Children too suffered from the horrors of the Civil War

CORNWALL — There are only a few subjects that both children and adults find compelling and interesting. One of them is, apparently, children.Or at least that seemed to be the case on July 31 as old and young listened with rapt attention at Children and the Civil War, a talk by history teacher Peter Vermilyea as part of the Cornwall Historical Society’s Cornwall and the Civil War exhibit. A small crowd gathered at the Cornwall library, ranging in age from 4-and-a-half on up.Vermilyea, a teacher at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, was named Connecticut History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute in 2006.In his talk, Vermilyea stressed the influence of children in the war through their patriotism and how they were to a great degree responsible for the war’s outcome.He displayed photos of youngsters dressing up for pretend battles, even while many who were not much older were concealing their age — the law required they be 18 — and volunteering as soldiers. Underage children were often “powder monkeys” who fought in the navy, bringing gunpowder from below decks up to the cannons.Most often, they were drummer boys and cooks’ helpers, but often still ended up in harm’s way.From war pension records, Vermilyea found that large numbers of children either volunteered for legitimate positions or found ways to be deceptive about their age.“Twenty-five were under the age of 10; 38 were under the age of 11; 225 were younger than 12; 309 were younger than 13; 1,525 were under 14; 105,000 were younger than 15; 321,000 were younger than 16 and 845,000 were under the age of 18. That was about one quarter of all the soldiers who fought in the war,” Vermilyea said.Most of the battles were fought in the South, Vermilyea said —which put Confederate soldiers close to home. When Union troops began to threaten their families, scores of them, already homesick, deserted to protect their own.“They were getting letters from their wives and children saying the Union Army was just down the street. You need to come home and protect us. And the southern armies just withered away from desertion.”Children sold picture cards to raise money for the war effort, not knowing or caring that they were also spreading propaganda. They made huge numbers of socks for soldiers. They collected bullets and canon balls from battlefields to sell to the government as scrap metal. Pay was per piece, so cannon balls especially were often broken into pieces. Some also exploded, killing the child who was breaking it up.Next to the end of slavery, one of the biggest changes brought about by the war was how children were treated. It accelerated a switch from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. Education for all children became important — even for former slave children.“The country starts to change. Kids were no longer viewed as simply workers on farms,” Vermilyea said. “In the years leading up to the Civil War, kids become something other than just workers. Parents begin to really cherish their children and be proud of them.”Life for the young also changed, especially in the South, because of the years of war close by. Vermilyea showed a shocking photo of children picnicking next to a large bomb that was so familiar to them they relaxed in its shade.