Mary Thompson Hospital: The Chicago Hospital for Women and Children

By Eve Fine

The Chicago Hospital for Women and Children was founded in 1865 to provide medical care to indigent women and children and clinical training to women doctors.

The hospital's founder, Mary Harris Thompson, received her M.D. from the New England Female Medical College in Boston in 1863. Her first patients in Chicago were the wives, widows, and children of Union soldiers. Thompson's ability to care for them was limited by her inability to gain a hospital position. Neither of Chicago's two hospitals permitted women to serve on their staffs, and one of them did not admit women patients. Thompson organized her own hospital.

The hospital depended upon the aid of wealthy Chicago women and the support of several medical men. The laywomen raised funds and managed all administrative work. The medical men became consulting physicians who aided Thompson in her medical and surgical practice. These doctors provided Thompson and her institution with the stamp of medical approval required because of a widespread prejudice against women physicians.

The hospital began training women doctors in 1871, when Thompson and William H. Byford established an affiliated medical school for women. Women medical students relied on the hospital for clinical observations and demonstrations. Graduates of the school, who seldom gained appointments in male hospitals, became interns, residents, and attending physicians in the hospital.

After Thompson's death in 1895, the hospital was renamed the Mary Thompson Hospital for Women and Children. It continued to provide otherwise unavailable clinical opportunities for medical women until 1972, when men were integrated into the staff. Financial burdens contributed to the closing of the hospital in 1988.

From: encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org

Image 1: Exterior view of Dr. Mary Thompson Hospital for Women and Children, located at 1712 West Adams Street in the Near West Side community area of Chicago

Image 2: Daniel Chester French (1850 – 1931) Bust of Dr. Mary Harris Thompson

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Aged Woman Bares Secret of Youth; She was a Drummer Boy in Union Army

From: Logansport Pharos Tribune (Logansport, Indiana) Apr 11, 1921

OAKLAND, Cal. — For 58 years Mrs. Anna Glud, of this city, has nursed a romantic secret.

And then, on her 68th birthday, with a family group about her, the white haired old lady revealed the amazing story of how, at the outbreak of the civil war, she had cut her hair, donned the uniform of a Union fighter and gone to the war as Tom Hunley a drummer boy.

That she had not previously bared her secret was due partially to the fact that her family had been divided on the war issues and she waited for time to heal the wounds; partially because of a somewhat natural reluctance.

But she did not wish the secret to go to the grave with her and so the story of Tom Hunley came to light.

Two persons had known her secret — Jermiah Hunley, her father and Gen. Grant, in whose charge her father had placed her.

The Hunley’s lived in a “border” state. Two sons went with the Union forces and two with the Confederate. Then the father was called.

Father Cuts Hair.
The prospect of leaving his little girl among strangers, unprotected and uncared for, was too much, so he dressed her in the uniform of a drummer boy, cut off her hair, told her to always remember her name was “Tom,” and joined the regiment.

For two years “Tom” Hunley and “his” father served with the Union forces in the bloodiest battles of the civil war. Never once was the identity of the little “drummer boy” suspected. There came a day, however, when Jeremiah was forced to reveal the secret of his daughter’s masquerade. General Grant inspected the regiment and seeing the diminutive “drummer boy” decided “he” was too young for active service, and ordered “him” mustered out. Thereupon Jermiah told him the story of the motherless little girl. The General swore himself to secrecy and ordered “Tom” Hunley’s retention in the service.

Reminiscing, the former “Tom” Hunley said: “During all that time though many remarked that I looked more like a girl than a boy, not one soldier discovered that I was a girl. Father and I kept together so constantly that I was always protected. Had I not had his assistance at all times, I doubt that I could have stood the rigors of a soldier’s life during those two dreadful years.

Feet Red With Blood.
“Why, in a battle near Davisville, when 7000 confederates and northerners were killed, our little body of men literally had to climb over the bodies of dead soldiers in order to fight our way out. My little feet were red with blood. And when we were mustered out in the fall of 1864 there were but 17 members of our company left.”

The war over, Jermiah and “Tom” Hunley settled down in Indiana. But the rigors of war were too much for the father and in six months time he followed his wife and four sons into the Beyond, leaving his little girl, now re-attired in the dress of her sex, to continue life under the guidance of newly-made friends.

Twenty years later, General Grant died without having revealed the secret of “Tom” Hunley, and a secret it has remained until recently when Mrs. Glud revealed it.

From: yesteryearsnews.wordpress.com

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Boys in the Civil War

From: acws.co.uk

It might have been called the Boys’ war. Authorities differ, and statistics bristle in the controversy, but this is the offering of the Photographic History of the Civil War:

More than 2,000,000 Federal soldiers were twenty-one or under (of a total of some 2,700,000). More than 1,000,000 were eighteen, 800,000 were seventeen, 200,000 were sixteen, 100,000 were fifteen and under. three hundred were thirteen or under, but most of these were fifers or drummers. They regularly enrolled and were sometimes fighters. There were twenty-five ten year olds or under.

A study of a million Federal enlistments turned up only 16,000 as old as forty-four, and only 46,000 of twenty-five or more.

Yet by other authorities, the Union armies were made up as follows: 30 per cent of men under twenty-one; 30 per cent from twenty-one to twenty-four; 30 percent from twenty five to thirty; 10 percent over thirty.

Confederate figures are skimpier, but one sample of 11,000 men produced about 8,000, the great majority, between eighteen and twenty-nine. There was one thirteen year old, three were fourteen; 31 were fifteen; 200 were sixteen; 366 were seventeen and about a thousand were eighteen. Almost 1,800 were in their thirties, about 400 in their forties, and 86 in their fifties. One man was seventy, and another seventy-three.

Most of the youths of tender age slipped in as musicians, for there were places for 40,000 in the Union armies alone. There are numerous tales of buglers too small to climb into saddles unaided, who rode into pistol-and-sabre battles with their regiments. Most famous of these on the Union side was Johnny Clem, who became drummer to the 22nd Michigan at eleven, and was soon a mounted orderly on the staff of General George H Thomas, with the "rank" of lance sergeant.

 No one knows the identity of the war’s youngest soldier, but on the Confederate side, in particular, there was a rush of claimants. Some of their tales belong with the war’s epic literature:

 George S Lamkin of Winona, Mississippi, joined Stanford’s Mississippi Battery when he was eleven, and before his twelfth birthday was severely wounded at Shiloh.

 T D Claiborne who left the Virginia Military Institute at thirteen, in 1861 reportedly became captain of the 18th Virginia that year, and was killed in 1864, at seventeen. (This likely belongs with the war’s apocrypha.)

E G Baxter of Clark County, Kentucky, is recorded as enlisting in Company A, 7th Kentucky Cavalry in June 1862, when he was not quite thirteen (birth date: September 10, 1849), and a year later was a second lieutenant.

John Bailey Tyler, of D Troop, 1st Maryland Cavalry, born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1849, was twelve when war came. He fought with his regiment until the end, without a wound.

T G Bean of Pickensville, Alabama, was probably the war’s most youthful recruiter. He organised two companies at the University of Alabama in 1861 when he was thirteen, though he did not get into service until two years later when he served as adjutant of the cadet corps taken into the Confederate armies.

M W Jewett of Ivanhoe, Virginia, is said to have been a private in the 59th Virginia at thirteen, serving at Charleston, South Carolina, in Florida and at the siege of Petersburg.

W D Peak of Oliver Springs, Tennessee, was fourteen when he joined Company A, 26th Tennessee, and Matthew J McDonald, of Company I, 1st Georgia Cavalry, began service at the same age.

John T Mason of Fairfax County, Virginia, went through the first battle of Manassas as a "marker" for the files of the 17th Virginia at age fourteen, was soon trained as a midshipman in the tiny Confederate Navy, and was aboard the famed cruiser Shenandoah.

One of Francis Scott Key’s grandsons, Billings Steele, who lived near Annapolis, Maryland, crossed the Potomac to join the rangers of Colonel John S Mosby, at the age of sixteen.

Source of the above statistics - The Civil War, Strange and Fascinating Facts by Burke Davis.
The above article appeared in the ACWS Newsletter, December 2001

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The Youngest Soldier Wounded

By Kayla

Although army drummers were usually adult males, young boys were trained to take their place—some even starting as young as eight years old.

These boys were responsible for memorizing up to 40 beats to communicate to the troops. Some of the boys were carried on the shoulders of fellow soldiers, protected and endeared by their older companions. These young drummers were not intentionally put near dangerous areas of battles, but it wasn’t rare for them to receive injury as they marched with the troops to fight.

William Black is believed to be the youngest soldier wounded in the Civil War. When he was twelve years old, his left arm and hand were severely injured by an exploding shell as he marched.

