A young, unidentified private in the 5th New Hampshire. The Whipple hat indicates this image was probably taken in Concord, NH, shortly before the regiment entrained for Washington, DC, in late October 1861. (Image courtesy of David Morin.)
The numbers, so they say, are in. Over the last several years, with the help of numerous student research assistants, I’ve been able to compile biographical information for a randomly selected pool of soldiers amounting to more than half of the original volunteers of the 5th New Hampshire who enlisted in 1861.[i] Collecting the data for these 540 men was extremely labor intensive. We used Ayling’s Revised Register as well as a host of other sources on FamilySearch (e.g. census records, marriage records, death records, enlistment forms, pension forms, etc.).[ii] Although the students and I completed the work some months ago, it was only recently that I finished entering all the data in an Excel spreadsheet. I hope that the spreadsheet will facilitate the searching and sorting of data. The next series of posts will look at this data from various angles.
I thought I’d discuss the age of the men upon enlistment first because the numbers are relatively easy to manipulate on a spreadsheet and use to build a graph. Obtaining the numbers themselves, however, was not easy, and I have to warn my readers that in many cases, the figures are approximations. For one thing, census takers and recruiting officers did not ask people for their birthdays—they asked for ages. That makes it difficult to determine birth years. Depending in which month he was asked his age, a man could give different responses. For example, somebody who was 23 at the time of the Census of 1860 could have been born in either 1836 or 1837. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that ages were self-reported. From census to census, some folks were very inconsistent in relating how old they were (e.g., they appeared to have aged only 7 years between 1850 and 1860). In other cases, people had reason to lie about their age. Men who married much younger girls often shaved—or perhaps chopped—a decade off their age on the marriage record. Underage boys and overage men invariably lied to the recruiting officer—although, to be honest, I think recruiting officers and parents were often complicit in these lies. Under these circumstances, determining somebody’s age in 1861 is a matter of educated—but usually well-educated—guesswork.
All this lying to recruiting officers led to some strange results in Ayling’s Revised Register which used recruitment forms to determine the ages of the soldiers listed in that volume. If one accepts the listed ages at face value, one sees a great deal of “clumping” at either end of the age range of legal enlistment. For example, 150 volunteers (almost 15% of the entire regiment) claimed they were 18 while only 88 asserted they were 19. The same phenomenon occurred at the other end of the spectrum, if somewhat less spectacularly: where only 20 men claimed they were 42 or 43, 35 claimed they were 44 or 45. (It’s my understanding that at the time, only men between the ages of 18 and 44 were legally permitted to enlist.)
I’m sure I didn’t detect all those who lied about their ages, but I am pleased to see my graph shows no clumping at the age of 44. Is there clumping at the other end? Yes, but the number of 18-year-olds is now much reduced from what Ayling indicates. Moreover, 19-year-olds form the largest cohort. Finally, we must keep in mind that some clumping at this end of the graph makes sense since historians recognize that soldiering was a young man’s métier during the Civil War.
Interestingly, recruitment faltered substantially among those between the ages of 24 and 30 (with the exception of 26-year-olds). I think the explanation here is simple: men in this age range were more likely to be married and thus disinclined to volunteer. On average, the men in the pool who married in 1860 or earlier did so at the age of 23.3 (n=107). The group as a whole married, on average, at 25.9, with a median age of 24 (n=261). I’m going to guess that the average for the group as a whole is higher because many single men who fought in the war put off marriage later than they might otherwise have done.
The average age upon enlistment of the soldiers in the pool was 25.5 years. The median age was 23 years. The difference is explained by the fact that a huge number of soldiers are concentrated in the younger age cohorts but there is a very long “tail” extending all the way out to men in their mid- to late 50s. The most common age was 19 (n=51). Those who were 17 years old or younger (that is, not legally eligible to enlist) amounted to 10.2% of the pool. Those 45 years or older (and also not legally eligible to enlist) were 5.7% of the pool.
Another young, unidentified volunteer whose image was captured shortly before the 5th New Hampshire left Concord in October 1861. This one, though, looks like he’s spoiling for a fight. (Imagine courtesy of David Morin.)
According to the figures I found, fighting in the 5th New Hampshire was a young man’s occupation.
- Volunteers between the ages of 18 and 23 constituted 45% of the regiment.
- Volunteers under the age of 25 were 58.9% of the regiment.
- Volunteers under the age of 29 formed 77% of the regiment.
Two age-related facts surprised me the most. First, the pool had a dozen men who were 50 years of age or older. If 50 is the new 40 these days, what are we to say about these men? That 50 at the time was equivalent to the current 65? I’d like to think these soldiers were superior physical specimens for the 1860s, but such does not seem to be the case. Three died of disease in the service, and one died almost 15 years after the war, partly due to his wounds. Of the remaining eight, one died in his 50s, one died in his 60s, two died in their 70s, and four died in their 80s.
Second, the number of boys in the regiment who were 17 years or younger is also surprising. That so many were so young helps explain the contretemps involving Colonel Edward Cross, Oratus Verry, and New Hampshire Representative Thomas M. Edwards. Apparently, Verry, who was 19, lied on his enlistment form and claimed he was 20 when he volunteered for the 5th New Hampshire (20 was the minimum age at which a volunteer could enlist without obtaining parental permission). Verry found he did not like army life, and asked his parents to help him get out of the regiment. They contacted Edwards, their congressman, who arranged to have the boy discharged on that grounds that he was underage. These proceedings infuriated Cross who wrote a blistering letter to Edwards which included the following passage: “Private Orastus [sic] J. Verry, Company F, will be discharged according to orders; but allow me to say that his discharge is an outrage against military custom, against law, and cannot fail to have a bad example. The young man is strong, able-bodied, and if he is discharged, with equal reason might one-half of our army be discharged” (italics added). [iii] What this incident signifies (among other things) is that much of the regiment was underage, and Cross knew it. If the precedent set by Verry would not have led to the discharge of half the army, it certainly would have released a substantial number of boy soldiers who should never have enlisted with or without parental permission.
As we shall see in further posts, the youth of these men very much dictated their social circumstances. The majority were unmarried, which meant that most of them lived in somebody else’s household—often that of their parents. That being the case, very few possessed any capital or cash of their own. In other words, they seemed poor, but the story was more complicated than that. The fathers of these young men often owned real estate of some sort—a workshop or, most commonly, a farm. Many of the sons clearly aspired to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and become capitalists in the same occupations. (Indeed, a quick survey of my spreadsheet seems to indicate that the sons of small farmers constituted the backbone of the 5th New Hampshire.) But at the time they enlisted in the 5th New Hampshire, they hadn’t enjoyed enough time to accumulate capital to marry, start a household of their own, and make a go at their chosen calling—whether it was farming, carpentry, shoemaking, or blacksmithing.
[i] For this particular bit of work, the students included Stephen Hanabergh ’22, Connor O’Neill ’22, and Madison Lessard ’22.
[ii] Augustus D. Ayling, Revised Register of the Soldiers and Sailors of New Hampshire in the War of the Rebellion. 1861-1866 (Concord: I. C. Evans, 1895).
[iii] Mike Pride and Mark Travis, My Brave Boys: To War with Colonel Cross & the Fighting Fifth (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), 57.
The 5th New Hampshire Project 