← Back to the front page

The Most Unlikely Soldiers In The US Civil War

Khalid Elhassan December 6, 2023 28 min

Getting Around Age Restrictions

Children are children, full of curiosity and frequently heedless of and insensate to danger and mortal risk to life and limb. There was thus no shortage of instances in which Civil War child soldiers snuck off to the firing lines in order to see for themselves the excitement of battle from up close. Some even picked up rifles and rushed into the maelstrom, to fight and die alongside the adults. Officially, there were age restrictions – in the Union, enlistees had to be over sixteen. In real life, however, those restrictions were easily gotten around, or outright ignored.

For example, many an under-aged Northern boy, eager to enlist, had little trouble in finding a recruiter willing to sign him up so long as he was willing to put one hand on the Bible, raise the other, and swear that he was “over 16”. Some children ingeniously reconciled their consciences with the lie by writing the number “16” on a piece of paper. They then stuck it to the bottom of a shoe, which enabled them to honestly swear that they were “over 16”.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.