HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS CENTERS
A soldier woke up in the morning hearing a drummer’s call to muster and went to bed hearing tattoo—later called taps. In between, drumbeats summoned him to meals and called him to attention when officers had announcements. Most important, there were specific, coded drumbeats spelling out different military formations and strategies during a battle. Even the youngest drummers stood right out in the middle of the battleground, trying to hear an officer’s order above all the gunfire so they could beat out the command to the troops. Everyone knew that if you could kill the enemy’s drummer, you wiped out your foe’s communications center. After the Civil War, cannons and shells got so loud that soldiers couldn’t hear a drummer’s signals, and bugles were used.
“The Yanks have to send their babies to fight.”—A rebel soldier’s assessment of Johnny Clem
Battlefields, 1861-1864
If you were too young to be a soldier but really wanted a taste of war, your best bet was to find a drum and some sticks and start practicing. Drummers and buglers were classified as noncombatants, so boys were allowed to join. Some were still little boys. At least twenty-five drummers during the Civil War were ten years old or younger. Many more were in their early teens. John Clem, a tiny, tough young drummer, became one of the most famous figures of the conflict.
Nine-year-old John Clem ran away from his Ohio farm to try to join the Third Ohio Regiment of the Union army in the spring of 1861. He knew no one would mistake him for a man—he was small even for his age—but he also knew that he could usually find some way to get just about anything he really wanted. The captain of the regiment waved him back home, but instead John slipped inside the baggage compartment of the train carrying the soldiers to camp at Lexington, Kentucky. Once there, John hopped out and presented himself to the men of the Twenty-second Michigan Regiment. They were charmed by the eager, round-faced boy. They agreed to take him on as a drummer and even chipped in their wages to pay him a salary of thirteen dollars a month. They made him a tiny uniform and sawed off a shotgun so he could have a weapon. A warrior at last, he was in heaven.
This studio portrait, taken after the battle of Shiloh, was used to turn Johnny Clem into “Johnny Shiloh,” child-hero of the North.
The drum corps of the Ninety-third New York Infantry
Johnny saw his first action in 1862, in the battle of Shiloh, a furious clash during which huge cannons traded massive fire. It was the first real battle for many soldiers. The shelling was so horrible that thousands of soldiers simply ran away and hid. Not John Clem. When a cannonball fragment glanced off a tree and shattered his drum, he stayed at his commander’s side. When the fight was over, he carried the pieces back to camp and proudly showed them to the survivors in his unit. They made him a sergeant, raised his pay, and set up a photo session for him. He became the Union’s poster child, proof that even Northern boys who were years away from their first shave were eager to fight. People took to calling him Johnny Shiloh.
Then, in 1863, he found himself in the battle of Chicamauga, Georgia. It was another massive struggle, this time to see which side could control a railroad depot near Chattanooga, Tennessee. During the smoke-filled action John got lost behind enemy lines. When he could finally see, he was looking at a Confederate officer, who ordered him to surrender. Johnny dropped to the ground, pretending to give up, and then killed the man with his tiny shotgun. He crawled off and lay among a pile of dead bodies until it got dark enough to steal away to the Union side.
Once again, the survivors in his regiment were proud of him. They made him a lance corporal and gave him another raise. He was now eleven and didn’t quite weigh sixty pounds, but soon he was famous in both armies as the “drummer boy of Chicamauga.”
YOU’RE A FINE COOK, AIN’T YOU?
Drummers rarely rested. When they weren’t practicing or fighting, they hauled water and gathered wood, rubbed down the horses, dug trenches, and built roads. A few cut hair. They helped surgeons amputate and stack up limbs. Many were made to cook for the men, who had to be patient while the boys learned. It didn’t always work out. One boy, William Bircher, was ordered to cook a chicken for an officer named Stalcup, whose favorite part was the gizzard—a sac full of tiny stones that chickens use to help digest their food. “Not being an expert at cooking,” wrote Bircher in his diary, “I forgot to cut the gizzard open and cleanse it from all its foreign substances. I simply put it in whole to cook. At noon I pronounced the dinner ready … Stalcup plunged his fork into the dish and took it in one mouthful. But [then] he began to curse like a sea captain as he spit about a pint of gravel stones and said, ‘You’re a fine cook, ain’t you?’ Next time I cook a chicken, you bet I will not forget to dissect the gizzard.”
The next year he was caught once again behind Confederate lines. This time rebel soldiers recognized him and held him until the North agreed to trade him for a high-ranking Confederate officer. When they let him go, one rebel cracked that the only thing John Clem proved was that “the Yanks have to send their babies to fight.”
He was finally discharged on September 19, 1864. He was four feet tall and had spent three years in the deadliest war in U.S. history. He reenlisted in the army after the Civil War and became a career officer, retiring in 1916 with the rank of major general. He died at eighty-five in 1937.