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The Tragic History of the U.S. Child Warriors

Khalid Elhassan June 9, 2020 34 min

14. If At First, You Don’t Succeed…

A Civil War Union Army recruitment poster. Pintrest

In 1862, a Union Army recruiter visited the small town of Alma, Wisconsin, set up shop in the schoolhouse, and made his pitch to the locals. One of them, fifteen-year-old Elisha Stockwell, Jr., stepped forward to enlist, but his father caught wind of what his son was trying to do. So the senior Stockwell marched to the gathering, confronted the recruiter, and informed him that his son was still a child, and that he did not consent to the boy’s enlistment. Since underage recruits needed their guardians’ permission (a requirement frequently ignored during the Civil War), the recruiter was forced to cross the crestfallen Elisha’s name off the list.

The child did not stay crestfallen for long. Soon thereafter, Elisha ran away to enlist, assisted by a friend who put him in touch with another recruiter. The duo walked Elisha through the steps/ lies necessary in order for a minor to enlist without his guardian’s consent. With the requisite winks and nods, and a cooperating captain falsely vouching for his age, Elisha was duly enrolled in the 14^th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment.

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.