which jointly won the Australia Historical Association’s biennial Hancock prize for the best first book in any field of history. 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.
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, and reported the following:
Page 99 is part of our book’s fifth chapter, entitled “Instructive Violence: Impressionable Minds and the Cultivation of Courage in Boys.” Here, we attempt to unravel a seeming paradox: although mid-nineteenth century Americans sentimentalized children and childhood to an extraordinary degree, they did not attempt to shield young readers from graphic depictions of violence. On the contrary, authors of children’s literature often dwelled on scenes of bloodshed and cruelty. This was especially true of works that attempted to communicate abolitionist messages—the subject of page 99. Such literature “taught that only those who could look pain and suffering in the eye could develop the inner resources that would support moral behavior.” More broadly, educational theorists believed that lessons had to seize children’s attention and grip their imagination to make lasting impressions. How better to accomplish this than with descriptions of flayed flesh or decapitated heads?Learn more about Of Age at the Oxford University Press website.
But what does all this have to do with boy soldiers? At first glance, not very much. If a reader were handed page 99 and asked to surmise the subject of our book, they might guess it to be a cultural study of juvenile literature in antebellum America. But Of Age is instead a sprawling study of underage enlistment that spans the nineteenth century while centering on the Civil War. Although it includes plenty of cultural analysis, it could also be described as legal, military, medical, and social history. In this sense, our book fails the Page 99 Test.
Still, by explaining why so many writers were willing, even eager, to expose children to violent images, we begin to account for how underage enlistment could have occurred on such a large scale during the Civil War. As we show, a full ten percent of the US forces were below the age of eighteen on enlistment. This seemingly blithe disregard for the potential effects of violence on young minds is just one piece of a larger puzzle. We also point to the lack of standardized birth certificates, the tendency to privilege size and skill over numerical age, and especially the age-integrated nature of social life. Because boys in their mid-teen years routinely studied, socialized, and labored with men of military age, many were inclined to waive off age restrictions, believing themselves fully capable of serving.
After explaining the multiple factors that paved the way for mass underage enlistment, Of Age turns to heart of the story: how did the United States and the Confederacy respectively deal with the presence of so many young people in the ranks? The answers are often surprising and counterintuitive. In the United States, attempts to grapple with the problem of underage enlistment—and the backlash that it produced among frustrated parents—made the issue a conduit for larger debates. As the federal government asserted more authority over the state-based volunteers, and as service in volunteer regiments gradually came to look more like service in the regular army, families found it difficult if not impossible to recover underage sons. In the minds of many northerners, including loyal Unionists, the government’s vise-like grip on enlisted soldiers, regardless of age, epitomized the dangers inherent in the growing consolidation of military power.
--Marshal Zeringue
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