Writing

“Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant

February 15, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, you know. You’re reading a book, and you sense that what you have in your hands is a game-changer.

This happened as I read the authors’ introduction to Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Co-authors Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant studied what many had long believed to be an exaggeration at best and mythical propaganda at worst – the number of underaged boys who fought in the Civil War – and discovered something startingly different. The result is a work that changes our understanding of the Civil War, arguably the most powerful event in the history of the United States.

During the war itself, the myth of the “drummer boy” almost propagated itself, especially in the Union states. On both sides, the official minimum enlistment or conscription age was 18. With a parent’s consent, it could be less than that. In practice, and again especially on the Union side, the minimum age was widely disregarded.

For evidence, Clarke and Plant turn to memoirs, histories, periodicals, and especially both pension records and legal proceedings, whereby parents sought to have their underaged sons discharged. The military tended to be in the driver’s seat, however, and particularly so with the suspension of habeus corpus by President Lincoln (in 1863, Congress codified what Lincoln had done by executive order in 1861).

Clarke and Plant carefully sift through the data and conclude that about 10 percent of the soldiers in both the Union and Confederate armies were under the age of 18 – teenaged boys, and sometimes younger. Numerically, that’s about 180,000 on the Union side and 20,000 on the Confederate side. Parents discovered their rights over their children seriously eroded by the demands of war and found themselves more often than not on the losing side in courtroom battles. Confederate parents appear to have had an easier time of reclaiming their underaged sons.

The authors tell the stories of some of the more famous children and teens fighting in the war, many as musicians in drum and bugle corps. The stories, of course, are what capture our attention and what captured the attention of readers during the war (see “Young Fred Grant Takes the Mississippi Capital, Almost” at Emerging Civil War). But they spend most of their tome looking at records, data, reports, and court records. It’s no surprise that the book was 10 years in the making.

The authors examine the history of underaged enlistment, going back to the War of 1812 and some of the legal disputes prior to the Civil War. They describe the social and cultural background that supported underaged enlistment, including the belief that war inspired courage in young minds and the propaganda benefits of depicting young boys fighting for their country. They show the various paths to enlistment included work, politics, and schools.

The subject of underaged soldiers was widely debated. While it tended to be more of a one-way outcome on the Union side, Confederate authorities (and parents) were concerned about what was called “preserving the seed corn” – making sure that the war didn’t devastate the region demographically. This was much less of a concern in the Union, with its much higher population. And one of the most moving chapters in the book is the account of enslaved and free youth who were forced into military and supporting service on both sides.

Clarke is an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney in Australia and the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Plant is a professor of history at the University of California at San Diego and the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America.

Of Age is more than a significant contribution to our understanding of the Civil War. It changes our perception and understanding of the war itself, through the lens of how both the Union and the Confederacy used some of the most vulnerable members of society to fight. These children, and that’s what they were, children – were more than musicians and helpers. They picked up rifles and fought alongside men of legal age. Clarke and Plant make sure their rightful story is told and their contribution recognized.

Top photograph: Johnny Clem, one of the most famous child soldiers of the Civil War. He joined a Michigan regiment at age 9 and was officially enrolled at age 12. Photo: Library of Congress.

The Missouri Civil War Museum

February 8, 2023 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

Recently, my wife and I visited the Missouri Civil War Museum. I’d heard about it from an online friend, but we’d never visited. It sits in the grounds of the Jefferson Barracks Park, with near Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery nearby, located in eastern St. Louis County adjacent to the Mississippi River. The museum has an admission fee, but it’s reasonable and well worth the cost.

The museum was opened in 2002. It receives no funding from state or federal taxes; it’s a 501(c)3 educational organization. It was created with the specific purpose of saving the Jefferson Parks Recreation Building (built in 1905) and opening a museum dedicated solely to Missouri in the Civil War.

We started with the five-minute introductory video, which explained the history of Jefferson Barracks and how the museum came to be. And then it was on to the exhibits, which are on the main floor and in the basement level.

