When people think about boy soldiers from Virginia during the Civil War, their minds are usually drawn to scenes of Virginia Military Institute cadets charging across the fields at New Market in 1864. Their story, however, has often overshadowed the stories of thousands of Virginians, both Black and white, Union and Confederate, who entered Civil War armies before they were eighteen years old (the age at which they were liable for military service). These underage youths became soldiers as enthusiasm, coercion, and necessity brought them into the fray. This series of blog posts explores the experiences of youth soldiers from Virginia who served on both sides of the conflict. The series illustrates how boys navigated the war as their communities divided, as violence escalated, and as slavery unraveled.[1]
Some of the first underage Virginians to become soldiers were those who joined the state militia in 1861. Virginia mobilized for war in the spring of that year, and the state government quickly called up the militia to defend Virginia’s soil. By law, every white male in the state between the ages of eighteen and forty-five was liable to militia duty. The state government controlled the militia, which was intended as a temporary supplement to the volunteer regiments being mustered into Confederate service. Although boys under eighteen were exempt from militia service, many still eagerly volunteered, leaping into roles as soldiers in a war that they expected would be won quickly. Others enlisted as substitutes for older family members and neighbors, motivated either by filial duty or financial compensation.[2]
Legally, boys under eighteen required parental consent to join the army or the militia in Virginia. For many parents, militia service seemed far more compatible with conceptions of guardianship and dependency. It was better, they concluded, for their sons to spend a month or two close to home in the militia than for them to join the Federal or Confederate army and risk being sent to fight on a distant battlefield. Some underage youths agreed with this logic. Others wanted to enter regular army units but seized the only opportunity they had to grasp martial inclusion and enrolled themselves in militia units instead.[3]
Luther W. Hopkins was a seventeen-year-old student from Loudoun County when he joined the Virginia militia in 1861. Decades later, he remembered the enthusiasm of all the boys in his town that summer by saying, “the boys were drilling in the field, for they were now out of school. All were anxious to get their equipment, and to be the first to offer their services to the Governor.” When Governor John Letcher “called the militia from the counties adjacent to Manassas to assemble,” the young Virginian gleefully answered. He noted that the call “included my county. I joined the militia and marched to Manassas, arriving there a few days before the battle.”
Hopkins looked wistfully back on his foray into service by describing the weapon he carried as “an old flint-lock musket, minus the flint, and no powder or ball. But I was at least a soldier and had a gun, and would surely see the battle and could write home all about it.” The Virginia teen got his chance to glimpse the realities of war as his militia regiment waited in reserve at the first battle of Bull Run. As wounded men came streaming toward militia lines and chaos ensued, Hopkins reflected that “It was then that I began to realize what war was.” The youthful Hopkins remained in the militia until the winter, when “soldiers were granted frequent furloughs, the militia was disbanded, and I went back home.” Hopkins turned eighteen that winter, and when the Confederacy passed a conscription act in the spring of 1862, he decided to enlist in a Virginia cavalry regiment. He served the rest of the war and eventually turned his recollections into a memoir designed to appeal to youthful readers.[4]
William H. Presgraves also served in the Virginia militia as a young teen. He is pictured above wearing checkered civilian trousers, donning an overshirt, and clutching a flintlock musket of the type carried by Virginia militiamen in 1861. His clothing and weapons reflect the mixture of the military and the civilian, the soldier and citizen, that defined Presgraves as a citizen soldier doing emergency service to the state. His clothing and equipment were simpler than those of his wealthier counterpart featured below.
Presgraves was born around 1846 and lived in Page County. His father, John, was a joiner who owned no real estate and reported only $82 of personal property in 1860. After the war, John applied for compensation from the Southern Claims Commission (SCC), insisting that he had remained loyal to the United States. Despite being liable for militia duty, he testified, he had refused to serve “in any shape or form.” Sixteen-year-old William, however, was determined to enlist, and he joined the militia without his father’s consent. After a few months in the militia, he joined the 33rd Virginia Infantry, which became part of the Army of Northern Virginia. The reality of war and the needs of his family were probably far more than he expected, and he deserted the regiment in May 1862. He returned in August 1863, and he served (with frequent absences) until at least May 1864.
The Presgraves family appears to have been tepid about the Confederate war effort, with the maintenance of their family and their safety taking precedence. In his SCC application, John Presgraves testified that the family tried to evade Confederate impositions on their family and their resources. He did, however, provide rye wheat to the Confederacy. He was financially compensated for that contribution when the wheat was impressed from his farm in 1863. John claimed that his son ultimately left his Confederate regiment and joined the “Northern Army.” Surviving records do not substantiate this claim, but William’s frequent absences from the 33rd Virginia suggest a waning enthusiasm for Confederate service.
The SCC commissioners rejected John Presgraves’ claim, expressing doubts about his loyalty to the Union. They observed that he “fail[ed] to testify to any loyal conduct,” and that Confederate officials had not “threatened or molested” him for his beliefs. John explained that he had withdrawn from politics and “kept out of [Confederate soldiers’] way.” In doing so, the family tried to survive the ravages of war in the Shenandoah Valley as loyalties and battlelines shifted around them. Teenage William’s checkered military service indicates that he was also trying to survive the war in Virginia as someone perched on the margins between youth and manhood.[5]
William T. Biedler, born in 1844, probably posed for the photograph shown above in the early days of the war. He carried the flintlock musket typical of the Virginia militia while sporting a black-trimmed overshirt with brass buttons to mark his status as a soldier. Along with the military style kepi on his head, he wore a simply designed and economically made roller-buckle belt with a cartridge box and a large side knife in a sheath attached to it. Biedler’s knife was probably one of his prized possessions, a marker of his emerging manhood in Southern society and as a member of the group of men who were headed to war carrying similar weapons.