From: spotlights.fold3.

Learn more about children in the Civil War at www.CivilWarRx.com.

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The Youngest Wounded: Drummer Boys

Excerpted from: wikipedia.org

Drummer boys were children recruited as drummers for use on the battlefield.

Until well into the 19th century, western armies recruited young boys to act as drummers. The drums were an important part of the battlefield communications system, with various drum rolls used to signal different commands from officers to troops. Although there were usually official age limits, these were often ignored; the youngest boys were sometimes treated as mascots by the adult soldiers. The life of a drummer boy appeared rather glamorous and as a result, boys would sometimes run away from home to enlist. Other boys may have been the sons or orphans of soldiers serving in the same unit. The image of a small child in the midst of battle was seen as deeply poignant by 19th-century artists, and idealised boy drummers were frequently depicted in paintings, sculpture and poetry.

Thirteen year old Charles King was the youngest soldier killed in the entire American Civil War (1861–1865). Charles enlisted in the 49th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry with the reluctant permission of his father at the age of 12 years, 5 months and 9 days. On September 17, 1862 at the Battle of Antietam or Battle of Sharpsburg he was mortally wounded near or in the area of the East Woods, carried from the field and died three days later.

Twelve-year old drummer boy William Black was the youngest recorded person wounded in battle during the American Civil War. John Clem, who had unofficially joined a Union Army regiment at the age of 9 as a drummer and mascot, became famous as the ""The Drummer Boy of Chickamauga" where he played a "long roll" and shot a Confederate officer who had demanded his surrender.

An 11 year-old drummer in the Confederate Orphan Brigade, known only as "Little Oirish", was credited with rallying troops at the Battle of Shiloh by taking up the regimental colors at a critical moment.

Another noted drummer boy was Louis Edward Rafield of the 21st Alabama Infantry, Co. K, known as the "Mobile Cadets". He had enlisted at age 11 and while 12 at the Battle of Shiloh he somehow lost his drum; he then obtained an enemy drum and kept on going, thus earning the title of "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh".

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Child Soldiers in the Civil War

By Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, 12-16-11

Although most Civil War soldiers were between 18 and 39 years old, many young children also served. It is estimated that at least 100,000 Union soldiers were boys under 15 years old and about 20 percent of all Civil War soldiers were under 18. Since soldiers had to be at least 18 years old to enlist in the military, many of these boys lied about their age in order to join. Other times, especially as the casualties climbed and more soldiers were needed, recruiters looked the other way when underage boys signed up. Coincidentally, it was this abundance of young, boyish-looking men in the ranks that made it easier for young women to disguise themselves as men and also sign up as soldiers.

These boy soldiers usually served as drummer boys, musicians, messengers, nurses and scouts for the troops. Yet, during the heat of battle, many of these boys put these duties aside and joined the troops in combat. One such soldier was Johnny Clem, an 11 year-old drummer boy for the Union army. Johnny became a celebrity during the battle of Chickamauga when he picked up a gun and shot a Confederate officer after he demanded Johnny to surrender. The army later promoted Johnny to sergeant and awarded him a silver medal. Johnny eventually earned the nickname “Drummer Boy of Chickamauga” or “Johnny Shiloh.” He was also commissioned by President Ulysses S. Grant as a second-lieutenant in 1871. Johnny was the last Civil War soldier still actively serving in the army when he retired, as Brigadier-General, in 1915. Another such soldier was John Cook, a 15-year-old Union bugle player, who put down his instrument and volunteered to operate a cannon during the famous battle of Antietam. Cook later received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle.

The youngest Union soldier and the youngest soldier to fight in the Civil War was a boy named Edward Black. Edward was born on May 30 in 1853, making him just 8 years old when he joined the Union army on July 24, 1861 as a drummer boy for the 21st Indiana volunteers. He is also considered one of the youngest soldiers ever to serve in the history of the U.S. Army. Black was captured at the Battle of Baton Rouge in August of 1862 but was freed when the Union army won the battle. After the army discharged him in September of 1862, Edward reenlisted with 1st Indiana Volunteer Heavy Artillery in February 1863. He continued fighting until the end of the war and was honorable discharged in February of 1866.

According to the book “The Fighting Men of the Civil War,” the youngest Confederate soldier was probably a boy named Charles C. Hay who joined the Alabama regiment when he was eleven years old.

The youngest soldier injured during the war was a boy named William Black, who was just 12 years old when his left hand and arm were shattered by an exploding shell.

The youngest recruits often served as musicians and drummers, yet this did not prevent them from being wounded or injured like Orion Howe, a 14 year-old drummer who was severely wounded when he volunteered to retrieve some much-needed ammunition for Colonel Malmborg from General Sherman during the battle of Vicksburg. His regiment’s historian wrote an account of Howe’s deed, which was published in the book “Sherman: Fighting Prophet”:

“We could see him nearly all the way…he ran through what seemed a hailstorm of canister and musket-balls, each throwing up its little puff of dust when it struck the dry hillside. Suddenly he dropped and hearts sank, but he had only tripped. Often he stumbled, sometimes he fell prostrate, but was quickly up again and he finally disappeared from us, limping over the summit and the 55th saw him no more for several months.”

Howe later received the Medal of Honor for his actions and Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the United States Naval Academy in July of 1865.

Many of these children joined the army because they were either runaways, orphans or they wanted to fight alongside their brothers and fathers. Although they held romantic and heroic notions of war, it wasn’t long until they experienced the full horrors of war. One boy from Wisconsin, Elisha Stockwell, described his experience during the battle of Shiloh in 1862:

“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.”

Another boy, 16-year-old John A. Cockerhill, also described his experience at Shiloh:

“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.”

Although young children, these boys served their country with as much bravery and dedication as any of the full grown men they fought alongside. About 48 young boys under age 18 won the Congressional Medal of Honor for their bravery during battle and many continued to serve in the army long after the war ended.

Image: Johnny Clem

From: civilwarsaga.com

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Charles "Charley" King, the Youngest Casualty of the Civil War

From: pacivilwar150.com

Great sacrifices were made at the Battle of Antietam. And one very small one.

Charles "Charley" King loved playing music. When war broke out, the West Chester, Pa. 12-year-old begged his father to let him enlist in the army as a drummer boy. He earned the backing of Company F Captain Benjamin Sweeney by practicing his drumming near the military camp where the company was being trained. Sweeney, who was recruiting soldiers to serve in the Forty-Ninth Pennsylvania, was impressed.

Sweeney convinced Charley's father that "drummer boys were non-combatants, who generally were safer behind the lines than on the battle line and helped with the wounded." He said Charley would be kept out of danger and would be looked after.

The family agreed to let the oldest of their five children enter the war.

Charley performed well as a musician-drummer boy with the company, impressing the men and officers so much with his drumming that he was promoted drum major of the field music of the Forty-Ninth Pennsylvania Regiment. It was a distinct honor for such a young volunteer. After participating in the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, Charley was a veteran, something that few of his age could claim.

With the movement of Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland in September of 1862, Charley marched with the rest of the Federal Army toward Western Maryland and a showdown with the enemy: The Battle of Antietam - the bloodiest single day of fighting in the Civil War.

During that battle on Sept. 17, 1862, enemy artillery exploded near the Forty-Ninth Pennsylvania, wounding several men including Charley, who was shot "through the body" by a piece of shrapnel.  He was carried back to a field hospital in the rear of the lines.

When that day ended, almost 25,000 lay dead or wounded on the peaceful farm fields surrounding the small village of Sharpsburg. Three days later, Charley died of his wounds, as the youngest soldier of either army to fall during the four years of Civil War.

Charley's father retrieved his body after the battle and laid him to rest near his home in West Chester, at Old Cheyney Cemetery.

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The Youngest Casualty: The Life of Charlie King

By Andy Lefko

Charles Edwin King, eldest son of Pennell and Adaline Bennett King was born in April of 1849. Charlie was the first of eight children born to the couple. Pennell and Adaline owned a tailoring shop and lived in the 100 block of Barnard St. Charlie grew up in a difficult period of our history. West Chester and its Quaker population was a hub on the underground railroad. Slave-catchers were looking for runaway slaves. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas had made abolitionist speeches in the county. Charlie would have been about ten years old when the abolitionist John Brown made his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, VA in 1859. To an intelligent boy like Charlie, we can assume that he heard the conversations of his elders and probably realized how polarized the country was becoming.

