply tag along, assisting however he could until he had proven his usefulness and was officially mustered into service. That was how Johnny Clem, the war’s most famous boy soldier, managed to enlist.
Reading the book, I was astounded by how many young people joined the war. One of your key findings is that boys comprised around ten percent of Union forces (and probably made up an equally significant part of the Confederate army). Those figures are staggering and make me wonder why it took so long for a book like yours to arrive. Why have scholars ignored or downplayed youth participation in the Civil War?
FMC and RJP: We actually did not initially set out to determine the percentage of Union troops who enlisted under the age of 18. But as the project progressed, we concluded that being able to advance a credible estimate would help us make the case for the importance of the topic. A strong clue of mass underage enlistment, apparent in data derived from military records, has been staring Civil War scholars in the face for a long time. Self-reported 18-year-olds were far and away the largest age category of Union army enlistees. But why would 18-year-olds have been so much more keen to enlist than, say, 20-year-olds? The disproportionate number of supposed 18-year-olds makes sense only once we appreciate that as many as half of them were actually inflating their ages.
Probably one reason it took so long for a book like ours to arrive is that proving soldiers’ deceptions about age is much easier to do with online resources that allow scholars to track individuals over the course of a lifetime, like ancestry.com, fold3, and findagrave. (We discuss our methodology at length in our appendices.) Even if such tools had been available in the past, though, historians still may not have viewed underage enlistment as a topic as worthy of exploration. Prior to the Civil War, boys and youths often filled roles in US and European armies and navies. They also performed many other difficult and dangerous jobs. So perhaps scholars simply did not view their presence in the ranks as particularly noteworthy.
What we discovered, however, is not just that the number of underage enlistees was greater than previously assumed. We also learned that their service generated protracted social debates and conflict, especially in the Union. The objections people raised to underage enlistment were naturally quite different from the condemnations of child soldiers that we hear today. Nineteenth-century Americans were not concerned with protecting children’s rights—a concept that did not yet exist—and they did not worry about shielding the young from psychologically traumatic situations. But military experts and parents alike did fear that young people lacked the physical strength and stamina to endure the hardships of service. Military doctors argued that, because boys had not finished growing, they would break down on hard campaigns and become a burden and expense to the military. Surgeon General William A. Hammond urged Congress to place the enlistment age at 20 or higher. Parents also vociferously condemned underage enlistment on legal grounds, arguing that the army had violated their rights by depriving them of the labor and services provided by their minor sons.
There may be yet another reason why few scholars have investigated this topic, which relates to the hyperbole and tall tales that have surrounded the subject of boy soldiers. Around World War I, as Congress was debating the minimum draft age, a myth took hold claiming that boys of 18 and younger composed up to half of the Civil War’s armies. In addition, throughout the twentieth century, children’s book authors and popular writers published an enormous number of works about heroic boy soldiers, many of which play fast and loose with the facts. We suspect that the exaggerations and sensationalism surrounding the topic may have dissuaded serious scholars from investigating it.
If I picture of boy soldiers from the past, I tend to imagine the protagonists of the tall and exaggerated tales you describe: the heroic drummer boy of popular prints and paintings. I imagine many other readers might have the same kinds of pictures in mind. Can you share a little more about what this trope gets wrong or leaves out? Which boys actually enlisted in the Civil War and what work did they do?
FMC and RJP: Those images come to your mind for a reason: they were among the war’s most popular artistic subjects. Unionists celebrated youth enlistment by extolling white drummer boys as the embodiment of republican virtue, drawing on a tradition that dated back to the French Revolution. One popular image in this vein, by artist William Morris Hunt, literally places the drummer boy on a pedestal. In keeping with Victorian tropes of childhood innocence, other Civil War images emphasized youths’ pure-hearted love of God and country. Artists, poets, and songwriters often portrayed drummer boys as leading the charge in battle and rallying the troops through their own heroic example.
Pretty much everything about these images was unrealistic. In his postwar memoir, the fifer Charles Bardeen reproduced a popular Thomas Nast image from Harper’s Weekly specifically to contest its accuracy. As Bardeen dryly remarked, “no drummer in my regiment ever played a drum on the battlefield or could see any sense in doing it. Fighting isn’t done that way.”
