John Lincoln Clem served as a drummer boy in the Union Army at the age of ten. By the age of 12, Clem had been promoted to Sergeant, making him the youngest noncommissioned officer in the United States Army.
In October 1863, the young Soldier was captured in Georgia while on detail as a train guard. Southern papers used Clem for propaganda as a means to show “what sore straits the Yankees are driven, when they have to send their babies out to fight us.” He was exchanged shortly after and was discharged at the end of the war.
Clem returned to military duty and graduated from artillery school at Fort Monroe in 1875. He rose through the ranks until retiring in 1916 as a Major General. At the time of his retirement, Clem was the last remaining Civil War veteran on active duty.
He eventually settled in San Antonio, Texas where he married Anita Rosetta French, daughter of Union General William Henry French, in 1875. After her death in 1899, he married again in 1903 to Bessie Sullivan, the daughter of a Confederate veteran.
Clem died in 1937 at the age of 85. He was buried alone in Arlington National Cemetery’s Section 2, directly across from the Lee Mansion and among many prominent names of the Civil War.
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