B Is for Battle: Children and the Civil War

Any historian of childhood faces especially daunting challenges. Not only must he or she contend with the usual erasures and elisions of historical knowledge, but in reconstructing childhood he or she confronts the absence of subjects who speak for themselves. Children usually do not write their own stories; rather, adult memoirists articulate their younger selves, often framing their accounts through nostalgic mythmaking or political, social, and aesthetic ideologies. The historian James Marten takes up the important charge of reassembling Civil War childhood, offering in The Children's Civil War the first comprehensive overview of the effects of the national conflict on the daily experience of northern and southern children. Marten scoured archives, manuscript collections, diaries, children's magazines and novels, memoirs, autobiographies, newspaper reports, correspondence, and interviews for evidence of the formative influence of the war on children's experience as family members and as players in the national theater. Though sometimes Marten employs his source material unreflectively by offering adult versions of childhood as historical fact, overall, the text satisfies in its outline of the war's impact on children's cultural roles and political agency.

Marten's admirable thesis argues that children were vitally engaged in the conflict, invested emotionally, morally, physically, and economically in the discord that upset their lives. Children became involved through the loss of fathers and brothers, the destruction and privation of the southern landscape, the northern practice of material sacrifice and moral exertion, and the psychological triumph and overwhelming pressures of emancipation. Their replies took various forms, from charitable participation in soldiers' aid societies and clothing drives, to public political assertions in demonstrations and parades, to creative response in privately published magazines and newspapers, to military action in imitative play and attempts to enlist. Actively politicized, Civil War children could not and would not stand outside the theater of war.

To set the groundwork for investigating children's political responses, Marten traces sources of information about the war that were available to children in the North and the South. He begins by acknowledging that children were consumers of mass media interpretations of the conflict. Describing the array of war-based games and toys, Marten argues for the pervasiveness of war culture even in the North, noting that young people could "imbibe the war spirit by simply browsing in their favorite shops and stores" (18). Panoramas, sanitary fairs, and the schoolhouse immersed children in public demonstrations of partisan belief, as well as information about battles, generals, and brigades. Other major sources of information about the war included correspondence from fathers and brothers. In a particularly moving chapter, Marten frames out the war's effect on definitions and responsibilities of fatherhood. Offering dozens of affecting letters to and from the battlefield, Marten argues that "[t]he overwhelming loneliness and longing of fathers and children, heartbreaking as it was, revealed the contours of the relationships between nineteenth-century children and fathers in ways that may not have been as clear if the war had not intervened" (70).

By studying Civil War correspondence, features of Victorian fatherhood come into relief, such as fathers' intense affection for their children and close involvement with their upbringing. The war also reconfigured conceptual categories by linking fatherhood with patriotism since "being a good and loyal soldier was now one of the duties of being a good father" (82). Writing "from the high moral ground they attained through patriotism and courage" (87), Civil War fathers amplified didactic and ethical concerns, instructing children (and wives) in proper ways of conducting their lives. Such instructions reveal a distressing urgency, for as Marten reminds us, many of these soldiers died shortly after writing their didactic missives. As Civil War children learned about the battlefront and the "minutiae of military life" (84) through their fathers' letters, they also absorbed their fathers' concern, affection, patriotism, and moral leadership, which may not have been articulated as clearly outside...