After the fall of Fort Sumter in April of 1861, men from West Chester went with their 3 month militia units to Harrisburg to train for the “short” war that would soon begin. Captain Sweney, a grocer from town, was the leader of Company G, of the 2nd PA Infantry Regiment and Charlie headed off with this group with as their Company drummer. However, when the regiment was ordered to the front, Pennell and Adaline ordered young Charlie home to the safety of West Chester. This did not sit well with Charlie and as the Village Record indicates, “He was so taken with going that his father would very frequently at nights, find him settin up in bed, Marking time on the head board of his bed.”

After the Union defeat at Bull Run, the 3 month enlistments were over and the 2nd Regiment came home and in September of 1861, Captain Sweney formed Company F of the 49th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. On September 12th, 1861, Charlie officially enlisted. The Kings, persuaded by Captain Sweney’s promise to protect Charlie and probably Charlie’s own persuasive powers, allowed him to join the regiment and go off to the front. Soon after becoming company drummer, Charlie was made Drum Major of the entire regiment.

After the winter of 1862, the Spring Campaign had begun and General McClellan’s army was on the outskirts of Richmond. The 49th PVI, was part of Hancock’s Brigade of the VI Army Corps. They had won praise at the Battle of Williamsburg, when they successfully defeated General Early’s brigade on a flanking maneuver around the confederate fortifications. However, those victories were short lived, and the confederate forces pushed Charlie King and the Army of the Potomac back to Harrison’s Landing and eventually off the peninsula. These were hard battles and hard marches. Charlie probably saw death and destruction that he could not have imagined.

In September of 1862, Charlie King was 13 years old and marching after the Confederate army which was attempting to invade Maryland. In Pennsylvania, Pennell had enlisted in the 2nd PA Emergency Militia of 1862 and was stationed on the Pennsylvania - Maryland border. Catching up with the confederates at Sharpsburg, MD the bloodiest day in American history began on September 17, 1862. By this time the glorious vision of a quick and easy war had been shattered, and the battle that would later be dubbed, “Artillery Hell” had begun early that morning in a farmer’s cornfield. However, Charlie King and the 49th PVI, were still miles away from the battlefield, but were on the march by 6 AM.

The following information was taken from Private B.F. Clarkson of Company C, who wrote the following account of the battle: Near the Pry House, they halted and could see and hear the battle on the far right of the Union Line. He noticed that playing cards were scattered along the roads, but there were never any bibles left there. General Hancock rode up to the 49th which was the lead regiment in the VI Corps and said, “Boys, do as you have done before, be brave and true, and this will be your last battle!” They then waded the Antietam Creek and double-quicked to the far right of the Union Line. As they ran they could see off to their left, the fighting happening around the Mumma Farm and wounded men limping. They heard the screams, the roar of cannons, the bursting of shells and the whizz of the minie balls. It was into this environment that fate had drawn young Charlie.

The brigade was formed around three batteries of cannon that were about to be taken by the enemy. The 49th were on the far right of the line protecting Cowan’s guns which lay just North of Miller’s Cornfield and the East Woods. The whole brigade was in an open field. So exposed was the brigade that Hancock was forced to pull the line back to a more protected area near the woods. As this was happening, the confederates were mounting an attack against the brigade, and confederate artillery was ranging in on the brigade from around the Dunker Church. At the appropriate moment the brigade opened a tremendous volley on the approaching enemy and stopped the advance. Simultaneously, the rebel artillery was picking up. Private Clarkson wrote, “I looked into the face of the comrade who stood at my right, and it looked pale as a ghost. Poor fellow I thought, you’re frightened. I wish you were away from here. A few moments later he was knocked to the earth with a grape-shot and taken to the hospital, just then Gus Heller had his feet shot off and a moment later, Charlie King was shot through the body and fell into a comrade’s arms.”

The 49th came onto the battle field around 11 AM, and held the same position the rest of the day. They sustained very few casualties, but Charlie was indeed one of them. Another account in Sgt. Westbrook’s History of the 49th PVI, recalls the events of Charlie's death: “Gus Heller lost a foot on the skirmish line and Charley King of Company F, was shot through the body and fell into the arms of H.H. Bowles of the 6th Maine Regiment.” He then states that Charlie died, September 20th at a temporary hospital nearby.

Eddie Bennett of the 51st PA, who had been wounded at the stone bridge wrote to his father, “I am sorry to hear of poor little Charley King, and will do all that lays in my power to find him, and if I do, I will send you word right away.”

From this point on, accounts vary. Some say, Pennell learned of the news of his son’s death and went right to the battlefield, claimed the body and brought it back to West Chester. And perhaps he is buried here in Greenmount or somewhere else nearby. Another account is that Pennell didn’t learn the news until he returned home after being discharged between September 23-25. Then he went to the battlefield but could not find where Charlie had been buried. The Jeffersonian, a local paper reported in October that when Pennell got to Sharpsburg, he found Charlie’s grave but didn’t bring him home. We know this much, he is not buried at Antietam National Cemetery, nor is he listed in any of the local cemeteries.

So today, we can say that wherever his earthly remains lie, he is home again in spirit, so that his heroic and patriotic service to his country can be remembered forever. His and his parent’s sacrifice was not in vain, people were freed from bondage and a country was preserved so that a democracy built on the will of the majority and the protection of the minority would be preserved. He is a hero in the truest sense of the word, as all of these men and women with flags beside their headstones are heroes, for eternity.

Photo: Monument dedicated to Charlie King, the youngest Union soldier killed in battle during the Civil War. The monument is located in Green Mount Cemetery in West Chester, PA. It was created as a result of an Eagle Scout project by Brendan Lyons and made possible through the generosity of the West Chester VFW and numerous other individuals and organizations.

From: bradburycamp.home.comcast.net

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Children on the Battlefield: Heroism and Sacrifice

By Marcie Schwartz

“I told [my sister] I had to go down town,” wrote Elisha Stockwell of Wisconsin, recalling his hasty enlistment at the age of 15 “She said, 'Hurry back, for dinner will soon be ready.' But I didn’t get back for two years.”

While the Civil War was called “The Boy’s War”, the enlistment of youths into the armed forces was not a new phenomenon in nineteenth century. Generations of boys had served in minor roles in armies and aboard vessels for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. On this subject, President Abraham Lincoln sternly wrote to the Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, “The United States don’t need the service of boys who disobey their parents.” Despite the age restrictions and inexperience, a number of young boys did enlist on both sides to find adventure and “take the defiant South and set them straight” or, as one Southern boy pledged, to “die rather than become a slave to the North.”

When Elisha Stockwell signed his recruitment papers, he was not entirely honest: “I told the recruiting officer I didn’t know just how old I was but thought I was eighteen. He didn’t measure my height, but called me five feet five inches high. I wasn’t that tall two years later when I re-enlisted.” For most of the war, the minimum enlistment age in the North was legally held at 18 for soldiers and 16 for musicians, although younger men could enlist at the permission of their parents until 1862. In the South, the age limit for soldiers stayed at 18 until 1864 when it was legally dropped to 17.

There were many different ways that a young boy could get around the legal age limitations. Perhaps the easiest route was to lie about their age to the recruitment officers. Pressured by their superiors, officers often turned a blind eye to the evident youth of willing recruits in order to fill their recruitment quotas. Other recruitment officers who were ministers would use their congregations as recruitment pools. Parishioners were less hesitant to let their boys enlist because their regiment was led by good “Christian gentleman.”

Even schoolteachers used their influence with local recruitment officers to enlist their own students. “The schools in which I had been teaching had more than the usual number of large boys,” recalled Oscar L. Jackson of Hocking County, Ohio “They furnished quite a large squad of recruits of the very best material for good soldiers to start the proposed company.”

If the boy could not get around a stubborn recruitment officer, the line of inquiry then turned to the boy’s parents. When 16 year-old Ned Hutter of Mississippi went to join the Confederate Army, he was honest about his age. When ordered out of line, his father, who was right behind him, stepped in: “He can work as steady as any man, and he can shoot as straight as any who have been signed today.” The officer asked no further questions as he handed young Hutter a pen. Many fathers proved more than willing to help their underage sons sign up, especially when they would be accompanying them. Lt. Cornelius C. White of the Sixty Fourth Ohio was accompanied in December 1861 by his nine-year-old son, Albert, who served as a drummer for the regiment. After enduring the harsh winter and the carnage of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, White sent his son home without procuring the proper discharge papers. The boy was listed as a deserter, but company officers looked the other way.

The last resort for boys unable to gain a parent’s consent was to simply run away from home and enlist in another town. Some boys enlisted under a false name so their parents (and the authorities) could not track them down. This method had an unforeseen consequence, though.  The young men who died in battle or in hospitals were only known by their assumed names, leaving families without a clue as to their fate. Also, when applying for government pension benefits 30 years or so hence, some efforts ended in futility because the soldiers they served with could not recall who they were.

