Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution by Caroline Cox, and: Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War by John A. Ruddiman (review)

Scholars have long pointed to how central youth was to the American Revolution. The North American colonists were a youthful people, with those below age sixteen constituting roughly 50 percent of the population. Dominating popular novels of the day, motifs of coming of age helped Revolutionary era Americans imagine a new kind of filial relationship that justified their rejection of Great Britain’s authority, as Jay Fliegelman argued in Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority. Subsequent images of the Revolution as a natural maturation from childish dependence to adult independence undercut its potential radicalism, according to Michael Kammen’s A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination. More recently, Holly Brewer has complicated the notion of the Revolution as a validation of youth by tracing the changing place of children in Anglo-American legal and political thought. Her study, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, shows how Revolutionary thought, with its privileging of the ability to reason and contractual relationships, furthered the exclusion of children and youth from the political realm. Yet if scholars have done much to identify the evolving status of Revolutionary-era youth as literary symbols and legal entities, they have done comparatively little to illuminate their lived experiences.

The two studies under review here go a long way toward remedying this lack. Caroline Cox’s Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution focuses specifically on soldiers younger than sixteen, the age at which most colonial boys began to perform militia service. In contrast, John Ruddiman’s Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War concentrates on neither beardless boys nor full-fledged adults, but rather youths in their late teens and early twenties whose struggle for personal independence unfolded amid the larger national struggle. Though both books rely on similar sources, including diaries, letters, courts martial records, and veteran pension files, they differ not only in terms of the cohorts they feature but also in their framing and approach.

Cox’s goal is twofold. First, building on her well-received social history of the Continental Army (A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army), she seeks to “widen the historical record” by encompassing boy soldiers who have been “dismissed as peripheral to the larger story of the war.” Second, she attempts to use the experiences of boy soldiers to “provide a window into the varied experiences of childhood, work, and war in Revolutionary America” (3). More successful at the former than the latter, Cox vividly brings to life the compelling and often tragic stories of the conflict’s youngest enlistees. Some boys exercised significant agency, running off to enlist out of patriotic sentiment or to escape abusive parents or masters. In other cases, parents and guardians enlisted boys to serve as substitutes, typically for relatives whom the family could less easily spare (including the boys’ own fathers). Still other boys were enlisted in local militias in hopes of protecting them from invading British forces or to prevent them from being drafted into the Continental Army.

Although Cox does not venture an estimate herself, the studies of extant muster rolls she cites suggest that boys age fifteen and under composed somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2 percent of the military, with the majority serving in militias rather than as regular soldiers (45). This tiny minority represented a significant increase from the past, Cox argues, for very few boys under sixteen served in the British or provincial militaries during the colonial era. She attributes this change to both technological developments and...