In contrast to William H. Presgraves, Biedler came from a wealthy slaveholding family in Page County, which likely explains his more elaborate equipment and clothing. Biedler enlisted in a Virginia unit in 1861 as a substitute for his father, who was in his early forties and liable for militia service. While no records exist indicating which unit Biedler served with, it probably was a Virginia militia unit, since he was armed with a flintlock weapon and his father would have been subject to militia service. By the time the Confederate central government declared a draft in the spring of 1862, Biedler’s weapon, clothing, and accoutrement would have been of different styles and makes. After Biedler’s stint in his early unit, he returned to civilian life until 1864, when he joined John S. Mosby’s battalion of Virginia partisan rangers. This unit was full of teenage soldiers, who will be discussed in later installments of this series.[6]
The Virginia militia existed throughout the war, but many of the men who were eligible for militia service enlisted or were conscripted into Confederate regiments. This left few men behind for organized local and state defense. As early as 1861, state officials responded by making younger boys and older men liable for state and local defense, a standard that continued throughout the war. As we will explore in later stories of the series, these boys sometimes fought desperately to defend Virginia towns from the advancing Union army.[7]
Underage militia troops were some of the first boy Virginians to go to war. They were not the only ones, however. Underage youths left schools, universities, workshops, plantations, and farms to fight a war that was waged on their doorsteps. Boys decided, and were forced, to attach themselves to Confederate and Federal volunteer units as the excitement, depredations, and realities of war spread through Virginia. Their stories are soon to follow….
Andrew Turner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Nau Civil War Center. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2025, and his dissertation was entitled, "War is the Business of Youth: Youth Soldiers, Manhood, and Their Enduring Civil War."
Images:
Image 1: Luther W. Hopkins in civilian clothing just before he joined the Virginia militia. As printed in, Luther W. Hopkins, From Bull Run to Appomattox: A Boy’s View, (Baltimore: Press of Fleet-McGinley Company, 1908), frontispiece.
Image 2: William H. Presgraves as he appeared while serving in the 97th Virginia Militia in 1861. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012646161/
Image 3: Sixteen-year-old William T. Biedler as he appeared in the early part of the war. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011648536/.
Notes:
[1] The Confederacy instituted several conscription acts throughout the war, with the last in 1864 imposing military service on youths as young seventeen. For much of the war, however, eighteen was the age at which youths were able, expected, or forced, to enlist in Union and Confederate armies.
[2] Daily Richmond Whig, June 11, 1861; Richmond Dispatch, July 20, 1861; James I. Robertson and William C. Davis, Virginia at War, 1861, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 139; The Code of Virginia, Second Edition, Including Legislation to the Year 1860, (Richmond: Ritchie Dunnavant and Company, 1860), 136; Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Virginia, Passed in 1861, in the Eighty-Fifth Year of the Commonwealth, (Richmond: W.F. Ritchie, 1861).
[3] Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023, 14, 20, 46, 27-67, 168-195.
[4] Hopkins, From Bull Run to Appomattox, 24, 31-39.
[5] Records of William H. Presgraves (also spelled “Pressgraves”), Record Group 109, Publication Number M324, NARA Catalog ID 586957, Compiled Military Service Records for Confederate Soldiers from the State of Virginia, 1861-1865 National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., accessed through Fold3.com, https://www.fold3.com/image/12225711/pressgraves-william-h-page-1-us-civil-war-service-records-cmsr-confederate-virginia-1861-1865; 1860 Page County VA Census, "Page, Virginia, United States records," images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9BSF-PJM?view=explore : Oct 3, 2025), image 89 of 184; United States. National Archives and Records Administration. Image Group Number: 005171738; Claim of John H. Presgraves, Claim Number 21210, Claim Date 1878-02-04, US, Southern Claims - Barred and Disallowed, 1871, Publication Number M1407, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, accessed via fold3.com, https://www.fold3.com/image/558976/john-h-presgraves-page-1-us-southern-claims-barred-and-disallowed-1871; John H. Presgraves, Confederate Citizens File, Roll 0819, Document 39, Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms, Compiled 1874 - 1899, Documenting the Period 1861 – 1865, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, accessed via fold3.com, https://www.fold3.com/image/49820069/presgraves-john-h-page-1-us-confederate-citizens-file-1861-1865.
[6] Records of William T. Biedler, Record Group 109, Publication Number M324, NARA Catalog ID 586957, Compiled Military Service Records for Confederate Soldiers from the State of Virginia, 1861-1865, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., accessed through Fold3.com, https://www.fold3.com/file/8092275?terms=war%2Cus%2Ccivil%2Cwilliam%2Cbiedler%2Cbiedler%2C+william&view=info; 1860 Page County Census, "United States, Census, 1860", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M41R-5NB : Mon Jul 08 23:02:52 UTC 2024), Entry for Ambrose M Biedler and Sarah A Biedler, 1860; 1860 Page County Slave Schedule, "United States, Census (Slave Schedule), 1860", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:W2X5-P2N2 : Thu Jan 16 23:47:35 UTC 2025), Entry for Ambon M Biedler,1860; Baltimore Sun, July 9, 1897.
[7] Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 25, 1861; Daily Richmond Whig, March 4, 1862; The Abingdon Virginian, June 26, 1863; Richmond Dispatch, March 24, 1864; Richmond Dispatch, April 8, 1864.