Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination

David M Rosen

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813572895
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

When we hear the term “child soldiers, ” most Americans imagine innocent victims roped into bloody conflicts in distant war-torn lands like Sudan and Sierra Leone. Yet our own history is filled with examples of children involved in warfare—from adolescent prisoner of war Andrew Jackson to Civil War drummer boys—who were once viewed as symbols of national pride rather than signs of human degradation.
 
In this daring new study, anthropologist David M. Rosen investigates why our cultural perception of the child soldier has changed so radically over the past two centuries. Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination reveals how Western conceptions of childhood as a uniquely vulnerable and innocent state are a relatively recent invention. Furthermore, Rosen offers an illuminating history of how human rights organizations drew upon these sentiments to create the very term “child soldier, ” which they presented as the embodiment of war’s human cost.
 
Filled with shocking historical accounts and facts—and revealing the reasons why one cannot spell “infantry” without “infant”— Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination seeks to shake us out of our pervasive historical amnesia. It challenges us to stop looking at child soldiers through a biased set of idealized assumptions about childhood, so that we can better address the realities of adolescents and pre-adolescents in combat. Presenting informative facts while examining fictional representations of the child soldier in popular culture, this book is both eye-opening and thought-provoking.   

1

A Tale of Two Orphans

The lives of two thirteen-year-old boys, separated by over two centuries, reveal both the history of child soldiers and the profound transformation of cultural attitudes toward children in armed conflict. The first was born in 1767 and the second in 1980. Both were thirteen years old when they became soldiers. Both fought in brutal partisan conflicts that pitted neighbor against neighbor and in which soldiers and civilians were massacred, murdered, and mutilated. Both became orphans during the war. Both survived and continued their studies after the war: one studied law and was admitted to the bar in North Carolina, the other finished a degree in politics at Oberlin College in Ohio. Both were the subjects of very successful books—national best sellers. But one was celebrated as a great American hero and patriot while the other attained international fame as a survivor and victim of war.

Two hundred thirteen years separate the birth of Andrew Jackson—child soldier, hero of the American Revolution, and seventh president of the United States—and Ishmael Beah—child soldier, victim of the civil war in Sierra Leone, and spokesman for the plight of child soldiers everywhere. John Eaton’s 1824 book The Life of Andrew Jackson caught the attention of the nation as the first presidential campaign biography ever written and the model for every one written since.1 Ishmael Beah’s autobiography A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier was a best seller in the United States in 2007 and was distributed nationally through the Starbucks coffee chain. Why was Andrew Jackson lionized as a hero, and why is Ishmael commiserated with and valorized as a victim of adult abuse? What processes turned the heroes of yesteryear into the victims of today? Understanding the stories of these two child soldiers, and the differences in the ways their societies viewed them, will illustrate the dramatic cultural shifts that have occurred in the West in our attitudes about the nature of war, the nature of children, and the responsibilities of society to its children in the context of armed conflict.

Andrew Jackson: Child Soldier of the American Revolution

Andrew Jackson, the youngest of three sons of Scots-Irish immigrants, was born in 1767 in the Waxhaw Settlement in the Piedmont region that straddles the border between North and South Carolina. Jackson’s father died shortly after his birth. His mother, a staunch opponent of the British, apparently impressed her sons with her tales of British tyranny and the oppression of the poor in Ireland. According John Eaton, Jackson’s first biographer, she held that the “first duty” of her children was “to expend their lives . . . in defending and supporting the natural rights of man.”2

Jackson was nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed. By the time he was thirteen, the Revolutionary War was raging across the South. His older brother Hugh was already dead, a victim of heat exhaustion during the 1779 Battle of Stono Ferry, near Charleston. The American Revolution was as much a civil war as it was a war of national independence from England. This was especially so in the Carolinas, where the citizenry was radically divided between Patriots (Whigs) and Loyalists (Tories). Indeed, North Carolina had the largest number of Loyalists of any of the American colonies, which meant that the war was not simply one of contending armies, but was fought among a local population with fiercely divided factions and loyalties.3 The war between Patriots and Loyalists was also an internal domestic conflict that set neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, and father against son.4