ROLES
Once enlisted, the boys would perform a number of important functions within a regiment. Some were regular, enlisted soldiers, but others would become musicians, mounted couriers or runners, hospital attendants, guards, orderlies, chaplain assistants, water carriers, or barbers. At sea, they would serve as cabin boys, galley helpers, and powder boys.

The musicians primarily played either the drums or the bugle. These boys marked the daily routine of the camp by signaling reveille, assembly, officer’s call, sick call, taps, and learned more than 40 distinctive calls to be used in battle. Their music also provided a source of entertainment for the troops as well as a festive flair for parades or regimental reviews. The most important job for these young musicians was to use their music to communicate orders during battle. The notes and beats of the instruments could carry commands quicker than a mounted courier, and father and more clearly than the human voice. Generally drummers were assigned to infantry regiments and buglers were assigned to cavalry or horse artillery as the bugle is more convenient to carry and play while mounted.

Powder boy, or powder monkey, like the position of a company drummer or bugler, was an old one in the Navy. Before the days of fixed ammunition, young boys brought up canvas bags or buckets of powder from the magazine to the gun carriage area, thus the name ‘powder monkey’. The powder monkeys, while technically required to follow the legal age regulations, were usually conscripted based on height and speed rather than age. A legal requirement of four feet, eight inches was placed upon the position as it was vital to be strong enough to perform their task, but also be short enough so they could be hidden behind the ships gunwale as they speedily ran back and forth between the cramped space beside their assigned gun and the magazine. While they were not an official member of the gun crew, they were essential during sea battles and were paid $10 a month plus regular seaman’s rations.

CAMP LIFE
Once enlisted and given a position, there were still unique hurdles for the young boys to get over in camp life. Homesickness was a common problem for soldiers of any age but the boys “were so young they had little real sense of who they were or how they fit into the world. The one solid and reliable thing they knew—their families—had been left behind.”

An immediate material matter was finding a properly fitting uniform. The uniform sizes were standardized during the war and it was difficult to find the smaller sizes, let alone replace them. The officers would sometimes provide a favorite musician with an elaborate, but impractical parade outfit. Enlisted boys were paid and drew supplies like a regular soldier, but they could often not even find the basics such as socks or shoes that came in their size. Sixteen year old Abel Sheeks of Alabama had only the clothes he wore when he ran away from home, but their blue color, much too similar to the Union uniform, made them unsuitable for combat. He scavenged battlefields after each battle, looking for dead soldiers his approximate size. “I must confess to feeling very bad doing this … but I had no other course,” he recalled. “In just a few weeks, my uniform was the equal of anyone’s.”

On the parade ground, young drummers often found it difficult to maintain the regulation 28 inch pace during a march while carrying a standard issue drum. The tedium of drilling was also very hard on a young, restless mind. One young Union boy, quite fed up with the routine, snapped at his sergeant, “Let’s stop this fooling and go over to the grocery.” The drillmaster proceeded to order a corporal to take him out and “drill him like hell.” Afterward, the boy remarked, “It takes a raw recruit some time to learn that he is not to think or suggest, but obey.”

Bullying from the older soldiers also dampened a young recruit’s spirits. Stockwell encountered one soldier who “liked to try all recruits to see if they could fight.” “I didn’t enlist to fight that way,” Stockwell recalled telling the bully, “but if he would get his gun and go outside of the camp, we would stand thirty or forty rods apart, and I thought I could convince him that I could shoot as well as he could.”

These young recruits were also exposed to the previously forbidden adult vices of tobacco, alcohol, gambling and prostitution. Fourteen-year-old James Dickinson got in over his head while serving on board a gunboat on the Mississippi River. After indulging in some rum, he wrote: “[It] made me drunk. I puked on deck and could not stand up.” Dickinson was demoted as punishment.

IN BATTLE
Boy soldiers faced life threatening challenges on the battlefield. Musicians were more often than not unarmed and this could prove fatal should they come into close quarters with the enemy. For many, the realization of what enlistment meant would truly hit home on the battlefield. “As we lay there and the shells were flying over us, my thoughts went back to my home” recalled Stockwell from his experience at the Battle of Shiloh “I thought what a foolish boy I was to run away to get into such a mess I was in. I would have been glad to have seen my father coming after me.”

While there were uniformed underage boys on both sides of the conflict, they rarely encountered each other except in heart wrenching cases like that of Union musician John A. Cockerill, age 16. “I passed the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray who lay with his blond curls scattered about his face,” he recalled as he walked the field after the Battle of Shiloh. “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…He was about my age…At the sight of the poor boy’s corpse, I burst into a regular boo hoo and started on.”

Even boys under the protection of senior officers, like Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s son, Fredrick Grant, were not immune to the trauma of warfare. “The horrors of the battlefield were brought vividly before me” he recalled from his time in Vicksburg “I made my way with [a] detachment, which was gathering the wounded, to a log house which had been appropriated for a hospital. Here the scenes were so terrible that I became faint, and making my way to a tree, sat down, the most woebegone twelve year old in America.”

Image: Powder monkey on the U.S.S. New Hampshire off Charleston, S.C. (Library of Congress)

Image: Enjoying their time off duty, a few drummer boys play a round of cards with their superiors, Winter 1862. (U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center)

From: civilwar.org

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Children in the Civil War

By Marcie Schwartz

Children were an active, enthusiastic, and critical part of Civil War society. They comprised a much bigger portion of the US population in 1860 than in the 21st century, with persons under age 19 making up nearly half of the population (compared to less than 25% today). Children played an important role on the home front supporting the war effort, and many soldiers on both sides invoked the future of their children as to why the war should be fought and won at any cost. A number of children took up arms with their elders and served as enlisted soldiers or regimental musicians. While we don't know how many children enlisted during the Civil War, we do know that around 48 soldiers who were under the age of 18 won the Congressional Medal of Honor for their bravery and service.

From: civilwar.org

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Children on the Home Front: Keeping Things Going

By Marcie Schwartz

“In these few months” wrote twelve year old Celine Fremaux of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, “my childhood had slipped away from me. Necessity, human obligations, family pride and patriotism had taken entire possession of my little emaciated body.” Children on the Civil War home front encountered trials, hardships, and violence that forced them to grow up quickly amidst a nation at war with itself.

RESPONSIBILITIES
On the home front, both northern and southern children became critical to the war effort in a variety of ways. Children took up jobs that their fathers or brothers had left vacant or those that their mothers could not manage alone as the new head of the household. Children would help tend to livestock and crops, serve as clerks or helpers for the family business, cook meals, and watch their younger siblings while still trying to attend school. At school, children would build little Fort Sumters of mud and wooden blocks […] put up clothespins for soldiers, ruthlessly slaughtering them with shot from cannons made of old brass pistol barrels fastened to blocks of wood. Thirteen year old Dan Beard of Cincinnati, Ohio recalled making little Jefferson Davises "of potatoes and put sticks in them for legs. We hung the desperate potato men by their necks and shot them with squibs from firecrackers.” In the classroom, patriotism was also alive and well. John Bach McMaster of New York City remembered “every morning after Bible reading, the young woman who presided at the piano would sing a war song, the boys joining in, and that done, a second and perhaps a third would follow.” Many children, however, dropped out of school to support their families, and many others turned to homeschooling when their schools were closed for lack of funding or attendance, or when their schoolmaster went off to war.

“I was ten years old today. I did not have a cake;” mourned Carrie Berry of Atlanta “times are too hard. I hope that by my next birthday there will be peace in our land.” Shortages of these little luxuries, as well as household goods, were common, especially in the less industrialized South, and children were often tasked with making ends meet by sewing clothes and blankets, as well as making soap, candles, and gathering herbs for medicinal purposes. As the war progressed, many children scrabbled to have enough to eat, becoming active participants in the Southern Bread Riots that broke out in most of the major southern cities by 1863. Suffering from a lack of provisions, food and money, children formed looting bands to obtain goods for their families, as evidenced by the ultimatum scratched into a young Richmond girl’s journal: “We are starving. As soon as enough of us get together we are going to take the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.”

ENTERTAINMENT
Despite these hardships, children managed to find ways to entertain themselves. “If it had not been for my books” wrote Emma LeConte of Columbia, South Carolina “it would indeed have been hard to bear. But in them I have lived and found my chief source of pleasure. I would take refuge in them from the sadness all around if it were not for other work to be done.” Reading, either from magazines, dime novels or books, was a primary pastime for children on both sides of the conflict.

