January 3, 1865---Children

JANUARY 3, 1865:  

Children played a vital but underappreciated role in the Civil War. Much of what a child’s role was was dependent upon his or her socioeconomic class.

Poor and working-class rural children were at first least affected by the war. It had always been traditional that members of farm families contributed to the work on the farm as soon as they were able. Young children worked the kitchen garden and were sent into the henhouse to collect eggs as soon as they were able to do so without breaking them. Little boys were allowed to tag along and help (to the limits of their abilities) with chores, and little girls were schooled in the traditional home economics. None of this changed with the coming of the war, except that boys and girls oft took on responsibilities earlier and greater than had been usual to compensate for fathers and older brothers gone to war. 

Poor and working class urban children were often impacted more severely than rural children. In a nation with no Child Labor laws, Northern youngsters often went to work to supplement family incomes as fathers and older boys went off to war.  Children were sometimes chained to the machinery they operated in order to keep them from wandering. Industrial accidents were common and often tragic. 

School-age children in attendance were kept in school as long as possible. By 1860, all northern States had compulsory (though erratically enforced) education laws, and the relative lack of disruption on the Northern home front during the war kept most school children who attended in attendance. Disruptions occurred when teachers went off to war, when the battle lines came into the North, and when fathers were killed in battle. Often, children had to drop out of school to help support their families. The absence (or loss) of the male parent frequently resulted in the descent of the family into penury, for though poor and working-class women were employed they most often earned barely more than their young working children. 

To counteract this serious social problem, Theodore Roosevelt Senior, of New York, devised the Allotment System, through which Union soldiers could have a portion of their pay sent directly home. In 1862, the United States instituted the first Disability Pensions for wounded warriors; by war’s end, these payments were extended to widows, orphans, and survivors. As of 2014,  Irene Triplett, aged 84, the daughter of Civil War veteran Mose Triplett (who became a father at 84) remains the last person to receive a Civil War Survivor’s Benefit of $73.13 per month. (Mose, who switched sides in the war at least once, received his pension as a Union soldier; Confederate soldiers were not permitted to receive payments for their service until 1958 --- and only one man ever received a check on that basis.)

Most southern States did not pass compulsory education laws until after 1900.  Southern children were often homeschooled during the war; regular schoolhouse education was spotty, particularly as areas of the South became battlefields time and again.  

Among the upper middle class and the wealthy (whether Northern burgher or Southern planter) childhood resembled the Victorian ideal of Nanny (or Mammy) and Nursery. Wealthy men (like Theodore Roosevelt Senior) could afford to pay $300 for a substitute to take their place in the ranks, and so remained at home (though among a certain class of Southerners this was considered unmanly. Such men often raised and equipped their own brigades or regiments and led them in combat). 

For the children of wealthy Northerners, the war had a certain distance; some loved ones died, of course, but such losses did not generally drive their families into poverty. For such children, publishers (almost exclusively in the North) produced colorful maps and atlases such as Following the Flag so they could follow the war. Faux uniforms with toy swords and firearms were popular toys for boys, as were brightly-painted leaden toy soldiers like The Virginia Campaign, 1864. Young Teedie Roosevelt was perhaps not very uncommon when he asked God in his prayers to “grind the Southern troops to powder,” although what his Georgia-born Mother, Grandmamma and Auntie thought of this supplication can only be guessed.

Such fripperies were rarer in the South with its more limited resources, though the well-off families of Richmond, Charleston, and other such locales could afford to have such books printed or toys custom made. Occasionally, toy shipments were smuggled in from the North and the blue uniforms of the toy soldiers were painted gray! 

The "Virginia Campaign" playset marketed by a Northern toymaker

Southern children suffered directly the losses of friends and loved ones and homes, the dislocations that all victims of war are heir to. Carrie Berry wrote mournfully in her diary, “Wednesday. this was my birthday. I was ten years old, But I did not have a cake times were too hard so I celebrated with ironing. I hope by my next birthday we will have peace in our land so that I can have a nice dinner.”

The Confederate government encouraged a kind of cultic nationalism. Books on “Confederate” history, “Confederate” science, “Confederate” math and “Confederate” spelling were subsidized by the leadership in Richmond.  

Rarely recognized for their contributions are the boy soldiers of the Civil War. The Confederate Army enforced a minimum age requirement of 16 for its soldiers, though as the war lengthened and manpower needs grew, in practice this became 14, and recruiters turned a blind eye to strapping 12 year olds who chose to pick up the rifle.  Neither the Confederate nor the Union Navy had a minimum age requirement, and ten year olds sometimes shipped out as cooks’ assistants, messboys, and the like. The Union too had a minimum age of 16 for combat soldiers, though many younger fellows signed up. The drummer boys of both armies and the powder monkeys of both navies were often selected based on their build and height (the slighter the better) and these very young men were routinely under fire in combat.  The record-holder as the youngest boy to serve in the Civil War was a nine year old drummer boy who saw action at Antietam.

A Union Navy "Powder Monkey," aged about ten

A Union Drummer Boy, aged about ten

Orphans were a terrible and ubiquitous by-product of the Civil War. It is estimated that besides the 700,000 soldiers who died while in service at least 150,000 civilians died --- of disease, of privation, or because they were trapped between the warring armies. 

A common photopose of the Civil War was one in which a child clasped a picture of his or her absent parent. Frequently that parent was deceased.

The statistics are uncertain, but a significant portion of the civilians killed in the war were women with children --- often many children. In the depths of crisis some desperate women sold their children for money or food. Annie Oakley (1860-1926) the famous exhibition shooter, was one of these bartered children.  

Annie Oakley

In 1860, approximately 50% of Americans were under the age of 19. This meant that there was an immense population of youths in need of care during the Civil War. 

At the end of the war no one could begin to guess the number of widows, orphans and half-orphans in America. There are, however, 1.3 million Civil War Widow and Orphan Pension applications on file in the National Archives today (all applicants were Unionists, since former Confederate survivors were not permitted to apply; however, .75 million otherwise-potentially qualified persons may have lived in the South). 

Shattered families clearly posed a massive, unaddressed social problem on the same scale as Reconstruction and the fate of the Freedmen. 

Orphaned children roamed the worst sections of cities in packs perpetrating crimes to survive; many (females and males) became child prostitutes; others became hopeless drug addicts; some simply wandered the country seeking food, shelter and care.  

A typical "Orphan Train" of the late 19th-early 20th Centuries crammed with homeless children. Orphans to be adopted were shipped west in boxcars just like cargo, and were put up on display at the various stations along the way. Whether they thrived in loving homes or were physically, mentally, and sexually abused or treated as chattels was entirely up to luck. There was no social service system to monitor their well-being.

The various States, and numerous social welfare and religious societies, built the “classic” huge, impersonal, and forbidding stone and brick orphanages of yore; other groups sponsored “Orphan Trains” which resettled orphans with families on the frontier.  The Orphan Train system operated between 1854 and 1929, and 250,000 children were “put up” to be shown and adopted, often on the same platforms where slaves had once been sold. There was little regulation of these efforts, and little follow-up. How many of these orphans died or were abused, neglected, and exploited may never be known. The orphan problem remained surprisingly invisible in the contemporary Press, though there is little doubt that the issue provided the first spark for the subsequent enlightenment of the later Progressive Era.  On the positive side of the equation, the modern concept of adoption was born out of the Civil War.