What Was It Like To Be A Civil War Soldier?

We’ll put it bluntly– the life of a Civil War soldier sucked. Sure, all war is hell, but if you signed up to be a Civil War soldier, it was essentially the equivalent to signing your own death certificate. Today, we’re exploring what life was really like to be a Civil War soldier. But before we get started, this is a good time to subscribe to our channel, Weird History.

Leave us a comment or tell us what weird phenomenon, person, or event you’d like us to cover next. Now, let’s go to the 1860s. [MUSIC PLAYING] Of the 2.7 million soldiers who fought in the Civil War in over 237 named battles along with a bunch of smaller, albeit bloody face-offs and confrontations, they all weren’t brawny, bearded adult men with wives and slaves back home.

Approximately 420,000 were Northern boys under the age of 17, and the South had an estimated 100,000 soldiers under the age of 15. These boys weren’t landowners and they definitely didn’t own slaves. As a matter of fact, it’s reported that the teens on both sides of the war had neutral feelings toward slavery. The reason why these kids joined the war was simply that they wanted to escape their dull farm lives at home.

Thanks to Abraham Lincoln’s call for a short 90 day tour of duty, a Union soldier could enlist, put in his combat time for a few months, and then return home for accolades and a hero’s welcome. What the Northern soldiers couldn’t have predicted was that the Civil War was going to drag out for years. After the Union was driven out of Richmond in the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, the Confederate army began to march on to Washington.

The South was starting to look like they had a chance to win this thing, thanks to their Peninsula win. That’s when Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 more Union soldiers with three year commitments. Only a fraction of those 300,000 Union soldiers would last their three years of brutal combat. [MUSIC PLAYING] How desperate were the underage boys to join the Civil War and begin living life? Well, they’d bend a lot of rules to get in.

For example, they relied on semantics. Because the rules of combat stated that a soldier must be over 18 to join the military, an underage kid would write the number 18 on the sole of his shoe, or stuff a piece of paper with the number 18 scrawled on it and hide it in his boot. Then when the recruiter would ask if the boy was over 18, the future war hero would technically be telling the truth by answering, yes, I am over 18.

If that didn’t work, the kids would just lie about their age because social security numbers, driver’s licenses, and Spokeo didn’t exist. If all else failed, the teens just asked their fathers to vouch for them. That said, not all teens carried arms. A lot of the kids signed up for noncombat, roles like joining the band as a drummer, flautist, or bugler.

These noncombat roles also included being the kid to carry canteens, bandages, and stretchers. Some of the more skilled soldiers even assisted surgeons and nurses with the wounded and acted as a carrier pigeon by relaying orders on the battlefield. [MUSIC PLAYING] William Sherman coined the phrase war is hell in 1879, 15 years after the Civil War, where he served as a general for the Union Army.

Sherman knew a great deal about death on the battlefields because he saw a lot of it. For example, on July 1, 1863, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate soldiers marched onto the battlefield in straight lines toward their enemy. Union soldiers decimated the Confederate soldiers. According to the south’s general, Alfred Iverson, his soldiers died an honorable death.

They nobly fought and perished without a man running to the rear. No greater gallantry and heroism has been displayed. The Confederate soldiers weren’t as romantic about death on the battlefield as Iverson was. In fact, it sounded like they were fighting two different wars. Iverson’s soldiers would recall huddling in the mud as bullets whizzed above them.

One of Iverson’s men described the moment when 79 of his fellow soldiers were slain in one volley. “Great God, when will this stop?” [MUSIC PLAYING] According to the book Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics, soldiers from the North and South were supposed to be taken care of while issued the following– pork, bread, beef, vegetables, potatoes, peas, hominy, roasted coffee beans, sugar.

Unfortunately, both sides of the War struggled to supply their soldiers with these basic necessities, the Confederates much more than the Union. Johnny Reb rarely sign any of the aforementioned rations. Instead, the Confederate soldiers subsided on cornbread, coffee, cigarettes, and anything they could steal. Any food the soldiers did get their hands on often became infested with insects, especially rice or grain, within days.

All this meant that the soldiers had to rely on their cunning to survive. Soldiers would supplement their meager rations by foraging on the land, receiving boxes of food from their families,or trading items with other soldiers, even if they traded with the enemy. Yep, it wasn’t uncommon for Union soldiers to trade their coffee with the Confederate soldiers in exchange for tobacco, away from the eyes of their officers.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Civil war soldiers didn’t have much of a chance to live if they were seriously wounded in battle. Picture it– you’re keeping the enemy at bay by shooting one round every 20 to 30 seconds, but as you pack your musket with gunpowder, you get hit in the stomach by enemy fire. In the 1860s, injured Civil War soldiers on both sides had to just sort of lie on the grassy knoll and play dead where they were shot in the hopes of an ambulance wagon coming by and tending to their wounds.

If they were lucky, they had a flask full of sipping whiskey to numb the pain from the hole in their belly. If these soldiers were extra lucky, a horse-drawn ambulance wagon would come by with medical supplies and patch him up. If an ambulance wagon wasn’t able to reach a wounded soldier out on the battleground, they would most likely perish.

[MUSIC PLAYING] We’re not going to sugarcoat it– getting shot by the enemy with a Springfield Model 1861 musket was bad. But you know what was worse? Disease. The thing is, you might have lived if you were shot, but if you got sick, caught a disease, or developed an infection during what’s been called the bloodiest war in American history, you were as good as dead.

To put it in perspective, the Union suffered the loss of 44,000 lives from dysentery and diarrhea. To put it in perspective, the Union