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

Reviewed by: Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant Corinne T. Field (bio) 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. 448. Cloth, 34. 95. ) Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant have written the definitive account of underage soldiers in the nineteenth-century United States while also revising the history of childhood, age consciousness, and the End Page 266 consolidation of federal power. They demonstrate that underage enlistees made up about 10 percent of Union forces during the Civil War, a slightly lower percentage of Confederate troops, and significantly more of United States Colored Troops. Further, the persistent presence of underage soldiers raised pressing practical and theoretical issues about whether minors owed service to their families or their nation. While never entirely resolved, these debates fueled the centralization of U. S. military power and expanded the reach of the federal government into family life. Long before the protective labor legislation, mandatory schooling, and age-based entitlements of the Progressive Era, military commanders pioneered the use of chronological age as a tool for mobilizing and regulating populations, in the process changing the definition and experience of what it meant to be a teenage boy. Clarke and Plant mine a wealth of sources, including military records, state and federal court cases, parents' petitions, legislative debates, memoirs, newspapers, sheet music, and popular prints. They include white Confederates as well as enslaved and free Black youth, even as they acknowledge that sources are more complete for white Unionists. In a methodological tour de force, they painstakingly track every self-reported eighteen-year-old in the Sixty-Fourth New York Volunteer Infantry through census, marriage, and pension records to determine how many lied about their age. They find that a few boys as young as thirteen managed to enlist while the bulk of underage soldiers were sixteen or seventeen. Of Age resolves years of debate over how many "boy soldiers" fought in the war and dispels the myth that Confederates "robbed the cradle" at a greater rate than Federals. The authors begin with the Militia Act of 1792, which set a national requirement that every free, able-bodied, white male citizen between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve in a local militia. Because teenage boys served temporary stints close to home, this requirement did not challenge the legal principle that minors remained under the authority of parents or guardians until age twenty-one. Enlistment in the regular army was another matter, however. Many Americans remained suspicious of standing armies in general and specifically did not want minors signing up to serve far from home. At issue were property rights, that is, whether parents or the military had a superior claim to the labor of male youth. Local courts aided parents in recovering their sons by issuing writs of habeas corpus that liberated minors from service in the U. S. armed forces. Federal courts sometimes supported parents and at other times insisted that Congress's power to raise an army implied that boys could be enlisted, especially in the navy, where young boys' labor was common and crucial. End Page 267 Military doctors added fuel to the fire by emphasizing the importance of chronological age as a predictor of physical capacity. Where previous historians have located the medical use of chronological age in the development of pediatrics and geriatrics later in the nineteenth century, Clarke and Plant show that army physicians in Europe and the United States innovated age-based measurements of human growth. By the 1850s, military doctors reached a consensus that teenage boys lacked the physical stamina to serve effectively in the military, especially to march long distances and withstand contagious disease. These doctors failed to convince commanders, but the physicians' arguments led courts-martial to be more lenient toward boys, parents to petition for release of their sons, and young soldiers themselves to worry about their prospects for survival. Clarke and Plant also revise the widely accepted claim that middle-class and elite parents protected and sheltered children. . .