The larger point here is that the vast majority of underage enlistees initially signed up as regular soldiers, not musicians, though allowances were often made for the youngest and weakest. These youths looked after the horses, foraged and cooked, washed and mended clothes, delivered messages, and waited on officers. Many also worked in hospitals, emptying bedpans, changing dressings, and disposing of amputated limbs. One 15-year-old who kept a diary matter-of-factly recorded that he had removed “about half a cup of maggots” from an amputee’s wound.
Boys from all classes enlisted. But of course, the great majority of underage youths on both sides came from modest and poor backgrounds. In the US, as bounties and the prices paid for substitutes skyrocketed, underage enlistment became a survival strategy for many poor families. This situation also led to the exploitation of many poor and immigrant youths, who became victims of what amounted to human trafficking schemes.
In your introduction, you explain that Of Age is most interested in understanding the social contexts that enabled underage enlistment and the public debates this enlistment provoked. Could you say more about your approach? Why did you choose to expand your study beyond the battlefield experiences of minor enlistees?
FMC and RJP: We focused on the broader context of underage service because we wanted to tell a story that went beyond the boys themselves. The struggle over underage enlistees involved judges, military officers and physicians, politicians and federal officials, parents and relatives, sometimes even friends and neighbors. A biographical approach would not have allowed us to capture that rich canvas. Nor would it have allowed us to highlight the thematic issues that we explore in the book, such as the centralization of military power, the federalization of habeas corpus, and the attenuation of parental rights.
We also adopted this contextual approach because, as already noted, so much of the existing work on boy soldiers is highly biographical and focused on wartime experiences. It’s easy to understand why that’s the case—the stories are undeniably compelling—but we wanted to do something different. We hoped to show that underage enlistment was a household dilemma, a social and political problem, a military concern, and a legal conundrum.
We perhaps carried that determination a bit too far, however. We always wanted to write one more chapter that really zeroed in on boys’ experiences in camp, focusing on their daily lives and the relationships they forged with older men and with one another. It’s kind of the book’s ghost chapter—the one we simply ran out of time to write.
In thinking about the social issues that underage enlistment provoked, I was fascinated by Chapter Seven, in which you discuss tensions in Union thought on family and the state. On the one hand, Union supporters believed the federal government should “reach into slaveholders’ households.” On the other, as you alluded to earlier, some Union parents whose underage sons enlisted without their consent argued that their boys were their property and should be returned from the army. You observe that “the erosion of parental rights for white Americans is among the less noted outcomes of the Civil War.” I’d love to hear you elaborate on this point. How does Of Age complicate our understanding of the war and its effects on US law and family life?
FMC and RJP: Yes, it’s interesting that the same term—emancipation—was used to discuss both release from slavery and release from minority status. It makes sense, since the legal status of a slave and that of minor were both defined in relationship to the household head, but it is still jarring to modern-day sensibilities. We were both really struck by the petitions in which parents tried to recover underage sons by claiming, as one woman did, “he is my property.” What exactly did that mean? Parents did not in fact own minor children, but they did have a legal claim to their labor or wages, and many relied heavily on older sons to get by. Indeed, the extent of families’ dependence on sons’ labor or earnings is one of our more striking findings. Now, whether such proprietary attitudes were deeply felt on an emotional level is harder to assess. After all, these petitioners sought a very specific goal, and they naturally wielded any argument that might help their cause. But their outrage over the military’s refusal to relinquish underage sons—their sense that their rights as citizens had been violated—comes through loud and clear.
The erosion of parental rights is a less noted outcome of the war than, say, emancipation, because it was neither as visible nor as radically transformative. In fact, the Civil War in some ways simply accelerated changes that were already underway, especially in northern states. Well before the war, the rise of manufacturing and opportunities further west had begun to draw minor youths out of rural households. Fathers found it difficult to retain control over offspring who were mobile and semi-independent; many did not really attempt to do so. The Civil War radically amplified this trend. By enlisting hundreds of thousands of males below the age of majority, and carrying them far away from home for extended periods of time, the military undermined parental authority over sons in unprecedented ways.
Records from the Freedmen’s Bureau, court cases, and newspaper articles, and other sources allow us to see the day-to-day drama as former enslavers and the formerly enslaved navigated a dramatically altered world. The conflicts between underage boys and their parents were of course much less fraught and mainly played out within individual households. Most cases left no document trail, and the evidence that does exist is concentrated during the war years rather than its aftermath. But one particular set of letters from a Kansan named Allen Dunn who wrote to Washington officials in 1866 provides some insight.
