Men as young as nine and as old as eighty-three are known to have enlisted in one side or the other during the American Civil War. But with the War placing greater strain on the white manhood of the South, teenaged and even boy soldiers seem to have been a Confederate trend in particular - some of the camp guards at Andersonsville and other prison camps, for instance, were children.
Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute provided many officers for the fledgling Confederate Army at the start of the War. Some Rebel soldiers expressed resentment in their letters and diaries, at being bossed around by boys young enough to be their sons.
The 1864 Battle of New Market, in which John Breckinridge defeated the Union's Franz Sigel, was perhaps the finest hour of the VMI cadets during the War. The boys lost ten of their number, but were able to save the day for the Southern army. One of these young soldiers, a Jewish-American named Moses Ezekiel, later became a sculptor and dedicated a statue at the Institute,
Virginia Mourning Her Dead.A good work on the subject: