Mark E. Neely, Jr. and Harold Holzer write about the young soldiers
like "the Soldier Boy":
Three years after the war began, as the copyright date of this print
suggests, children barely old enough to understand secession and war
in 1861 were suddenly thrust into service themselves. Available statistics,
which if anything overestimated the age of Northern soldiers, the
youngest and most zealous of whom understandably lied about their
birth dates in order to enlist, show that large numbers of teenagers
served in the ranks: 90,215 nineteen-year-old soldiers joined the
Union army between 1861 and 1865, along with 133,475 eighteen-year-olds,
6,425 seventeen-year-olds, 2,758 sixteen-year-olds, 773 fifteen-year-olds,
330 fourteen-year-olds, and 127 who were only thirteen years old (Ages
of U.S. Volunteer Soldiers [U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1866, pp. 5-6]).
The artist who drew this image likely copied the uniform from a soldier's
photograph but had probably never seen a cannon, for the barrel of
a Civil War cannon rested on the parallel wooden trails, not between
them, as in this print (The Union Image: Popular Prints of the
Civil War North, 93).
The 1864 Currier and Ives image of 'The Soldier Boy" was a lithograph,
measuring l2.5 x 8.5 inches.