Dunn’s only living son had enlisted without consent at the age of 14 and served until the war’s end, when he was discharged at the age of 16. Apparently, his homecoming did not go smoothly, for Dunn wrote to the US Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase to ask if parents could reassert their right to the “services” of Union veterans who remained minors. In reality, military service had legally emancipated such youths. But the Chief Justice lightheartedly replied that, so far as he was aware, “The fifth commandment [to honor one’s parents]” remained “unrepealed.” Dunn received essentially the same response from the War Department after writing to complain of military officials who were “doing a vast mischief” in his neighborhood by asserting that young veterans owed “no services to their parents, by reason of their service in the army.” Federal officials were clearly reluctant to acknowledge the war’s disruptive effects on household governance, but such conflicts were no doubt common.
Though we no longer support the idea of child soldiers, militarism remains a major facet of contemporary boyhood cultures in the US and around the world. How might we make sense of, or reconcile, this contradiction?
FMC and RJP: It’s not really a contradiction that we can reconcile. In our book, we show that mid-nineteenth century literature geared toward even very young children was very bloody and violent—shockingly so from a contemporary perspective. This was no accident: authors often consciously embraced sensational violence as a pedagogical tool for helping to impress certain lessons on pliant childish minds. There was no public outcry over representations of violence in children’s literature, as there would be in the late nineteenth century over dime novels, or in the 1950s over comic books, or in our own times over violent video games. But as you note, even though we now give much lip service to the idea of protecting children, militarism continues shapes childhood in the US, and especially boyhood.
One point worth emphasizing is that the minimum draft age actually declined over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which challenges the assumption that, as societies modernize, they grow increasingly more committed to protecting youths from military service. During the Civil War, the US Congress set the draft age at 20, not 18. In neither World War I nor II were 18-year-olds drafted from the very outset. That changed during Korea and Vietnam, and people today broadly accept that 18-year-old males must register for the Selective Service.
So, the trajectory regarding age and military service is not as simple as it appears at first glance. After the Civil War, we would never again fight a war in which children as young as 11, 12, and 13 served in the ranks, and underage enlistment in general became less common. But at the same time, the idea that federal government should be able to compel those as young as 18 to perform military service became far more widely accepted. This change occurred in large part because parents lost authority over males age 18 to 21, but also because the nation’s longstanding wariness of a strong, federally controlled military diminished to a vanishing point in the twentieth century.
I’d like to shift to discussing the making of the book because it’s still relatively unusual to see an academic history monograph with more than one author. How did you two meet and decide to work on this book project together?
FMC: We met in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where we formed a writing group with two other friends, Carolyn Eastman and Tom Foster, that really helped us all get through. But we initially had no plans to collaborate, because we worked in different periods: whereas I concentrated on the Civil War, Rebecca’s dissertation focused on motherhood and mother-blaming in the twentieth century. After completing our degrees, we continued to share work with one another and bat ideas back and forth, and whenever I came to the States to conduct research, I would always stop in San Diego on my way back home.
By 2010, I had embarked on a project about citizenship and people’s changing relationship to the federal government during the Civil War, drawing on the vast collection of letters from Union soldiers’ relatives that were routed to the Adjutant General’s Office. These petitions address all manner of issues, from husbands gone missing to complaints about the poor conditions in army camps to the irregularity of military pay. But a large subset were written by parents attempting to recover underage sons who had enlisted without their consent. Initially, I set all those letters aside, because it seemed like a discrete and not very promising topic—after all, everyone knew that underage soldiers snuck into the ranks during the Civil War. But the sheer volume and content of these petitions nagged at me, and on one of my visits to San Diego, I shared some examples with Rebecca. She insisted that they were what I should be concentrating on. Essentially, I said, “Okay, I’ll switch focus, but you have to do it with me.”
RJP: I had to overcome two major reservations before signing on to the collaboration. First, the Civil War is such a vast field; I worried that I would not be able to get up speed quickly enough to really pull my weight. At Frances’s suggestion, I began teaching a course on the Civil War era, which helped enormously. Second, I wanted to make sure that our friendship could weather the process of cowriting. At the time, I was working on an article about African American gold star mothers and widows and the memory of World War I. I invited Frances to join me as a kind of trial run. After that collaboration worked well, I was ready to dive in.
