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Of Age is the first study to focus on underage enlistment in the US Civil War. By tracing the heated conflicts between parents who sought to recover their sons and military and federal officials who resisted their claims, this book exposes larger, underlying struggles over the centralization of wartime legal and military power.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Terminology
- Introduction
- Part I: Parental Rights and the Duty to Bear Arms: Congress, Courts, and the Military
- Ch. 1: Competing Obligations: Debating Underage Enlistment in the War of 1812
- Ch. 2: A Great Inconvenience: Prewar Legal Disputes Over Underage Enlistees
- Ch. 3: Underdeveloped Bodies: Calculating the Ideal Enlistment Age
- Part II: The Social and Cultural Origins of Underage Enlistment
- Ch. 4: Instructive Violence: Impressionable Minds and the Cultivation of Courage
- Ch. 5: Pride of the Nation: The Iconography of Child Soldiers and Drummer Boys
- Ch. 6: Paths to Enlistment: Work, Politics, and School
- Part III: Male Youth and Military Service in the Civil War Era
- Ch. 7: Contrary to All Law: Debating Underage Service in the United States
- Ch. 8: Preserving the Seed Corn: Youth Enlistment and Demographic Anxiety in the Confederacy
- Ch. 9: Forced into Service: Enslaved and Unfree Youths in the Confederate and Union Armies
- Ch. 10: A War Fought by Boys: Reimagining Boyhood and Underage Service after the Civil War
- Coda: Young Veterans in Postwar America
- Appendix A: Counting Underage Soldiers
- Appendix B: Using the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death database to Determine Age of Enlistment in the Union Army, by Christopher Roudiez
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Frances M. Clarke is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. She is the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North.
Rebecca Jo Plant is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America.
Summary
Of Age is the first study to focus on underage enlistment in the US Civil War. By tracing the heated conflicts between parents who sought to recover their sons and military and federal officials who resisted their claims, this book exposes larger, underlying struggles over the centralization of wartime legal and military power.
Additional text
Elegantly conceived and compellingly written... In a crowded field, Clarke and Plant have achieved something quite remarkable. They have written a groundbreaking history of an entirely neglected topic. By so doing, they create an analytical framework that reshapes our understanding of a society at war and the long-term social, political, and legal consequences of wartime debates over boy soldiers. The authors must be commended for this singular achievement.