I was surprised. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the museum’s exhibits are extremely well-done and chock full of artifacts. The first room provided the background for the war – the events leading up to it as well as the 1860 election. But it’s all set in a Missouri context.

I found myself fascinated with a map showing how the counties voted in the 1860 election. Missouri, a slave or border state which remained in the Union, split its vote like many slave states did. But the map shows two counties that voted for Abraham Lincoln – St. Louis County and Gasconade County.

In 1860, the city of St. Louis was part of St. Louis County; the “divorce” happened in 1876, when the city decided it did not want to be part of all the criminal riffraff in the county – a decision that eventually became a huge mistake. The city’s business community and a large German immigrant population supported Lincoln, explaining why the county voted like it did. (There were slaveowners in the city and in St. Louis County, like Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law at Whitehaven, now a national park.)

Robert E. Lee drew this map in 1837 while stationed here.

Gasconade County on the Missouri River voted Republican because of its large German immigrant population. The town of Hermann, Missouri, was founded by immigrants in 1837 and became the county seat in 1842. They selected the area because the high river bluffs reminded them of the Rhine River. It became a center of wine production until Prohibition in 1920; the wine industry began its recovery in the 1960s and it’s part of the nation’s first officially designated wine district (which irritates Californians).

For both counties, the German population helps explain the reason for the vote for Lincoln.

On the main floor, the exhibits are displayed around the perimeter of what had been the recreation hall’s gymnasium. In one tour of the room, you can experience the history of the war and how soldiers and civilians lived through it – or died during it. The museum has really done an effective, engaging job here. More exhibits were downstairs, including how the Civil War has been portrayed by Hollywood.

Looking from the museum to what was once the parade ground.

What you gain from the overall visit is an appreciation for how the state was ravaged during the war years and how guerilla bands on both sides participated in that destruction and death. The exhibits also explain the engagement that began at the federal fort in Pilot Knob, in southeastern Missouri, and ended near Kansas City in the far west. (The state of Missouri also has a Civil War Museum in Pilot Knob, which is well worth a visit.) After the war, many of the Missouri guerrillas drifted into criminal gangs, including Jesse James and the Younger Brothers.

Our museum visit ended at the gift shop on the main floor, which, again, was surprisingly good especially for the new and used books for sale. The museum organization is also renovating the 1918 post exchange building next door, which will be used as a Civil War Studies Center, and it’s received several preservation and recognition awards since it opened. And each year its sponsors a Civil War Symposium, this year scheduled for March 24-26.

And, yes, I will be going back. It’s a wonderful gem of a museum.

“Irish American Civil War Songs” by Catherine Bateson

February 1, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My thoughts, lately, have been turning toward the green. Not environmental green, but Irish green.

A couple of years ago, my brother did one of those “Spit in a tube and mail it in” DNA tests. We’d always understood our heritage to be (in this order) English, Irish, French, and German. The results mostly corroborated that, except in the order: Irish (County Cork, Irish, in fact) led the blood pack, with 38 percent of our DNA. English (Midlands) was in second place at about 18 percent, followed by English (London) at about 10 percent. French (Alsace Lorraine) was there, to be sure, and so was German (Saxon). We even had a surprising 7 percent Scandinavian, which I suspect went back to the Vikings conquering England and Ireland.

The Irish, as it turns out came from our father’s side of the family, through both of his parents. On his father’s side, it likely came sometime in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, on his mother’s, mostly the 19^th century.

The Irish had been emigrating to North America for a considerable period of time, likely as long as European emigration has existed. But it was in the 1840s that Irish emigration became a flood to America, following the Potato Famine. By the time of the Civil War, Irish immigrants accounted for 1.5 million of the total U.S. population (slave and free) of 31.5 million. The U.S. population had increased 35 percent from 1850 to 1860, and a considerable portion of that increase was due to immigration.