Could you tell us about how co-authorship functions from a practical perspective? How did you divide up research, writing, and editing work? What did you do when disagreed about how a chapter should be written, or a source interpreted?
RJP: We should say upfront that we benefited from two major grants, without which our project would have been impossible. One was from the Australian Research Council, the nation’s major grant-funding entity. The other was an ACLS Collaborative Grant, a category that has since been discontinued. Along with some smaller grants from individual libraries, this funding allowed us to visit archives in the United States together and made it possible for me to make several trips to Sydney, including an extended stay during which my family temporarily moved there. That was when we really began writing.
At the outset, spending many hours together every day was essential. We literally wrote sentences together, trading off who was typing on the computer. But we would also separate when we became interested in following different strands, work for a few hours on our own, and then reunite to share our thoughts and findings. We would keep talking over lunch and during walks. It was pretty intensive. Later in the process, once we had a clearer sense of the project, we could break things up into chunks and each work independently; Frances took the lead on some chapters, whereas I did on others. During one period of time, Frances was on sabbatical and I wasn’t, so I could really only respond to the work that she was producing. But in the end, we edited and revised every part so extensively that it’s now hard to remember who initially drafted what.
FMC: Honestly, we did not have many disagreements, which is kind of amazing. We both remember one time very early on when Rebecca was in Sydney and we became really frustrated with each other. We had gone out for a walk, and our conversation devolved into a smoldering silence. But neither of us recalls the precise substance of the conflict! I drew an important lesson from that episode, though, which is that we had to give each other enough space to allow for our individual ways of working. What’s interesting about the two of us is that we start and end up in the same place, meaning we almost always agree on the questions worth asking, and we see eye-to-eye on matters of interpretation and argument. But we get there in different ways. I think the reason why the process wasn’t more fraught is that we fundamentally respect one another. Even if we had the feeling that the other person was going astray or heading down a rabbit hole, we had enough trust to let the process play out.
The book has been a huge success: Of Age not only won the Grace Abbott prize but was also recognized with the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Congrats again! Do you attribute Of Age’s success to your working together? If yes, then how do you think the history profession can better encourage and foster collaboration?
RJP: Thank you! We were thrilled to see our research recognized by these awards. I definitely attribute the success of the book to our collaboration. It turned out that we were better collaborators than either of us anticipated, because we compensated for one another’s weaknesses. For instance, I struggle with organization and structure, and I used to be a bit too freewheeling about deleting material when I wasn’t entirely satisfied. Frances is a master organizer, both on a practical level (like managing with sources), but also in terms of being able to see a chapter as a whole from an early stage. The problem for her, I think, is that because everything builds on what came before, it’s difficult to cut text or make major changes—like breaking a chapter in two, or moving a bunch of material from one chapter to another. I think we both grew as historians and writers from working so closely with one another. By the end, she was stripping stuff out left and right, while I kept trying to slip in leftover gems.
Historians outside the US actually do often collaborate, and part of the reason why is because it is incentivized by government-funded grants. There needs to be more support to allow US humanists to engage in collaborative work. The NEH offers a collaborative grant, but it often goes to teams of scholars engaged in more sprawling projects. These are of course totally worthy enterprises, but there should also be opportunities for two or three people to undertake the kind of scholarly research, thinking, and writing that results in a traditional monograph.
Universities also need to be more nuanced and sophisticated in terms of how they assess collaborative work. Collaboration in the humanities is not the same as collaboration in the sciences or even the social sciences. A bean-counting mentality that asks coauthors to quantify what percentage of the book they have written, or one which holds that a book in which two authors contributed equally can only “count” as half a book for each individual in terms of promotion and tenure, isn’t really fair when assessing truly collaborative works. It fails to credit the process of working with another person, which itself takes time and energy; in some ways, it is actually harder and more time-consuming than working alone. To truly value collaboration means understanding that the final product cannot be reduced to its individual parts—that something valuable arises from the collaborative process itself. I should say that my home institution, the University of California, San Diego, which is known as a STEM school, has been very good in this regard.
Do you have any plans to continue the research in Of Age? If not, are you working on any new projects you’d like to tell us about?
