When I was a boy, The Wonderful
World of Disney came on at 7:00 PM Sunday nights and it was a must see program
for just about every kid that had a TV. In 1963, Disney produced a made-for-TV
film entitled Johnny Shiloh, with Kevin Corcoran (Who died recently of
cancer) in the title role. I absolutely loved it. I mean it was a great film
for a little boy to see.
The film was inspiring because it
was based on a true story, the story of John Lincoln Clem (1851-1937), “the
Drummer Boy of Chickamauga” AKA “Johnny Shiloh.”
More than ten thousand soldiers
under the age of eighteen served in the Union Army during the American Civil
War. Among the youngest John Lincoln “Johnny” Clem who ran away from his home in
Newark, Ohio, at age 9, after the death of his mother in a train accident, to
join the Union Army. Unable to jin the military, he tagged along behind the 22nd
Michigan Regiment and performed camp duties for a standard soldier’s pay of $13
a month, a sum collected and donated by the regiment’s officers.
The legend says that Clem served
as a drummer boy with the 22nd Michigan at the Battle of Shiloh where he was
almost killed from a shrapnel shell crashed through his drum, knocking him
unconscious only to be rescued by infantrymen who from therein nicknamed Clem
"Johnny Shiloh."
However Clem more than probably
wasn’t in the battle of Shiloh. The 22nd Michigan hadn’t been organized at that
point, only coming together in August 1862, four months after the battle.
Sadly, the Johnny Shiloh legend probably
grew out of a popular Civil War song, "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" by
William S. Hays.
However, Clem did serve as a
drummer boy for the 22nd Michigan at the Battle of Chickamauga and rode on an artillery
caisson to the front and wielded a musket trimmed to his size. The story that
he shot a Confederate colonel who had demanded his surrender, might be a bit of
a stretch. He more than probably only wounded Col. Calvin Walker, whose 3rd
Tennessee opposed the 22nd Michigan towards the end of the battle but didn’t
kill him. According to Col. Walker he shouted out “I think the best thing a
mite of a chap like you can do, is drop that gun.”
After the battle, Clem became
known as the "Drummer Boy of Chickamauga" and was decorated by Secretary
of the Treasury, later Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Salmon
P. Chase, and promoted to sergeant, the youngest soldier ever to be a
noncommissioned officer in the United States Army.
A year later, in October of 1863,
Clem was captured in Georgia by Confederate cavalrymen while detailed as a
train guard. The Rebels confiscated his uniform, and his hat which he held precious
because it had three bullet holes in it. He was traded in a prisoner exchange a
short time later. (As the youngest soldier in the Union Army, and a war hero, Clem
was a nationally renowned figure.)
Clem went on to fight in several other
battles and was wounded twice while serving as a mounted orderly. He was
honorably discharged in September of 1864 at age 13.
As a civilian, he entered high
school and graduated in 1870. A year later, he was elected commander/captain of the
"Washington Rifles" a District of Columbia Army National Guard
militia unit. After he failed the entrance exam to West Point, President
Ulysses S. Grant appointed him second lieutenant in the Twenty Fourth United
States Infantry in December 1871. He was promoted to captain in 1882 and
transferred to the Quartermaster Department where he stayed for the rest of his
career. He was promoted to major in 1895.
During the Spanish–American War
in 1898 he served as depot quartermaster in Portland, Oregon and later as a department
quartermaster for the Department of Columbia. (Washington DC) and later served
in Puerto Rico as depot. He was promoted
to lieutenant colonel in 1901 and to colonel in 1903. He then served from 1906
to 1911 as chief quartermaster at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.
After the death of his first
wife, at age fifty-two, Clem married twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Sullivan.
Their daughter, Elizabeth Ann, would later enter a Carmelite monastery in
Indianapolis and become a Nun.
In 1915, Clem reached the
mandatory retirement age of 64 and retired at the rank of brigadier general. At
the time, he was the last veteran of the American Civil War serving in the U.S.
Army. In the summer of 1931, at age eighty, he turned back to Roman Catholicism.
Clem died on May 13, 1937,
reciting the rosary at his home in San Antonio, Texas. He was eighty-five years
old. His tombstone at Arlington Cemetery reads “The Drummer Boy of
Chickamauga.”
