Confederate Phoenix: Rebel Children and Their Families in South Carolina (review)

An often overlooked fact of the U.S. Civil War was the significant number of its observers and participants who were children. Forty percent of the white population in South Carolina, for example, was under the age of fifteen during the war. Yet only in the last decade, with James Marten's The Children's Civil War (1998) leading the way, have historians begun to reckon with the implications of this demographic fact, making Edmund Drago's study of South Carolina's "rebel children" a welcome new study.

The children in Confederate Phoenix were in no way sheltered from the war but instead deeply embedded in its violence and deprivations. In a series of thematically organized chapters, Drago traces the various roles children assumed, from the "boy soldiers" who guarded forts and served as drummer boys, to the students who read newly published Confederate textbooks, to the orphans who suffered from insufficient state aid into the postwar years. He tells about the older children who took advantage of loosened courtship rituals and about the youth who made a game out of Sherman's siege of Charleston, laughing and clapping as they watched missiles soar past their homes and fail to hit their marks. In each of these chapters Drago provides a wide-ranging collection of fascinating stories culled from extensive archival research.

The most promising and original part of the book is Drago's exploration of the postwar period. Reconstruction, or what he refers to as "The Civil War, Part II," opened up another new role for children—as a focal point for South Carolinians' remembrance of the Civil War (108). Adults recognized that children needed to become the standard-bearers of the Confederacy into the future, and the children initially appeared to oblige them. Boys, in particular, became "overly eager" in their commemoration of the South and had to be restrained from violent acts (121). Drago stops short of examining how this dynamic persisted as these children reached adulthood and assumed positions of leadership and power in the South. He instead looks at how future generations of white children became similarly indoctrinated in the South's Confederate—and therefore, racial—mores, telling us about Strom Thurmond's childhood experience of hearing the fiery speeches of Ben Tillman and Cole Blease. By focusing on this cyclical nature of southern childhood rather than following the wartime generation of children consistently into the future, Drago misses an opportunity to assess what long-term impact the war had on the children who lived through it—a central question that begs for an answer.

Drago is more suggestive than conclusive on other issues surrounding children. Throughout the book, he argues that patriarchy was at once threatened and strengthened over the course of the war—a familiar yet significant observation. But while talking in general terms about patriarchy's effect on families, he leaves implicit how a child's position in the patriarchy changed or stayed the same over time, or what that position meant specifically to children. An underexplored moment, for example, comes in a chapter on Sherman's March, in which Drago mentions how boys, amid the presence of black occupying troops in Charleston, helped older women, carried water for girls, and did errands for other fearful women—but does not explore what this reveals about the particular demands that the patriarchal ethos placed on white boys living on the home front. Drago may be hesitant to draw such conclusions for good reason: researching children is a difficult enterprise when their voices are so quiet or difficult to isolate in the historical record. Yet, a fuller understanding of children in the war requires such analysis.

Drago's book, nevertheless, is full of tantalizing evidence that will undoubtedly raise questions for its readers and, one hopes, will prompt additional research into the history of the war's children.