FMC and RJP: At the moment, we are working on project together with historian Judy Giesberg on the history of sexuality, focusing on Civil War-era court martial cases that involve allegations of sexual encounters between underage enlistees and adult soldiers. In these cases, the main charge is often “conduct prejudicial to good military order and discipline” (Army), “scandalous conduct tending to the destruction of good morals” (Navy), or “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentlemen” (if the defendant was an officer). Other charges in these cases range from drunkenness to assault and battery. We are still in the early stages so won’t say too much, but we do hope this work will allow us to address a notable absence in our book. Although we looked at underage enlistment from many perspectives, we did not address how boys soldiers were often the objects of sexual desire and subject to various forms of sexual coercion and abuse.
To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…
1) Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?
FMC: I am really old school when it comes to managing notes and citations. I used online citation management and notetaking programs in grad school, but the programs I chose ended up folding, and I lost a lot of data, so I moved to Word documents for notetaking and manual entry of citations. I put all my secondary source on a particular topic into a single giant Word document.
RJP: We did use Zotero for managing our database of newspaper articles. We also had a shared Dropbox where we stored pretty much everything besides the newspaper articles. Without that kind of cloud-based filing system and access to videoconferencing, I can’t imagine how we could have written Of Age.
2) Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year (does not have to be something that was also published in the last year)?
FMC: The best book that I have read recently is Chloe Hooper’s Bedtime Story. Hooper is one of the most outstanding Australian authors of non-fiction writing today, and although this book is not a history of childhood per se, it has a lot to say on the subject of children and how they think and feel. When Hooper’s partner was diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness, she needed a way to explain the situation to their two young sons. Turning to literature, she analyses the kinds of stories that adults have told to children over time to help them cope with loss, evil, or death. Hooper’s search for wisdom and catharsis within the pages of children’s literature is an exquisite study of the tales we tell ourselves to make sense of the senseless.
RJP: Honestly, I didn’t read very widely in the history of childhood and youth this past year! I guess I was taking a break after completing our book, because I mostly read novels and memoirs. Among them was the triology Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth by Leo Tolstoy, a fictionalized autobiography that he wrote when he was just 23. I found it completely engrossing. It offers a window onto the social world of nineteenth-century Russian elites, but what I loved most was how it captures the emotions of childhood and youth—the intensity of one’s attachments, the frustration borne of being subject to others’ will. His memory must have been extraordinary.
3) Favorite childhood game or toy?
FMC: I’d have to admit that my favorite toys as a kid were my Barbie dolls. I don’t remember being especially enamored of the dolls themselves; what I really loved were the tiny outfits and accessories. I think I enjoyed organizing those more than playing with the actual dolls. And thus began a lifetime of owning too many things and spending too much time reorganizing them.
RJP: had a classic 1970s suburban childhood. There was a posse of kids that would gather at the schoolyard to play kickball or four-square, which were the only sports-related activities that I could hazard with risking mortification. As for toys, my father purchased kits to build my sister and I each a dollhouse for Christmas one year. For years I saved my allowance to buy dollhouse furniture and all manner of itty-bitty items—candlestick holders, canned food, toilet paper rolls. Other than that, I mostly loved my books, my stuffed animals, and a couple of albums, including Free to Be You and Me.
4) And in keeping with the theme of collaboration, did you have a childhood best friend or favorite confidante (real or imagined)?
FMC: I still have a childhood best friend. Her name is Nancy and we went to kindergarten together and once lived across the road from each other. She’s moved around a lot and now lives in a different state but somehow we’ve always managed to see each other every year.
RJP: From third to fifth or sixth grade, I had a best friend. Apparently, the two of us were so thrilled to be together that we would literally jump up and down when reunited. It was such a gift to have a friend like that. That relationships also introduced me to the reality of different socio-economic classes. Her household employed a paid domestic worker, for example, which I’d only seen on television before then. And the friendship eventually ended when she switched to a private school. That’s such a common childhood experience, I think—learning about class difference from personal relationships with kids whose families are either richer or poorer than one’s own.
Frances M. Clarke is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras. She is the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and the coauthor, with Rebecca Jo Plant, of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
Rebecca Jo Plant is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to co-authoring Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) with Frances M. Clarke, she published Mom: The Reconstruction of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). From 2019 to 2024, she co-edited Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.
For a condensed version of the introduction to Of Age, check out the authors’ article in Smithsonian Magazine.
