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The Weirdest Ways Children Were Treated in History

Khalid Elhassan March 28, 2021 36 min

Baby dangling over the street in a cage. The Sun

Civil War child soldier John Lincoln Clem, who holds the record as the youngest sergeant in the history of the US Army. Pintrest

18. America’s Child Soldiers

The United States Civil War was the last conflict in which significant numbers of American children served as soldiers. About a fifth of all military personnel in the Civil War were under eighteen, and more than 100,000 soldiers in the Union Army alone were fifteen-years-old or less. There were even cases in which children as young as eight were put in uniform. Most US Army child soldiers were utilized as drummers, buglers, cooks’ assistants, nurses, orderlies, general gophers, or in other non-combatant positions. However, during battles, those children were often just as exposed to bullets and artillery as were the grown men on the firing line.

Confederate drummer boys. Library of Congress

In the US Navy, children often served as “powder monkeys” in warships. Tasked during combat with rushing gunpowder from magazines to canons, they were just as exposed to danger during action as were all other sailors aboard ship, regardless of age. Indeed, as they scurried about toting sacks of gunpowder that could go off if they came into contact with any spark or shard of flaming timber or scorching shell fragment, the little powder monkeys might have been at greater risk than the rest of the crew.

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.