The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 8: Soldier Life and Secret Service.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

[232] unfinished railway at Second Bull Run, in the cornfields of the Antietam, on the frozen slopes of Marye's Hill, or among the murky woods of Chancellorsville. Now, in many a regiment, by the spring of 1864, half the original names had gone from the muster-rolls, the fearful cost of such battling as had been theirs—theirs, the home-loving lads who came flocking in the flush of youth and the fervor of patriotism to offer their brave lives at the earliest call, in 1861.

It was a veteran army of campaigners with which Meade, Hancock, and Reynolds, those three gallant Pennsylvanians, overthrew at Gettysburg the hard-fighting army of the South —Reynolds laying down his life in the fierce grapple of the first day—veterans, yet more than half of them beardless boys. Few people to-day who see the bent forms and snowy heads of our few remaining ‘comrades’ of the Civil War, begin to know, and fewer still can realize, the real facts as to the ages of our volunteers. It is something worthy of being recorded here and remembered for all time, that the ‘old boys,’ as they love to speak of themselves, were young boys, very young, when first they raised their ungloved right hands to swear allegiance to the flag, and obedience to the officers appointed over them.

It is something to be inscribed on the tablets of memory —the fact that over one million of the soldiers who fought for the preservation of the Union were but eighteen years of age or less at date of enlistment—that over two millions were not over twenty-one. It is a matter of record that of a total of 1,012,273 enlistments statistically examined it was found that only 46,626 were twenty-five years of age—only 16,070 were forty-four. It is something for mothers to know today that three hundred boys of thirteen years or less (twenty-five were but ten or under) were actually accepted and enlisted, generally as drummers or fifers, but, all the same, regularly enrolled and sworn in by the recruiting officers of the United States. Many a time those little fellows were