In the North, magazines like Student and Schoolmate, The Little Pilgrim, and Our Young Folks were popular and contained numerous age appropriate articles, fictional stories, trivia, songs, games, patriotic plays to be put up, and poems related to the war. Oliver Optic’s produced entertaining wartime adventure tales such as The Young Lieutenant, Fighting Joe, Sailor Boy, and The Yankee Middy. While the magazine’s prose and Optic’s adventure stories focused on the drama and heroics of the war, they also promoted patriotism and virtue and the idea that the reader’s individual actions, no matter how small, contributed to something greater than themselves. Children were also able to obtain more factual accounts of the war like Following the Flag or Days and Nights on the Battlefield, battlefield maps, as well as more sensational dime novels.

In the South, paper, ink, and skilled printers were scarce, so new material was restricted mainly to hymns and bowdlerized textbooks designed to meet the same aims as their northern counterparts: make children aware of the issues that caused the war and to rally support for the Confederate war effort. The new textbooks spouted nationalism with names like The Dixie Primer, A New Southern Grammar, and The Confederate Spelling Book and their contents promoted values and issues pertinent to the southern cause. The 1863 Geographical Reader for the Dixie Children briefly explained the war from a southern perspective: “Thousands of lives have been lost, and the earth has been drenched with blood; but still Abraham is unable to conquer the “Rebels” as he calls the South. The South only asked to be let alone, and to divide the public property equally. It would have been wise of the North to have said to her Southern sisters, 'If you are not content to dwell with us any longer, depart in peace.'”

While books were the primary forms of entertainment at home, children could venture outside of the home for public shows and events, many of which revolved around the subject of the war. Children and their families often frequented plays, concerts, photography displays, magic lantern shows, martial parades, traveling panorama shows, and, in the North, Sanitary Fairs. The US Sanitary Commission allowed communities to directly support the war effort. Dan Beard recalled “every home and every school, parents, teachers and children were picking lint [for the Sanitary Commission] which was carefully placed on a clean piece of paper and used by the field surgeons to stanch the blood.” Held from late 1863 through 1865, Sanitary Fairs, sponsored by the Commission, raised more than four million dollars and provided some much needed levity and entertainment. After paying a small entrance fee, families could purchase donated goods, homemade pastries, locally grown crops, souvenirs, attend concerts and speeches, and gawk at war relics from the Revolution as well as captured Confederate armaments, trophies, and flags. Children would contribute their own handmade crafts to the fairs to be sold. “I made a model of a saddlebag loghouse which was very realistic,” wrote Dan Beard “I proudly carried that all the way to the Sanitary Fair. It was sold for seven dollars and a half, which was a severe blow to my artistic soul, because I really thought it was worth about fifty dollars.”  Chicago closed its schools during the fairs of 1863 and 1865 so children could attend and support this patriotic event, and newspapers from the time depict children around the country running to see the Fair’s “treasury of useful articles, toys and knickknacks” as well as magic shows, ventriloquists, a “Gipsey tent” , and “a very remarkable animal called the Gorilla.”

THE WAR COMES HOME
The “home front”, however, especially in the South, was constantly under threat. Many of the battles were named after the towns that witnessed them, guerrilla raids harassed non-combatants, troops were garrisoned in houses and barns, and both armies left homes in ruins and fields littered with the dead and dying. In besieged cities, the situation for children and their families became desperate as the weeks turned into months of shelling. In Vicksburg, frightened citizens sought refuge in basements and even in caves. One young girl, Lucy McCrae, was almost hit by a shell and buried under flying rocks and dirt. “The blood was gushing from my nose, eyes, ears, and mouth,” she wrote “but no bones were broken.” On November 16, 1864, , ten year old Carrie Berry huddled with his family as occupied Atlanta burned around them: “They came burning the store house and about night it looked like the whole town was on fire. We all set up all night. If we had not sat up our house would have been burnt up for the fire was very near and the soldiers were going around setting houses on fire where they were not watched. They behaved very badly […] nobody knows what we have suffered since they came in.” Smaller southern cities and towns fared no better. In Winnsboro, North Carolina, a young girl witnessed “streets and vacant lots filled with homeless families […] when bringing bedding, raiment or provisions out of their burning homes, these were destroyed by the brutal soldiers. They stole much that was useless to them, for even Bibles were taken.”  A seventeen year old widowed mother from Sandersville, Georgia lamented as soldiers “would walk up the steps of the back veranda on which we stood, and throwing down the hams and shoulders of our meat would cut them up in our very faces.” After the soldiers left with the rest of their belongings, she “knew that now our last hope for food was gone. I went to bed supperless […] sadder now was the thought, 'The cows are killed. I will be so hungry I cannot nurse Baby.'”

The northern home front also came face to face with the horrors of war, especially when armies collided in the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On the first day of the fighting, fifteen year old Albertus McCreary watched from his porch as the street filled with “Union soldiers, running and pushing each other, sweaty and black from powder and dust. They called to us for water. While we were carrying water to the soldiers, a small drummer boy ran up the porch, and handing me his drum, said 'Keep this for me.' We were so busy that we did not notice how close the fighting was until, about a half a block away, we saw hand-to-hand conflict. An officer rode his horse up on the pavement and said 'All you good people go down in your cellars or you will all be killed.'” Even when the fighting ceased, townspeople were still left to pick up the pieces of their lives and care for the wounded thrust into their care.

Charles McCurdy, ten years old at the battle of Gettysburg, watched as the wounded in his barn “lay on the threshing floor […]they had received no care and were a pitiful and dreadful sight.” Fifteen year old Tillie Pierce’s house was repurposed as hospital for the wounded of Gettysburg and when she returned home she “fairly shrank back the awful sight presented. The approaches were crowded with wounded, dying and dead. By this time amputating benches had been placed about the house […]I saw the wounded throwing themselves wildly about, and shrieking with pain while the operation was going on. Just outside the yard I noticed a pile of limbs higher than the fence. It was a ghastly sight.” Albertus McCreary’s sister, seventeen year old Jennie, was tasked with rolling bandages. She and her next door neighbors “had not rolled many before we saw the street filled with wounded men. I never thought I could do anything about a wounded man but I find I had a little more nerve than I thought I had. [The first soldier] had walked from the field and was almost exhausted. He threw himself in the chair and said, 'O girls, I have as good a home as you. If I were only there!' He fainted directly afterward. That was the only time I cried.”

CONTRABAND CAMPS
Perhaps the lives most put in jeopardy by the Civil War were those of former slaves and their children. As news of the Confiscation Act of 1861 and the employment of ‘contraband’ (escaped slaves) by the U.S Navy and U.S Army spread, escaped slaves and their families began to congregate at places like Fort Monroe to appeal to become contraband. More than one hundred camps formed around Union held forts or encampments to house the escaped slaves. Despite being a welcome refuge for many, the camps often became overcrowded, and illnesses such as smallpox became endemic in the more makeshift sites. Children maintained an overwhelming numerical majority in the camp and, despite the varied conditions, all camps had a school. Most refugee children and many adults were able to spend at least some of their time in school, often managed by white northern missionaries. The rest of the hours were used to work in the fields to earn enough money to eat, and children as young as ten were send out to labor beside adults and typically given “one-quarter pay.” These camps were the center of the home front experience for escaped slaves, and presented a world of great contrast: they provided a glimpse of freedom, but poor living conditions and disease often ended the dream before it could truly begin.

Photo: This photo of Frank, Frederick, and Alice Humiston was in their father, Sgt. Amos Huminston's hand when he was found dead on the Gettysburg battlefield. (Library of Congress)

Photo: A quartet of African American children sit in the ruins of Circular Church in Charleston, S.C. (Library of Congress)

From: civilwar.org

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Childhood and Transatlantic Slavery

By Steven Mintz, Columbia University

Until recently, the subject of childhood under slavery was almost entirely unstudied. This was true despite the fact that childhood is central to an understanding of slavery. In classical antiquity, abandoned children were a major source of slaves. Although most sub-Saharan Africans forced into slavery were in their teens and 20s, a substantial and growing proportion were children. In the American South in the decades before the Civil War, half of all slaves were under the age of 16.

A focus on children not only underscores slavery's oppressions, it also reveals the ways that enslaved children and their parents dealt with slavery's hardships and horrors. It demonstrates that even children were active agents who were able to carve out a space where they could find a degree of autonomy.

The study of slave children has brought many important facts to light. Infant and child mortality rates were twice as high among slave children as among southern white children. A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slaveowners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, providing pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive field work even in the last week before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or what we would today consider to be severely underweight.

Growth rates among slave children were extremely slow. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to eat vegetables soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions. These apparently stemmed from beriberi, pellagra, tetany, rickets, and kwashiorkor, diseases that are caused by protein and nutritional deficiencies.

Deprived of an adequate diet, slave children were very small by modern standards. Their average height at age three was shorter than 99 percent of 20th-century American three year olds. At age 17, slave men were shorter than 96 percent of present day 17-year-old men and slave women were shorter than 80 percent of contemporary women.

