Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front
By James Marten
Ivan R. Dee, 209 pages, $26
Considering how obsessed Americans are with the Civil War, it is astonishing how little we know about the lives of children during the terrible conflict of 1861-1865. According to James Marten, children made up one-third of the population in 1860. Surely the ways in which they first experienced and then remembered the war were critical to the development of the nation.
Marten's "Children for the Union" details the impact of the Civil War on the lives of Northern white children. Before the war, new commercially produced toys and games together with increasing numbers of children's magazines taught youngsters the principles held by their parents. Naturally, youngsters also observed and participated in the explosive politics that led to the war, attending speeches, marching in parades and hitting boys who supported the wrong party. Daniel Beard's mother planned to take her boys to see Abraham Lincoln and then "give them both a sound whipping" so they would never forget seeing the new president whose election had divided the Union.
The war itself entered Northern children's lives through magazine stories, playtime re-enactments of famous battles, patriotic songs and moving panoramas of war scenes sold by professional entertainers. At the same time, the loss of fathers and brothers to the front placed unprecedented burdens upon younger children. They became responsible for helping to support the family financially and emotionally.
Indeed, according to Marten, "the war provided an opportunity to be truly useful, to display the qualities of hard work and reliability and maturity that were the focus of much of the education and childrearing practices that shaped their lives." Popular stories told children that they were " 'just as patriotic as . . . a soldier in the field' " if they shouldered household duties " 'voluntarily, and in the right spirit.' " Some went so far as to assure children that good behavior would make God protect the soldiers they loved, devastating youngsters when family members were killed. Northern children were mercifully spared much exposure to the battles themselves, but girls raised money for supplies and picked lint for bandages, while a few boys joined the Army as drummers.
Despite the death and destruction of the war, Marten suggests, children's wartime excitement and patriotism became postwar optimism as the children grew up. A boy during the sectional conflict, Theodore
Roosevelt threw himself into his own arduous physical tests and longed for another war to "toughen up" young men and keep the nation's morals pure. In contrast, the war convinced Henry Cabot Lodge not to worry about national declension. Lodge believed that America could do anything because it had come through " 'the most terrible ordeal which any nation can undergo.' " There was a dark underside to this postwar morality and optimism, though, according to Marten, as Americans insisted on "force-feeding 'American' values and habits" to immigrants and American Indians.
"Children for the Union" provides a welcome glimpse into the lives of Northern middle-class children of the Civil War era. Anecdotes trump analysis here, but they beg us to consider how young Americans might internalize a distant conflict and then carry its lessons into the nation's future.