Jenny Clark, drummer boy, 1865
The Civil War was over, but veterans didn’t necessarily find the transition home to be easy. One such was a drummer in the 144th Illinois Infantry, organized in Alton, Illinois. Mustered in on 21 October 1864, the regiment was sent to St. Louis, Missouri. When the regiment was mustered out on 14 July 1865, the drummer appears to have stayed in St. Louis. (See the National Park Service website.)
Originally from Springfield, Illinois, Jenny Clark may have had no home, mother having died and father being still in the army. The five-dollar fine for Clark wearing Clark’s own uniform probably didn’t help. This is the only mention of Clark in American newspapers.
“A Female Drummer Boy.” Daily Missouri Democrat [St. Louis, Missouri] 7 September 1865; p. 4.
On Monday night, as officer Langford was exploring the alley between Fifth and Sixth and Locust and St. Charles streets, he discovered a boy in blue—a small specimen of a drummer boy—engaged in the laudable work of putting on a clean shirt. Having been intimate with the drummer boy of the 8th Missouri, and being interested in drummer boys generally, the officer turned his lantern on the face and bare shoulders of the stripling, and the flash revealed something which convinced him that the individual jumping into the clean shirt was of the feminine gender. Further examination placed the matter beyond all question, and he took the biped to the calaboose. The girl gave her name as Jenny Clark, and stated that she had been a drummer “boy” in the 144th Illinois for about a year, and lived at Springfield. She is about sixteen years old, and has a father in the army, her mother being dead. The Recorder fined her five dollars.
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