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The Tragic History of the U.S. Child Warriors

Khalid Elhassan June 9, 2020 34 min

30. The Young Prussian Immigrant

Drum of a Mozart Regiment company. Wikimedia

Gustav Albert Schurmann was born in 1849 in Westphalia, Prussia. The following year, his father, a talented musician, took his family and fled revolutionary Europe to America, settling in New York City. As Gustav grew up, his father taught him how to play a variety of musical instruments.

After the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter in 1861, war fever engulfed the country. That spring, eleven-year-old Gustav was working the streets of New York City as a shoeshine boy. Like thousands who swarmed the recruiting stations eager to enlist, the young boy was swept up in the excitement. So he sought to join any regiment that would accept a musically-talented child as a drummer boy. His father had volunteered as a musician in the 40th New York Volunteer Infantry, later known as “The Mozart Regiment” because of the high percentage of musicians in its ranks, so Gustav sought to join.

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.