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CHAPTER ONE The War Hit Me and Hit Me Hard Jimmie Tanner’s Civil War As a Union veteran,Tanner was part of the most recognizable single group of American men during the last third of the nineteenth century: 41 percent of all northern white men born between 1822 and 1845 served in the Union army, while an astounding 81 percent of all men born in 1843—just a year before Tanner’s birthday—took up arms for the Union. In many ways, Tanner’s military experience was typical: most of his time was spent drilling , marching, waiting. But when something finally did happen, it changed his life forever. Young in War Four years before James R. Tanner recorded history in shorthand a few feet from the dying Abraham Lincoln, he had been a seventeen-year-old farmer and country schoolmaster in Schoharie County, a rural area west of Albany. Born on April 4, 1844, in 1860 he lived in the town of Seward with his father, Josiah, his mother, Elizabeth, and three siblings, twentyfour -year-old John, and twenty-year-old Julia and Job (apparently twins). In New York a “town” encompassed farmland as well as villages and hamlets ; virtually all the residents of Seward actually lived on farms, with a few dozen families clustered in tiny hamlets. Later in life,Tanner identified much more with the village of Cobleskill; although his address growing up was actually Richmondville (a town sliced away from the town of Cobleskill shortly after Tanner’s birth), the family farm was just a few miles from Cobleskill. Perhaps 360 people lived in the village, and the only businesses or institutions of note were a series of mills clustered along Cobleskill Creek, three churches, a general store, a hardware store, a two-room schoolhouse, and a large brick hotel called The National. Like Cobleskill, the other hamlets and villages in Schoharie The War Hit Me and Hit Me Hard 7 County sustained a few small lumber and flour mills and factories. Railroads would not reach the area until after the Civil War, when the economy began to flourish and the population began to grow. But prior to the war the place was better known as the site of frequent clashes between settlers and Native Americans in the early part of the eighteenth century and of tension between American patriots and pro-British Tories (and their Indian allies) during the American Revolution, as well as for a natural cave that would become a major tourist attraction in the 1870s. In a cheery, chatty memoir published by a local newspaper just a few months before his death, Tanner recalled first seeing the little town at the age of eight, when he and his mother walked over to Cobleskill to help with the hops harvest. He recalled the sunny early-autumn day and the warm spirit of cooperation and celebration that infused the neighbors and townspeople, who worked all day and then danced and drank all night. As an adult, “Jimmie,” as he was called by many locals until he was a grown man, virtually never wrote about his family, and very little is known about them. A history of Schoharie published in 1882, when Tanner had already gained statewide fame, included short biographies of “Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers,” but the only Tanner mentioned was James. Reporters and admirers would later tend to follow the same story line when describing Tanner’s mostly generic childhood. “His early life was spent on the farm,” went a typical account, “working in the fields in summer, and attending the district school in winter, besides ‘doing the chores’ about the farm which fall to the lot of every country boy.” But there was something different about him. It is impossible to identify the source of the impetus—there is no reason to think his parents were particularly well educated—but census records reveal that, unlike most rural boys their age, both Jim and Job had attended school within the last year. And by the time the 1860 census was taken, Jim was a sixteen-year-old country schoolteacher. Other young men probably did the same (although no doubt few teenagers); before the Civil War local school boards in New York and most other states had the authority to issue teaching certificates to anyone they deemed qualified. His discharge certificate from the army reported his “occupation when enlisted” as “School Teacher,” and he no doubt...

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