About half of all U.S. slave children grew up apart from their father, either because he lived on another plantation, had been sold away, or was white. On large plantations, infants and very young children were supervised and cared for by adults other than their parents. Children as young as two or three might work at domestic chores, including childcare or collecting trash and kindling, toting water, scaring away birds, weeding, or plucking grubs off of plants. Generally, in the U.S. South, children entered field work between the ages of eight and 12.

Slave children received harsh punishments, not dissimilar from those meted out to adults. They might be whipped or even required to swallow worms they failed to pick off of cotton or tobacco plants. During adolescence, a majority of slave youth were sold or hired away.

The study of childhood under slavery has given rise to a series of controversies. One is the extent to which slave children succeeded in "stealing" a childhood. Despite slavery's hardships and brutalities, many slave children were able to experience something that we would consider a childhood. Children played with home-made toys, including improvised marbles and hobby horses. Even where education was forbidden or strongly discouraged, a surprising proportion—perhaps between five and ten percent—learned how to read and write. Through their activities, games, religion, and relations with kin and other members of the slave community, children were able to make life bearable.

Like children of the Holocaust, they played games that helped them cope with slavery's oppressions, including mock auctions or games that included whipping. Their songs, too, helped them deal with slavery's horrors. One song included the following lyrics that addressed the subject of family separation directly: "Mammy, is Ole' Massa gwin'er sell us tomorrow? / Yes, my chile. / Whar he gwin'er sell us? / Way down South in Georgia."

Another area of controversy involves the extent to which slave parents were able to shield their children from slavery's brutalities. We have discovered that there was a "tug-of-war" between slave children's parents and plantation masters and mistresses, who were eager to make slave children, especially young children, feel loyalty, and even gratitude, to their owners. To win over children's affection, owners sometime gave them gifts and favors. At times, owners asked children to report rules violations within the slave quarters.

Slave parents, in turn, sought to instill in their children a sense of loyalty to the slave community as a whole. They taught children to refer to other girls and boys as sister and brother, and to unrelated adults as aunt or uncle. Through folk tales, such as the famous "Br'er Rabbit" stories, parents taught their children how to outwit more powerful adversaries.

Less studied questions are how the lives of slave children differed in urban and rural areas or on larger and smaller plantations, and how childhood experience differed at various points in time.

Why I Taught the Source
In reconstructing children's experience under slavery, historians tap a wide range of sources. These include the published testimony of fugitive or emancipated slaves, contemporary letters, journals, plantation records, and oral histories, such as those collected by the U.S. Works Projects Administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Recently, scholars have supplemented traditional sources with unconventional forms of evidence, including photographs, slave songs, and artifacts, such as toys.

Published narratives by fugitive or former slaves provide especially useful insights into the world history of slave children. Especially notable are those by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, who were enslaved in the U.S. during the early 19th century and whose writings underscore important aspects about childhood under slavery: (1) the extent of interracial interaction, including interracial play, on plantations in the U.S. South; (2) the moment when the full reality of life-long bondage dawned on slave children and the moment when they learned that adults in their lives, including parents, could not protect them from punishment; and (3) the harsh reality of sexual abuse faced by slave girls in their teenage years.

Especially useful in helping to place slavery in a world history perspective is one of the first slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, originally published in 1772. A former slave who purchased his freedom from a Quaker merchant in 1766, he traveled across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on British merchant ships, served in the British navy, and became a leading figure in the 18th-century British antislavery movement. His autobiography, which went through nine editions between 1789 and 1797 and was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian, awakened thousands of readers to the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.

His narrative challenges the view that Africa at the time of the slave trade was a benighted or backward region. His region, "a charming fruitful vale, named Essaka," was "uncommonly rich," and his fellow countrymen were "almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets." He offers a graphic account of his kidnapping into slavery at the age of 11, and describes being held captive along the West African coast for seven months before was subsequently sold to British slavers, who shipped him to Barbados and then took him to Virginia.

His narrative also offers a harrowing account of the shock and isolation he felt during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. His description of the inhuman conditions aboard the slave ship has a power that has not been matched. "The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died," he wrote. "The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate," he wrote, "added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. . . . The wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable. . . . The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable."

Excerpted from: chnm.gmu.edu

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Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Pediatrics: The Development of a Specialty

By Cynthia Connolly, PhD, RN, FAAN

A Nineteenth Century Innovation: Hospitals for Children
In early 1879, a concerned citizen using the name “Fireside” penned an impassioned letter to the editors of Boston’s Evening Transcript. The paper published the heartfelt appeal to the citizens of Boston on behalf of the city’s Children’s Hospital on January 22.

Fireside wrote of the poverty observed on Boston’s streets by the casual onlooker:

"Men whose brutal faces made me shiver, women from whom every grace of womanhood had departed; and oh! More pitiful than all, the child faces that looked at me as I passed---the poor, wan faces, so pinched and pale with want and sickness, yet with a childlike innocence in their eyes . . ." (“Fireside”, 1879).

Fireside begged those who could afford it to send money to Children’s Hospital. Donations were a necessity, since the institution received financial support wholly through private funds. The writer may have also wanted to publicize the hospital’s existence since the idea of an institution devoted to the needs of children was a new concept. Until the mid-nineteenth century, there were no facilities dedicated to the care of sick children in the United States. If they could not be cared for at home, children, like their parents, went to municipal almshouses, also known as poorhouses. Orphaned or abandoned babies often ended up in infant asylums, which had been patterned after similar British institutions where the mortality rate approached 100 percent. By the 1860s in the United States, special hospitals for children were becoming a necessity, since many of the newly founded general hospitals simply refused to admit them (King, 1993).

The earliest children's hospitals admitted indigent or abandoned children, some of whom—but by no means all—were also ill. Many people during this era believed that immortality and poor character caused poverty. Since sickness and poverty often appeared together, providing spiritual guidance and moral uplift to the ill, in addition to offering food, clothing, and whatever other material provisions were needed, was supposed to help the poor rise above their condition and facilitate better health. Stratifying the needy into “deserving” versus “undeserving” categories helped charitable organizations and hospitals decide which individuals to aid. Because indigent children were considered the innocent victims of their parents’ bad choices or unsuitable lifestyles, they were, by definition, always deserving of assistance, and aiding them engendered little controversy (Katz, 1986).

Hospitalized children often resided at the institutions for months, and beyond fresh air and food, they were given few therapeutics, at least according to today’s standards. Those in charge of children’s institutions considered one of the most important interventions for the children to be their exposure to the wealthy trustees who ran the institutions. These individuals, usually socially prominent, were presumed to have better characters than the children's indigent parents, and they hired staff who they felt could help imbue the children with the qualities the trustees felt were important. Staff and trustees often discouraged or made it difficult for parents to visit their children, hoping that prolonged contact with staff would facilitate Americanization in immigrant children, and inculcate middle class behaviors and health practices among the native-born (Brosco, 1994; Vogel, 1980).

Fireside's description of the hospital’s environment, illustrated this practice:

"While there, in addition to their medical treatment and nursing, they are carefully taught cleanliness of habit, purity of thought and word, and as much regard is paid to their moral training as can be found in any cultivated family. Think what a widespread influence this becomes when the children return to their homes . . ." (“Fireside”, 1879).

Inventing Pediatric Medicine and Nursing
Physician Abraham Jacobi, considered by most to be founder of modern pediatrics, offered the first medical lectures on the diseases of childhood in 1860. Until the Civil War, pediatrics was considered part of obstetrics in the United States. Before Jacobi, medical specialties centered on a particular organ or technology. Jacobi felt that pediatrics should have a broader, more conceptual, focus. His vision was that pediatricians should concern themselves with child health well beyond mere disease. He advocated for the involvement of doctors who treated children in all aspects of child health including infant feeding, child hygiene, and disease prevention in well children. The pediatrician, he argued, could also use his talents to facilitate the Americanization of immigrants. Jacobi articulated a model for pediatrics with a focus well beyond specific diseases, one that involved disease prevention in healthy children, educating parents about child rearing, and social activism for children's rights.

In 1880, Jacobi and a few other interested physicians founded the American Medical Association’s section on the diseases of children. In 1888, they formed a new organization, the American Pediatric Society, which helped to solidify pediatrics as a distinct branch of medicine. Jacobi served as the first president of both groups. Framers of the American Pediatric Society recruited prominent physicians into their ranks to advance pediatrics’ acceptance. Early pediatricians such as Jacobi wrote prolifically in new journals and textbooks that focused exclusively on childhood diseases. They stressed the need for more children’s hospitals, and for the expansion of pediatric content in medical school curricula. By 1900, ten schools of medicine had full-time pediatricians (Halpern, 1988; Meckel, 1990; Viner, 2002).

