William Bircher, 15, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1862
“[The dead lay] like grass before a scythe in summer time . . . even the rudest and roughest of us were forced to think of . . . the sorrow that would be shed among the mountains of the North and the rice-fields of the far off South.”
Emma LeConte, 17, Columbia, South Carolina, 1865
“If it had not been for my books it would indeed have been hard to bear.
But in them I have lived and found my chief source of pleasure.”
William Bayly, 13, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863
“Two boys and myself went along the ridge and, in the absorbing interest of filling our stomachs with berries, forgot all about war . . . until startled by the discharge of a cannon.”
Frances Caldern de la Barca Hunt, 14, Richmond, Virginia, 1865
“We have no school now and don’t know when we will have any. . . . Old Abe has just gotten into the city and [Union troops] are firing salutes in honor of his arrival.”
Source: Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War by Emmy E. Werner