Les soldats devaient avoir 18 ans pour s'enrôler et respecter les règles de recrutement. Et pourtant... La guerre fut longue et les effectifs souvent insuffisants.
"With hopes of adventure and glory, tens of thousands of boys under the age of 18 answered the call of the Civil War, many of them rushing to join Union and Confederate troops in the earliest days of battle. Both sides had recruitment rules that barred underage men from enlisting, but that didn’t stop those who wanted to be part of the action: some enlisted without their parents’ permission and lied about their ages or bargained with recruiters for a trial period, while others joined along with their older brothers and fathers whose partisan passions overwhelmed their parental senses. Most of the youngest boys became drummers, messengers and orderlies, but thousands of others fought alongside the men.
As each side scrambled to get troops into the field in the early days of the war, many of these boys went to battle with just a few weeks of training. It didn’t take long for them to understand what they’d gotten themselves into. Elisha Stockwell Jr., from Alma, Wisc., was 15 when he enlisted. After the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, he wrote, “I want to say, as we lay there and the shells were flying over us, my thoughts went back to my home, and I thought what a foolish boy I was to run away and get into such a mess as I was in. I would have been glad to have seen my father coming after me.”
While some regiments protected their boy recruits by sending them to the rear when fighting broke out, others expected them to work in the front lines as stretcher bearers. Harry Kieffer, a musician for the 150th Pennsylvania, wrote about his experience at Gettysburg: “[I am called] away for a moment to look after some poor fellow whose arm is off at the shoulder, and it was just time I got away, too, for immediately a shell plunges into the sod where I had been sitting, tearing my stretcher to tatters.” A 16-year-old musician, John A. Cockerill, who was also at Shiloh, later wrote,
I passed… the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray who lay with his blond curls scattered about his face and his hand folded peacefully across his breast. He was clad in a bright and neat uniform, well garnished with gold, which seemed to tell the story of a loving mother and sisters who had sent their household pet to the field of war. His neat little hat lying beside him bore the number of a Georgia regiment… He was about my age… At the sight of the poor boy’s corpse, I burst into a regular boo hoo and started on.
Perhaps the most famous boy of the war was John Joseph Klem, better known as Johnny Clem. At only nine years old and roughly four feet tall, Clem tried unsuccessfully to enlist with the 3rd Ohio in May 1861, soon after Lincoln first issued the call for volunteers. Clem left his father, brother and sister in Newark, Ohio, to join; his mother had been killed in a train accident earlier that year. Undeterred by the rejection of the 3rd Ohio, Clem tried his luck again with the 22nd Michigan, which allowed him to join as an unofficial drummer boy. Until he was added to the muster roll in 1863, the $13 he earned each month came from donations made by the officers of his regiment."
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/the-boys-of-war/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1
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