Changing notions of disease causation synergized the development of pediatrics in the United States.  In the 1870s and 1880s, Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and others forged the germ theory of disease causation. These changes altered the role of the hospital in American life (Rosenberg, 1987) and reshaped pediatric nursing and medical care in the ensuing decades. By 1900, the organisms responsible for typhoid, leprosy, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, and a host of other conditions were identified. Illness—at least infectious illness—left the realm of morality and religion. It gradually evolved, at least for infectious diseases, to receive its identity in the laboratory (Rosen 1958/1993).

An understanding of the bacterial origins of infectious diseases encouraged such advances as the use of surgical gloves and sterilization. When coupled with anesthesia, these interventions made pediatric surgery safer. Better surgical therapeutics helped make hospitals more medically oriented. As early as the 1870s, physicians at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, for example, pressured the lay trustees who managed the hospital to increase patient turnover and accept more acutely ill children, especially orthopedic surgical patients who had something to offer physician education and on whom new surgical techniques and therapies could be tried. This new emphasis on the medical needs of patients and the experimental needs of doctors and nurses conflicted with the social welfare role children's hospitals saw themselves as performing (CHOP, 1870-1880).

Children’s hospitals were highly visible in the communities in which they were founded. The individuals who worked there deservedly prided themselves for providing a social safety net for the ill or abandoned child who needed care. Moreover, children’s hospitals were also good for the burgeoning specialties of pediatric nursing and medicine (Brodie, 1998; Golden, 1989). The development of children’s hospitals helped pediatrics to evolve more quickly into a specialty branch of medicine and nursing because of the opportunities it afforded for training, the feeling of shared identity and unity it fostered in its staff, and the research opportunities indigent hospitalized children provided in an era in which no ethical guidelines governed research.

Over time, the proportion of children admitted for social welfare reasons began to fall while the number of those suffering from chronic medical conditions or requiring surgery rose. More hospitals also began to accept children with infectious diseases for the first time. For example, until the 1890s when the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia developed accommodations to isolate potentially infectious children, the institution avoided admitting children with contagious diseases as well as infants for any reason (CHOP, 1893). As the hospital began to admit sicker patients, hospital trustees and physicians understood that trained nurses were essential for children to benefit from the burgeoning diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. The ongoing need for more and better-trained nurses resulted in the long anticipated inauguration of a nurse training school at the hospital in 1895, an advance that the Board noted answered  "a want, long felt" (CHOP, 1895).

Though the first pediatric nursing textbook was not published until 1923, articles addressing the needs of children appeared in nursing journals much earlier. (Farrar, 1906; Pierce, Cutler, & Bancroft, 1923). Florence Nightingale herself emphasized children's nursing care needs in her seminal 1859 book, Notes on Nursing, writing: "It is the real test of a nurse whether she can nurse a sick infant" (Nightingale, 1859/1992). Early publications highlighted such practices as infant feeding techniques and pediatric nursing procedures. Pioneering pediatric nurses such as Anna Haswell (1908) also stressed the special personality type required for children’s nursing asserting that:

The nursing of young children stands out as a division of our work needing special study. We have no branch that is more important . . . Let us be willing to do anything which will accomplish the greatest good for the child, and honor our profession by becoming more and more efficient in our ability to care for sick children (p 115).

Just what skills were necessary to ‘efficiently care for sick children’ in those days? Though the early nursing literature recognized that nurses needed educational preparation, the form that training took was different from today's. Until the twentieth century, nurses who specialized in children’s health trained in much the same way as their adult-oriented counterparts. Hospitals usually paid student nurses small allowances in addition to room and board, and in return these students worked, often largely unsupervised, on the wards caring for patients.

Students usually toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week for fifty weeks a year. The length of training was variable, ranging anywhere from eighteen months to three years. Nurses who wanted to specialize in child health tried to get their training either at a hospital with a children’s ward or at one of the few children’s hospitals. Once graduated, a few nurses assumed leadership positions in hospitals, but most sought private-duty positions in middle-and upper-class homes. The pay was poor and the hours irregular (Reverby, 1987).

Over the course of the twentieth century, hospital care for sick children of all classes became more commonplace, especially as new technologies and advances such as antibiotics made it possible to save the lives of more children. After World War II, an increasing number of subspecialties in children’s health care, such as neonatology and pediatric critical care, emerged from the rapidly expanding body of knowledge being generated.

Public Health Nursing and Children’s Health
Although institutions were central to the development of children’s health care, many advances arose from the early twentieth century public health movement and reformers efforts to publicize the plight of poor children. When Jacob Riis, New York City police reporter turned social reformer, wrote his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, his descriptions of the poor, especially the children, appalled people: “Seventy-two dead babies were picked up on the streets last year. Some of them doubtless were put out by very poor parents to save funeral expenses . . . bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about” (Riis, 1890, p 180). Riis’s tales of children dying from starvation and disease, exhausted from overwork, and fending for themselves on the streets, galvanized reformers and helped stimulate the reforms that created our modern child labor laws and systems of juvenile justice, foster care, and government aid to poor families.

These reforms were needed because the United States was experiencing profound social and cultural changes wrought by industrialization, urbanization, economic growth, and population increase. Moreover, people poured into American cities from overseas. Many of these new immigrants, arriving mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, were poor, spoke little or no English, and engaged in cultural practices foreign to earlier arrivals and the native-born. Masses of immigrants ended up in the ghettos of large cities where they faced even more awful conditions than did American migrants to the same urban areas. Living conditions were usually squalid, and immigrants often were forced to accept jobs so arduous or unsafe that native-born Americans shunned them. Their language and cultural practices were frequently objects of ridicule and suspicion.

The incidence of urban poverty exploded as immigrants and native born migrants crammed into tenements. Inadequate living conditions led to overcrowding, poor sanitation, disease, and increased crime (Cravens, 1985). For reformers such as Riis, “child-saving” represented a meaningful venue through which to cure these ills. Child-savers argued that children were impressionable, possessing the capacity to be uplifted, to rehabilitate their morally questionable parents and other family members, and to be easily Americanized if they were immigrants (Katz, 1986). As one prominent physician noted: "Anyone who has had practical experience recognizes only too well the almost hopeless task of trying to train and educate in the rules of hygiene and right living, ignorant, stupid people from the slums . . . Children, however, are easily trained" (Hawes, 1910, p 904).

Because of the writing and photography of reformers such as Riis, the plight of vulnerable children became more difficult to ignore in the late nineteenth century. Poor children and those orphaned or abandoned, were highly visible in cities. Children played in the streets, increasingly becoming victims of accidents. Contagious diseases and hunger were rampant. Poor maternal nutrition helped keep infant mortality high. Record keeping was sporadic until the 1920s and '30s, but what records that do exist indicate that at the dawn of the twentieth century one in every seven babies died. In some New England industrial towns, the infant death rate was as high as 30 percent. (Klaus, 1993; Meckel, 1990).

A New York City nurse, Lillian Wald, pioneered the new nursing specialty of public health nursing, an important engine of child-saving. In 1893, she and a colleague merged the concepts underlying district nursing and settlement houses by creating the nurse-managed Henry Street Settlement. Wald believed that bringing subsidized nursing care to the poor in their homes—care similar to that which the middle and upper classes could afford for themselves—both heightened the chances for its success and made treatment more humane. Wald also strove to improve the daily living experiences of children. Many Henry Street ventures focused on children health plays, train rides, summer camps, organized sports, music classes, playground for children to be outside. Wald (1915) evocatively brought turn of the century children’s health risks to life:

"One night during my first month on the East Side, [which would have been 1893] sleepless because of the heat, I leaned out of the window and looked down on Rivington Street. . . Sitting on the curb directly under my window, with her feet in the gutter, was a woman, drooping from exhaustion, a baby at her breast. The fire-escapes, considered the most desirable sleeping-places, were crowded with the youngest and the oldest; children were asleep on the sidewalks, on the steps of the houses and in the empty push-carts;. . . I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock in the morning (p 69-79)!"

One of Wald’s most significant accomplishments for children was her idea for school nurses. In 1902, Wald convinced the Board of Education to hire a Henry Street nurse to work in the school system. New York City had begun having physicians inspect school children for acute or infectious diseases in 1897. However, the children physicians identified as “sickly” were simply barred from attending school. Wald argued that this practice was inhumane and arranged for Lina Rogers, a Henry Street Settlement nurse to provide follow-up and home care to children (Wald, 1915).