By 1780, when Jackson was thirteen, the British seemed to have the upper hand in the battlegrounds of North and South Carolina. Charleston, South Carolina, fell on May 12, 1780. The defeated forces of the Continental Army retreated northward toward North Carolina, but were routed by British forces under the command of Banastre Tarleton on May 29, 1780, in the Battle of the Waxhaws. Jackson got his first taste of the sheer brutality of warfare at this battle, although he was not yet a soldier. During the battle, Tarleton’s largely Loyalist forces killed 113 members of the Patriot militia and wounded 150. More important, the battle was noted for the way in which Loyalists deliberately killed surrendering Patriots. Dr. Robert Brownfield, a surgeon who treated the wounded, described it as “indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the most ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages.”5 The surviving wounded soldiers were abandoned to the care of the settlers at a church meeting house converted into a hospital. Jackson’s mother was among those who ministered to the wounded soldiers, and both Jackson and his sixteen-year-old brother Robert helped their mother treat the wounded, many of whom were horribly mangled with multiple wounds.6

A War of Revenge, Murder, and Mayhem

The so-called Waxhaws Massacre catalyzed an emerging rhetoric of atrocity and revenge that defined the way in which Patriots and Tories viewed one another.7 Although it is sometimes difficult to sort out myth from reality, personal revenge was a powerful motive for many of the rebels.8 One young patriot, Major Thomas Young, who joined the Patriot militia at age sixteen, was clear that he enlisted to avenge the murder of his brother John. In revenge, he claimed, more than one hundred Tories “felt the weight of his arm” and he personally hanged a local and reviled Tory named Adam Steedham.9

Like Young, Jackson and his brothers burned to avenge the dead and the wounded, particularly their brother who had been killed in the melee.10 “Men hunted each other,” said Amos Kendall, “like beasts of prey.”11 The main objective of both parties was to kill the fighting men, and thereby avenge the slaying of partisans.12 The historian Augustus Buell called it a “savage carnival of internecine murder, where neighbor destroyed neighbor and families exterminated families.”13 Without first enlisting in any organized corps Jackson and his brother, along with many others, formed small parties that went out on single enterprises of retaliation, using their own horses and weapons.14 In this murderous cauldron the laws and customs of war were routinely disregarded. There were few distinctions between soldiers and civilians, and even where different groups wore distinguishing signs or badges, they often used each other’s badges as a mode of disguise.15 Later in life, Jackson spoke about the madness of war during that time, particularly citing the case of one Patriot who, having found a friend murdered and mutilated, devoted himself to killing Tories. According to Jackson, he lay in wait for them and had killed twenty by war’s end.16

Not long after setting out for war, Jackson and his brother Robert joined a cavalry unit under the command of Colonel William Davies, who made Jackson a mounted orderly (messenger) and gave him a pistol. Jackson also carried a small shotgun given to him by an uncle.17 But the forces in which Jackson served were routed by a group of armed Loyalists dressed as Patriots, who were backed by a troop of British dragoons.18 Jackson and his brother fled to a nearby house, but were soon discovered and captured. What followed became one of the most important episodes in Jackson’s life. Not long after Jackson’s capture, the officer in charge ordered him to clean the officer’s boots. Jackson refused, demanding to be treated as a prisoner of war. Jackson’s biographer James Parton described the scene: “The officer glared at him like a wild beast, and aimed a desperate blow at the boy’s head with his sword. Andrew broke the force of the blow with his hand, and thus received two wounds—one deep gash on his head and another on his hand, the marks of which he carried to his grave. The officer, after achieving this gallant feat, turned to Robert Jackson, and ordered him to clean his boots. Robert also refused. The valiant Briton struck the young man so violent a sword blow upon the head, so as to prostrate and disable him.”19

Jackson and his brother were nearly starved as prisoners of war and his brother’s condition worsened. Ultimately both captives were released in a prisoner exchange, but Robert died a few days later, possibly of his wounds or of smallpox.20 Not long after this, Jackson’s mother and other women brought food and medicine to those held in the prison ships in Charleston (the prisoners included the sons of Mrs. Jackson’s sister), where Mrs. Jackson caught fever and died.21 Thus by age fifteen, his brothers and parents all dead, Jackson became an orphan of the American Revolution.22

Child Prisoners of War

The British soldiers’ brutal treatment of Jackson and his brother was a commonplace experience for captured rebels during the war. Captured rebels were treated not as prisoners of war, but as traitors and criminals “destined to the cord,” that is, the hangman’s noose. Rebellion, in British eyes, was a capital offense and execution the just fate of rebels. Prisoners were routinely abused and beaten, and robberies, murders, and mock executions were common.23 The worst excesses took place in New York, the center of British wartime operations during the Revolutionary War. Here the British created a notorious system of prison ships at Wallabout Bay in Brooklyn, just across the East River from Manhattan Island.24 The British interned between 24,850 and 32,000 Americans in these prison ships and other places in New York, and between 15,575 and 18,000 of those prisoners died in captivity.

