Children and Youth during the Civil War Era

Part II: Children of War

| 63 Part II Children of War One need not be a grown-up to imbibe the peculiar feeling that hangs over everything in time of war. It was something like that sensation that goes about when a contagious disease suddenly breaks out in a peaceful community and the infected houses are placarded and streets barricaded. Young and old felt it weighing down like an incubus. —Hermon W. DeLong Sr., Boyhood Reminiscences The war was continually rising in front of me to bar me from something I wanted, whether food, clothes, or playthings. —Robert Hugh Martin, A Boy of Old Shenandoah1 Civil War children and youth continued playing, going to school, arguing with their families, doing chores, and celebrating typical coming-ofage markers. Yet, as revealed in the recollections of these two boys—one a Yankee living safely in upstate New York, the other a young rebel living close to the fighting in Virginia—show, the lives of children and youth were inevitably altered by the conflict. It added to their chores, took away, sometimes forever, fathers and brothers, closed schools, and offered unprecedented distractions . Part II looks at some of the ways that the war intruded on and, in some instances, changed the lives of children and youth in both sections. Teenagers have always challenged their parents; even though adolescence was not identified by name until late in the nineteenth century, its characteristic tumult and the resulting prickly relationships with parents were recognized for centuries before it had a name. The war provided yet another way for youths to rebel, and Thomas Curran offers the example of one Confederate boy whose confrontation with family and other authority figures took a special form due to the war. 64 | Part II. Children of War Although many northern boys also ran off to war without their parents’ permission—the famous drummer boy John Clem is just one prominent example—most Yankee children and youth enjoyed a more distant relationship with the war. Two essays offer very different accounts of the ways in which juvenile magazines adapted their customary content to the developing interests of wartime readers. Paul Ringel shows how the war gave the entrepreneurial editor of the Youth’s Companion the opportunity to provide sensational adventure stories—the war would, he argues, permanently change the nature of juvenile periodicals—while at the same promoting patriotism and piety. Sean Scott examines the ways in which the near obsession with death in prewar Christian magazines for children may have prepared children to accept the unbearable human cost of war by infusing catastrophic loss with spirituality and providing a language for expressing and processing grief. The most jarring experiences for American children and youth occurred, of course, in the Confederacy, where encounters with Union troops, the destruction of the institution of slavery, and the disruption of the southern economy reached into virtually every corner of their lives. Young Confederate women experienced the same hardships as their mothers, but their particular needs and desires were further interrupted by the absence of young men and the appearance of Yankee soldiers. As they tried to retain a grip on their traditions and values, they had to navigate wartime exigencies that often reshaped or, at times, exaggerated southern assumptions. As Victoria Ott shows, courtship rituals transcended biological imperatives and social niceties to become a political statement for elite Confederate teenagers, while Lisa Tendrich Frank’s essay suggests that the lives of Confederate girls exposed to the trials and horrors of Sherman’s March were altered materially but also psychologically; it is no coincidence that some of the most fervent believers in the Lost Cause were women who had lived through the war, formed memorial societies, and published books of reminiscences with evocative titles like Our Women in the War: The Lives They Lived; the Deaths They Died.2 Notes 1. Hermon W. DeLong Sr., Boyhood Reminiscences (Life in Danville, 1855–1872), with Other Sketches (Dansville, NY: Dansville Press, 1913), 70; Robert Hugh Martin, A Boy of Old Shenandoah (Parsons, WV: McClain, 1977), 46. 2. Our Women in the War: The Lives They Lived; the Deaths They Died (Charleston, SC: Weekly News and Courier, 1885). ...