Wald's activism helped spur the creation of the Children’s Bureau, the first government agency to be dedicated solely to children’s welfare, which was established in 1912 (Markel and Golden, 2005). Wald and other public health nurses throughout the nation worked at health departments to implement Children’s Bureau initiatives such as those aimed at preventing infant mortality. They also worked through private agencies to secure such health benefits as pure milk for children and families. Their efforts established nurses as a critical societal resource for children’s health.

When, a few years later, Congress enacted the first federal legislation for children’s health and welfare, the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, nurses coordinated many of its educational and health-screening efforts (Sealander, 2003). At the height of the 1930s Depression, nurses again sprung into action, providing health care to children through the Child Health Recovery Program and later through the Social Security Act (Markel and Golden, 2005). The importance of nurses to the success of child health programs became clear again in the 1960s through their participation in Medicaid-funded programs and in the new infrastructure needed to support the 1975 legislation that guaranteed a quality education for all children, even those with mental and physical disabilities. Today, an essential site for children’s health care delivery is the school-based health clinic, where school nurses and pediatric nurse practitioners address epidemics of child obesity, asthma, and mental health and behavioral problems (Halfon, 2007).

Image: Student nurse and children, Jewish Hospital, Philadelphia, PA c. 1900
                     

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Childcare in the Civil War Era

From: faqs.org

The contemporary idea of childhood in the United States is distinctly domestic: it regards the home and its appendages, such as schools and churches, as the child's proper places. Although U.S. attitudes toward childhood and children have European roots, approaches to child welfare in parts of Europe and non-Western societies often differ from American attitudes, since they have included the separation of children from their homes for purposes of maturation, APPRENTICE-SHIP, and early employment. From the American view, such practices are aberrant, harmful, and tantamount to ABANDONMENT in so far as they fall short of providing children with nurturing, parental home environments. Contemporary Western notions of abandonment sprang from this particular representation of domestic childhood and from normative judgments about a child's actual and ideal life course.

The Years Prior to the Civil War
Dependent children are those who, through various circumstances, become dependent on private charity or public assistance. In the United States, ideas about children's welfare were inherited from the English Poor Laws under the principle of parens patriae, whereby the state is the ultimate parent of all children. In the colonial era, this resulted in two forms of relief for dependent children: indoor relief (assistance to parents in the home) and outdoor relief (alternate homes, such as ORPHANAGES and poor houses). For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, public administration was local and the household was the immediate source of authority, with the result that dependents had little direct contact with the state. Many thousands of children were brought to the colonies as indentures and the death rate in the Chesapeake was high for children as well as adults. Consequently, the indenture system tried to maintain household governance and the family system by placing children in homes while training them for future employment. It made little difference whether the child was poor, illegitimate, or orphaned and, regardless of cause, children who were left on their own were regularly indentured or apprenticed. Indenture afforded a reasonable solution to uncared-for children while reducing public responsibility for colonial dependents, including those who were orphaned, whose parents were unfit, or who misbehaved. In 1648 Virginia, for example, following the British model, the state could remove a child from a home with parents who were overly fond or if the child was "perversely obstinate."

The first private orphan asylum in North America appeared in 1738 in Georgia, and the first public orphanage did not open until a half century later, in 1790, in South Carolina, with 115 orphans. Others followed in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The founding of orphanages demonstrates that by the late eighteenth century, congregate alternatives for dependent children were being tried. Whereas binding out and indenture favored the family setting and foreshadowed the subsequent shift to FOSTER CARE and ADOPTION, almshouses and orphanages foreshadowed a preference for congregate institutions.

The years prior to the Civil War witnessed a movement away from indenture and apprenticeship toward the rise of congregate institutions, based in rising objections to indenture for children, and an increase in the real numbers of dependent children. Moreover, as industrialization changed the size and nature of the family, the value of children shifted from their productive contribution to the family to parental bonds of affection for the child. The nineteenth-century cult of motherhood eroded the traditional patriarchal control over child custody, forging instead a romanticized ideology in which children were innocent and vulnerable and mothers had a special responsibility for protecting them. In 1838, a new judicial policy marked the shift from father's rights to mother's love in the adjudication of child custody. EX PARTECROUSE declared that children have needs, not rights; that they need custody, not liberty; and the place for a child was school, not prison. While the case is noted for shifting the parental responsibility of child custody from the father to the mother, it was also pivotal for legitimizing and elevating the practice of institutional custody.

Between 1820 and 1860, 150 private orphanages were founded across the United States, some in response to EPIDEMICS that orphaned many children. Orphanages were largely religious and largely for white children under ten years of age. Most orphanages indentured the older children, and few received public funds. It was not long before congregate institutions became overcrowded, underfunded, and less and less rehabilitative. By mid-century, congregate institutions that only a few years earlier had been models of care were losing their luster. An 1855 report to the New York State Legislature chastised almshouses for the outrageous conditions in which they sheltered some 3,000 children under sixteen. The problems were intensified with the children orphaned in the Civil War and as numbers of immigrants multiplied. Nevertheless, despite criticism, congregate institutions grew through the end of the nineteenth century.

Placing Out
The idea of PLACING OUT marked a departure from apprenticeship, indenture, and congregate homes. Whereas removing children from the home under those circumstances did not necessarily sever ties with the children's families, placing out included permanent transfer to foster or adoptive homes, illustrated by the NEW YORK CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY(NYCAS) and CHARLES LORING BRACE's famous ORPHANTRAINS in the mid-nineteenth century. Brace was a critic of congregate institutions, and the NYCAS placed thousands of dependent youth in private homes. (NYCAS, however, over-whelmingly favored white western European children, who represented 95 percent of its placements; it could not or would not place black or eastern European children.) Brace romanticized the image of children being "rescued" from urban streets and placed in families in the midwestern countryside and the plains states. He spoke passionately about the practice that eventually affected some 200,000 youngsters over seventy-five years. As rapid urbanization, immigration, and industrialization widened social class divisions, reformers like Brace looked to protect society by removing children from those "dangerous" classes.

Brace's objective was to place children in caring, moral, and stable family environments, and this program signaled the triumph of the ideology of domesticity, with its emphasis on affection, romantic marriage, and innocent children. He preferred foster care to adoption, as most of his children's parents were destitute but not absent or dead, and ties of affection and Christian charity to legal bonds. Brace found a middle ground between involuntary apprenticeship or indenture on the one hand and adoption on the other. With the support of New York's upper-class reformers, he shared their concern for the waif as well as disdain for the poor and immigrant parents.

In the colonial era children outside the bloodline could not share legal status with natural-born children. However, by the mid-nineteenth century the courts, under the best interests of the child doctrine, were more willing to consider the place of affection, choice, and nurture in the family structure. In 1851, two path-breaking court cases terminated the natural rights of birth parents. More and more, judges moved the parent-child relationship from patriarchal kinship lines to a contractual relationship that reflected sentimental ties and emphasized child nurture. That year, Massachusetts passed an act to provide for the adoption of children, substituting artificial ties for those of birth. By the end of the century, the Massachusetts model existed in almost every state, and adoption became routine.

While Brace's system of fostering challenged institutional care for dependent children, asylums continued to grow in size and number but increasingly were on the defensive. In 1864 the Boston Children's Aid Society (BCAS), for example, rejected long-term care in favor of keeping the families intact to the greatest extent possible. Where Brace wanted homes for children who were homeless or in jeopardy, the BCAS developed strategies for placing dependent children, paying other families to board them, and finding places where single mothers could both work and keep their children, carefully selecting and monitoring the foster homes. Taken together, these projects encouraged the formation of foster care and the passage of adoption laws intended to place children in family environments where the relocated children would be treated like natural sons and daughters. Brace wanted to place children permanently, separated from their birth families, which, especially regarding poor or immigrant families, he considered to be incapable of raising good "American" children. The BCAS, on the other hand, wanted to place children in ways that their parents could see them, and perhaps reclaim them when their situations improved. Moreover, Brace and his peers succeeded in articulating new language that included the rights of the child, not for independence or personal liberty, but for safety from risk and corruption. Welfare policies were profoundly influenced by the idea of the child as a special category of citizen, and state-sponsored children's institutions supported this view. By the end of the nineteenth century, the best interest of the child doctrine facilitated the creation of age-segregated state laws restricting child labor and prohibiting children from buying tobacco or alcohol. It also shaped adoption and custody laws. The new laws rested on an assessment of the child's needs and the public good rather than the parents' interests. Poor and black families after the Civil War were particularly vulnerable to having their children bound out for apprenticeships without parental approval, and the best interest of the child idea sometimes resulted in injustices as the authority to control the child shifted from the parent to the state.

Image: Civil War Cincinnati Sisters, ca 1864. Carte de visite. Winder's Cartes de Visite Photograph Gallery No. 373 Central Ave, opp Court, Cincinnati, O.

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