Some 200,000 Irishmen / Irish Americans fought in the Civil War. Most fought on the Union side, but about 20,000 signed on as Confederate soldiers. They brought with them their history, their political leanings, and their experiences with the famine and immigration. And they brought their songs.

Catherine Bateson, a lecturer in American history at the University of Kent in England, has documented the importance of Irish music, ballads, and songs in Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood. I knew that music was important for both sides during the Civil War; it was used for marching, ceremonial activities, rest periods, and even for propaganda purposes with both soldiers and civilians. Thousands of songs and hymns were written and sung during the war years.

As Bateson makes clear, the Irish brought with them their longstanding love of ballads and music. They told stories with their songs and ballads, tales of victories and defeats. They expressed their political leanings (and desire for independence from Britain). And their music made its way into general overall American music, including to provide the music (and some of the lyrics) for “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the Confederate anthem, and “The Fighting 69^th,” the song of the famed Irish brigade from New York that provided the basis for so many other songs then and afterward.

Bateson describes the background of Irish music and songs in mid-19thcentury America; how Irish American Civil War songs were produced; the ballads of the battlefield; how lyrics reinforced Irish cultural identity and Irish nationalism; how the songs and ballads expressed wartime politics; and how their music provided Irish Americans with identity and expressions of loyalty. Irish American music celebrated their military leaders, like Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran, and their music provided solace after devastating defeats like the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.

Bateson received her undergraduate degree in history from University College London and spent a year abroad studying at the University of Pennsylvania. She received an M.A. degree in American Studies from King’s College, London and her Ph.D. in history from the University of Edinburgh. She’s also an associate editor in the Irish in the American Civil War project and a former vice-chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America.

Irish American Civil War Songs provides a detailed study of some of the important music associated with the Civil War. It also opens a window into what some 200,000 soldiers sang during the war, and how their music provided very specific meanings.

Top photograph: Soldiers of the Fighting 69th (Irish) Brigade. Michael Corcoran is standing at left, his hand on the gun carriage wheel. Thomas Francis Meagher is standing behind the gun. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Tracing the Life of an Ancestor Isn’t Easy—or Always Accurate

January 25, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Oral history may not be particularly trustworthy.

My father was four years old when his paternal grandfather died, so any direct memories he would have had were likely dim. He told me the story, passed down by his father, that his grandfather Samuel Young had fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, had found himself stranded somewhere in the east when the war ended in 1865, and made his way home primarily by walking. My father said “the Youngs were a family of shopkeepers,” and had lived and worked around Brookhaven in northern Pike Country, and they had owned no slaves. (Pike was a large county; during Reconstruction it was split into two counties, Pike and Lincoln.)

When his grandfather reached home near Brookhaven, Mississippi, my father said, he discovered the family was gone. Neighbors said the entire family had fled to East Texas to escape the devastation of war and Union control. He continued his trek across Louisiana and eventually found his family. At some point, the family returned to Mississippi. My father also told me, again passing down the family story from his father, that Samuel had been too young to enlist, and so became a messenger boy.

The only possible reference I’ve been able to find in Confederate war records to a Samuel Franklin Young is a listing for S.F. Young – but it’s a man from a far northern country in Mississippi, whereas my ancestor would have been listed for Pike County, which was in southern Mississippi on the Louisiana line.

That’s as much as I knew about my great-grandfather. It turns out that much of it is likely wrong.

The first question involves Samuel’s age. His tombstone in a cemetery near Alexandria, Louisiana, says he was born Jan. 22, 1845. The 1850 U.S. census lists his age as 7 years, 7 months, which would make his birth year 1843. The records in the family Bible, which I have, and which were written by Samuel himself, say his birth year was 1846. Another record says 1847.

All of those possible dates, except possibly the last one, are problematic for the “too young to enlist” in the war statement from my father. By 1863, the conscription age for the Confederate Army was 16.

Then I discovered this on one of the popular genealogy sites – another bit of family oral history from a grandson of Samuel through another descendant’s line.

