Snowballing and Civil War
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Henry Adams, the great-grandson of America's second president, John Adams, and the grandson of its sixth, John Quincy Adams, recounted in his comically affected, self-deprecating style fierce snowball battles that he and the other boys of his generation fought on Boston Common, and how "ten or twelve years afterwards when these same boys were fighting and falling on all the battle fields of Virginia and Maryland he" morosely, like the good Adams that he was, "wondered whether" all of the snowballing in their youth had somehow fit those children for their later all-too-real fighting and dying in the American Civil War.
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As often with Henry Adams, it's hard to judge whether in that passage he was making a serious point, as opposed to merely jesting. Most often in that autobiography of his, Henry Adams was doing both.
Whether American boys' antebellum snowball wars meaningfully presaged their later fighting in the Civil War, newspapers published during the war years offer evidence aplenty that Union and Confederate troops alike often entertained themselves, during long lulls in actual combat, by engaging in pitched intramural snowball fights, including this one, described tongue-in-check in a Vermont newspaper in 1864:
\An 1863 snowballing battle waged among the boys at a Hartford, CT orphanage presaged the military outcome of the Civil War itself : | ||||
| Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT), 26 Feb. 1863, p.2. |
Consider now another epic snowball battle in 1862, as a result of which a soldier involved declared: "Our Colonel's looked more like snow men than human beings."
The Holmes County Republican (Millersburg, Ohio), 13 Feb. 1862, p. 4
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