The Children's Civil War is an exploration of childhood during our nation's greatest crisis. James Marten describes how the war changed the literature and schoolbooks published for children, how it affected children's relationships with absent fathers and brothers, how the responsibilities forced on northern and especially southern youngsters shortened their childhoods, and how the death and destruction that tore the country apart often cut down children as well as adults.

Drawing on the childhoods of such diverse Americans as Jane Addams, Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Tom Watson, and on sources that range from diaries and memoirs to children's "amateur newspapers," Marten examines the myriad ways in which the Civil War shaped the lives of a generation of American children.