The grandson remembered his grandfather telling stories about his life. Samuel had been born on the Lake Plantation east of Johnston Station in Pike County. His father Franklin owned the plantation and 17 slaves (Franklin is listed as “farmer” on the 1850 census). His father was also involved in building the fill or rail bed for the Illinois Central Railroad from Johnston Station to Summit, Mississippi (the station and line were constructed in 1857).

Samuel, “as was the custom in the family,” was called James Samuel, Clarence Samuel, Samuel Franklin, and simply Samuel.

Then there’s this: Samuel was drafted during the Civil War, but his father paid a substitute $500 and a horse and saddle to take his son’s place. Later, Samuel was drafted anyway, enlisted in the cavalry, and “fought the Indians west of the Mississippi River.” After the war, Franklin supposedly lost his plantation “to the carpetbaggers,” and the family settled elsewhere in Pike County and worked as sharecropper farmers. Samuel later went to work in a sawmill.

There are a lot of problems with those statements. It’s unlikely Samuel would have been called “James Samuel;” he had an older brother named James who died in 1860. His name is listed as “Samuel Franklin Young” in the Bible, and his signature (also in the Bible) is Samuel F. Young. I’m not sure where Clarence came from. And for the Civil War service “fighting the Indians,” Samuel’s other older brother Wylie served in the Confederate military and died in Texas in 1863.

I suspect either Samuel or his grandson combined some stories, or the grandson’s memory combined the stories. But most of this runs counter to my own father’s memory, or at least his recall of what he understood about his grandfather. And a reader recently pointed out that his great-grandfather had also been too young to enlist and served as a messenger boy for the Confederate post office.

And who knows what name Samuel served in the army under? His own? Clarence? James? And perhaps my father, and I by extension, misunderstood the meaning of “messenger boy” and assumed it was military. And here I thought I had all the facts.

What I know for certain about my great-grandfather: he was born in 1845 or 1846 in Johnston Station, Mississippi. He served somewhere in the Confederate Army. At his death in 1920, he was living with an unmarried daughter named Myrtle Young outside Alexandria, La., and he is buried in a cemetery there. He and his wife Octavia had nine children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Octavia died in 1887, and Samuel never remarried.

It’s back to the records to see what other facts I can find or corroborate.

Top photograph: Samuel and Octavia Young about 1880.

William’s Faulkner’s Civil War

January 11, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

If there is one writer who cast the largest shadow upon southern U.S. literature in the 20^th century, it’s William Faulkner. He also cast one of the largest shadows over all American literature in the 20^th century. At my university, few escaped the required courses in American literature without reading the short stories “Barn Burning” and/or “The Bear.” I’d read “Barn Burning in high school, but, taking English rather than American literature in college, I didn’t read Faulkner until years later. It was Flannery O’Connor who led me to Faulkner, and then I read nearly everything he wrote.

Michael Gorra has studied and taught Faulkner, Faulkner’s works, and literature for more than 40 years. The Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, he’s also served as editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. The man knows his Faulkner.

And to know Faulkner, you have to know the Civil War. The war, its aftermath, the “Lost Cause,” and the memory of the war – even by those who didn’t experience it – is a major theme, perhaps the major theme, in the history and literature of the South. Gorra knows his Civil War, too, and he’s a Connecticut-born Yankee who teaches at a Yankee university in Massachusetts.

Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War is a remarkable work of literary criticism. It’s about the themes of the war in Faulkner’s writings, but to understand those themes, you have to grasp the story of the war and its significant details. Gorra does that, but he does more. He’s read the letters and memoirs of people who fought and lived the war. He’s studied the major battles, especially the ones that play even a small role in Faulkner’s novels and stories. He’s walked the terrain of the war, and he’s studied how the war was fought in Faulkner’s home state of Mississippi.

All of this permeates Faulkner’s novels and short stories. Sometimes it’s an overt influence; sometimes, it’s very subtle. Reading Faulkner years after university might have been the best thing that happened to me in understanding his works, because I recognized how much he was talking about had permeated my own family.

