John Lincoln Clem ran away from his home in Newark, Ohio, and joined the Union Army as a drummer boy. He was supposedly nine years old.
I’ll flag that up front, because it’s the part that gets repeated the most and stands on the shakiest ground. The stories put him at Shiloh at nine. In my research, the only age I could actually pin down was twelve. History is not an absolute, and this is a good example of a story that grew in the telling.
But twelve is remarkable enough.
At the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, Clem — twelve years old — was confronted by a Confederate colonel who demanded his surrender. Clem pulled out a sawed-off musket, shot the colonel, and escaped.
He was promoted to sergeant. The newspapers made him “The Drummer Boy of Chickamauga,” and he became a national hero at an age when most boys today are in the seventh grade.
Here’s the part that always gets me. Clem didn’t go home and become a story. He stayed. He made the Army his entire working life and retired in 1915 — the last Civil War veteran still on active duty in the United States Army. Congress promoted him to major general on the retired list the following year.
Think about the span of that. A boy who beat a drum for men carrying muzzle-loading rifles was still in uniform when the Army was buying machine guns and airplanes. He lived until 1937, dying at 85.
He outlived the war by 72 years, and for 50 of them, he was still in.
There were thousands of boys in those camps — carrying drums, water, and messages, some of them barely tall enough to shoulder a musket. Most of their names are gone. Clem’s survived because he shot a colonel.
This is one of 101 questions answered in The Civil War Little Black Book: Secrets, History, and Trivia of America’s Defining Conflict.
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I’ve also written a novel about Sherman’s March to the Sea, Howl! WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters: https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ
And a trilogy going from West Point in the 1840s through the Mexican War and into the Civil War in the vein of HBO’s Rome miniseries; Duty, Honor, Country: https://amzn.to/3RgWbXa