The majority of Revolutionary War soldiers came from the white male population aged sixteen and above, although by 1778 a large number of black volunteers and bondsmen serving as substitutes for their white masters were added to the ranks of the Continental Army.25 During the American Revolution a total of 68,024 Americans were killed in action and other 10,000 died of wounds or disease. The death rate for captive prisoners was horrifying: the number of captives who died from systemic abuse and ill treatment was two or three times the number actually killed in battle.26

Age appears to have had little or no impact upon whether a person was interned as a prisoner. A twelve-year-old boy named Palmer served as the youngest crew member of the American privateer Chance; but when the British captured the ship they confined Palmer on the prison ship Jersey along with the rest of the Chance’s crew. Palmer apparently died of smallpox on the prison ship. On the night of his death, his captain, Thomas Dring, whom Palmer had always regarded as his protector, held onto Palmer during his convulsions as he screamed and begged for his mother and family.27 Another boy, Daniel Bedinger, age fifteen, was one of about twenty-eight hundred prisoners captured by the British in the Battle of Fort Washington in Upper Manhattan in November 1776. He was first held in a sugar refinery in Lower Manhattan that had been converted into a prison, where many prisoners died of sickness, starvation, and exposure to the cold. He was ultimately transferred to one of the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, and was later released in a prisoner exchange, but never fully regained his health. Bedinger was lucky; only eight hundred of the prisoners captured at Fort Washington survived their imprisonment.28

Heroism and National Celebrity

The horrifying conditions of capture and imprisonment of American soldiers by the British were well known. Indeed, many who served in the Continental Army remained as living witnesses to the brutality of warfare, so Jackson’s story no doubt rang true to many Americans in the early nineteenth century. The episode of Jackson’s service and capture became central to Eaton’s Life of Andrew Jackson. With the book in print, Jackson structured his presidential campaign around his story; and the heart of the story was the brave thirteen-year-old soldier who refused to bow down to a tyrant. Jackson himself seems to have been somewhat circumspect about his military service, but by the time he ran for president he was celebrated as the hero of two wars—the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Arguably, Jackson was the first president of the United States to be democratically elected.29 As Jill Lepore has put it, “Americans first voted for a President whose campaign touted him as a rugged, stubborn, hot-tempered war hero”;30 Jackson the war hero was a child soldier.

Ishmael Beah: Child Soldier of the Civil War in Sierra Leone

Ishmael Beah was born on November 23, 1980, in a fishing village in Bonthe District in southern Sierra Leone. Beah’s memoir of his recruitment and service as a child soldier sold over a million and a half copies, and the book was studied on college campuses across America. He is regarded as one of the most widely read contemporary African writers. According to his memoir, in 1993 his village was attacked by rebel soldiers of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the Sierra Leonean rebel group known for its murderous cruelty in the treatment of the civilian population, including the widespread amputation of civilians’ hands and arms. The attack on his village was the beginning of Beah’s odyssey of flight, recruitment, and rehabilitation, a journey punctuated by a series of horrifying episodes that shaped his life’s narrative.

Beah’s account begins with his visit in 1993 to the village of Matter Jong, which came under sudden attack by the forces of the RUF. Beah and several companions fled, but soon realized they would not be able to feed themselves without money, so they sneaked back into the village to retrieve funds. After they escaped again from the village, they wandered through the countryside looking for a zone of safety and hoping perhaps to reconnect with Beah’s parents. The boys were briefly captured by rebels, witnessed the torture and mock execution of an old man by rebel fighters, and were forcibly recruited into the rebel ranks. Beah learned that those not selected for recruitment would be marched to a river and shot, but the whol...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. A Tale of Two Orphans
• Chapter 2. The Struggle over Child Recruitment
• Chapter 3. Child Soldiers in World War II
• Chapter 4. The Child Soldier in Popular Culture
• Chapter 5. Modern Child Soldiers
• Chapter 6. The Politics and Culture of Childhood Vulnerability
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author