Literary criticism is often tedious and difficult. Gorra’s work on Faulkner here is anything but that. His writing is accessible, and he tells Civil War stories that amplify and expand upon what Faulkner did. He makes the writer understandable in a way few critics can. And he doesn’t shy away from the controversial aspects of Faulkner’s works, and there are plenty of controversial aspects.

Gorra’s published works include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of An American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (2004); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (1997); and The English Novel at Mid-Century (1990). He’s also served as editor for volumes of stories by Joseph Conrad and Henry James for Penguin. His awards and recognitions include a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including a Public Scholar Award, and a National Book Critics Circle award for his work as a reviewer.

The Saddest Words tells a wonderful story of how one of the most important American writers used family history, family stories, and historical events to create what became some of the most significant literary works of the 20^thcentury. The Civil War sits at the center of it all, much like it continues to sit at the center of American life.

What My History Books Left Out

January 4, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In early November, we visited friends and family in the New Orleans area. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves with some of our oldest friends wandering the French Quarter. For a break, we stopped at the small café operated by the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum that is all about the history of the city. In the shop (all museums everywhere have shops), our friend pointed me toward a book called Afro-Creole Poetry by Clint Bruce.

The work is a collection of 79 poems that were published between 1862 and 1870 in two newspapers in New Orleans – L’Union and La Tribune Nouvelle-Orleans. As the names employ, they were published in French: La Tribune also had an English edition. L’Union began publication a few months after the city fell to the ships of Union Admiral David Farragut. The paper lasted about two years, and it was almost immediately replaced by La Tribune.

Louis Charles Roudanez, a founder of both newspapers

Many newspapers published poetry in the 19^th century; a few continued doing that in the early years of the 20^th century before the practice died out. These two French newspapers were unusual and unique for the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. They were owned, operated, and almost entirely written by Blacks. Specifically, the newspapers were owned and written by Free Blacks.

Clint Bruce, who assembled this collection of Afro-Creole poetry (with the poems displayed in both French and English), provides considerable background about the publishers and writers. They came from an elite class of Blacks in the city. Many of the families had been there for generations; many came as refuges of the revolution in Haiti or from French-speaking families expelled from Cuba by the Spanish governor after Napoleon invaded Spain in Europe. While vastly outnumbered by enslaved Blacks in Louisiana, their small numbers belied their influence. When the Union occupied the city in 1862, this group of Free Blacks rose to almost immediate prominence, and their members played a significant role in Reconstruction in both the city and the state.

Before I read Afro-Creole Poetry, I was largely ignorant of any of this. I was born and raised in New Orleans. I took a year of required state history in middle school. We studied the Civil War and Reconstruction in high school and college. I attended LSU, which had at the time some of the top Civil War historians in the country. My junior year in college, I took a semester of Louisiana history. What I came out of all that with was a very different picture of Reconstruction in Louisiana and almost complete ignorance of Free Blacks.

I tend to look suspiciously at, and discount, efforts to rewrite American history to suit current political narratives. There’s a lot of that going on. But I have to ask myself why this group pf people, and all they accomplished, had disappeared from the history I studied in school. The answer I’ve come up with, mostly through other reading, is that Civil War historians for a long time focused on the major players, like Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson, Davis, and generals on both sides, and on a barebones account of Reconstruction that focused primarily on how it ended with the election of 1876 and the deal cut to make Rutherford Hayes the president. I think this is less a case of “systemic racism” and more a case of “this is how history was studied and understood.” What I never knew was that Reconstruction didn’t begin in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy, but in 1862 with the capture of my hometown.

Yesterday, I posted a review at Tweetspeak Poetry of Afro-Creole Poetry that focuses on the poems with a little of the background. But the book and what it represents needed a larger interpretation, a larger understanding. And it’s a reminder to me not to be so quick to judge all reinterpretations of historical events, especially those that are particularly close to home.

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