Children and Youth during the Civil War Era

4. A “Rebel to [His] Govt. and to His Parents”: The Emancipation of Tommy Cave

| 65 4 A “Rebel to [His] Govt. and to His Parents” The Emancipation of Tommy Cave Thomas F. Curran In mid-1862, despite his father’s opposition, fifteen-year-old Tommy Cave ran away from his home in Boone County, Missouri, and joined the Confederate army. Six months later the boy was captured just a few miles from his father’s farm and, like other prisoners of war taken in the state, was sent to St. Louis. It was not uncommon for Federal authorities in St. Louis to release prisoners under the age of eighteen to their parents, but not so with Cave. After investigating the facts, Provost Marshal General Franklin Dick determined that Cave had rebelled against his parents in the same way that he had rebelled against the Federal government. Instead of returning the boy to his parents, Dick decided that the army would continue to hold Cave as a prisoner of war. By doing this, Dick essentially freed Cave from his parents’ control and treated him as any other adult prisoner. In fact, Cave did not want to be released to his parents. “I want to be Exchanged & sent South,” Cave informed his captors, so that he could remain in the Confederate army. He received his wish. Dick sent Cave to the military prison in Alton, Illinois, with other rebel captives until an exchange of prisoners could be arranged. The boy would be paroled and exchanged with about a thousand other Confederates from Alton in mid-1863. He quickly returned to active duty, and a year later he died far from home on a battlefield in Virginia.1 The Civil War was more than a contest of brother against brother. As Amy Murrell Taylor shows in her recent study, the conflict divided families in many ways. Arguably, nowhere were the wartime divisions more complex than in Missouri. For Tommy Cave, joining the Confederate army meant rejecting the authority of his parents (despite the fact that his father sympathized with the South) in the same way that he rejected the authority of the U.S. government. James Marten has noted that when Civil War– 66 | Thomas F. Curran era boys became soldiers, “their military service made them de facto adults; their experiences resembled the exploits of the men with whom they served more than those of the children who stayed at home.”2 While this is certainly accurate, one can see from the records that boy soldiers belonging to the Confederate army were not always treated by Federal authorities the same as their adult counterparts. This was particularly true for young Confederate prisoners of war in Missouri. The decisions of Union authorities in the case of Tommy Cave and other underage detainees shed light on the complicated familial issues generated by the war, as well as on the broad discretion Union authorities had in carrying out their duties. In particular, the provost marshals general responsible for deciding these cases found themselves acting , in a way, as proto–family court judges. Although they could hardly have predicted that the twentieth century would see the rise of a judicial system intended solely for juveniles and their specific problems, the cases of underage soldiers in conflict with their parents over military service provide dim foreshadowing of the juvenile justice system. In cases such as that of Tommy Cave, the provost marshal general would have to weigh the interests of the community or the nation against the interests of the boy and his family. Tommy Cave’s family background made him a likely supporter of the Confederate cause. The Cave family could trace its roots back to colonial Virginia . Both of Tommy’s parents, Major William S. Cave and Margaret Harrison Cave, came from prominent families that made their way to Missouri in the early nineteenth century. It is unclear how William obtained the sobriquet “Major.” A “William S. Cave” served briefly as a private in a unit of Missouri volunteers during the Black Hawk War in 1832. William would have been twenty at the time. Nevertheless, he probably received the title from peacetime militia service. William Cave’s farm was located only one mile north of the town of Columbia in Boone County, which sat at the center of the state on the north bank of the Missouri River. Visible from the cupola of the Columbia courthouse, the Cave farm on the eve of the Civil War was home to a growing family of six children. They included five sons and one...