America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace by James Marten (review)

In 1866, the American public was introduced to a fictional Union veteran amputee in a short story published, anonymously, in the Atlantic Monthly by noted Civil War surgeon and nerve specialist Silas Weir Mitchell. The story’s protagonist, George Dedlow, a quadruple amputee, mused that a “man is not his brain, or any one part of it, but all of his economy, and to lose any part of it must lessen this sense of his own existence.” Dedlow’s own existence is reaffirmed in the tale’s almost farcical conclusion where, during a séance, he is reunited with his lost legs, preserved as specimens in the Army Medical Museum. Although Dedlow briefly believed he could walk again, he soon realized his error, and Mitchell abandoned his creation contemplating a heavenly reunion with “the lost members of my corporeal family.”

The far-from-fictional James Tanner did not wait for a heavenly reunion with his legs when an exploding shell severed both of his ankles at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, nor did he waste much time meditating on the ontological implications of his loss. Although he had only just turned eighteen when the tragedy occurred, self-pity did not factor in Tanner’s psychology, at least not publically. He was, as Marten notes, the product of “a culture that did not reward men who betrayed too much emotion” (28). But even within that context, Tanner’s ability to transcend his personal tragedy was remarkable.

What was most remarkable, perhaps, was that Tanner survived his terrible injuries at all. His case was sufficiently serious, and sufficiently unusual, to merit a footnote in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion as one of the very few successful double-amputations of its type. And his psychological survival matched his physical recovery. Having been nursed back to health through the efforts of his brother, John, he reasserted his independence using serviceable but always uncomfortable prosthetic limbs. He taught himself shorthand and, thanks to that skill, was the official recorder at the tragic events of Good Friday, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln died. He went on to study law and became a successful political entrepreneur in Gilded Age America.

Tanner was a prominent and successful man, but his fame faded along with his generation, that of Civil War veterans whom Marten explored in sophisticated and sympathetic detail in his earlier study Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (2012), which reintroduced Tanner to modern readers. Marten’s focus here is not just to draw out of that larger tapestry the thread of one remarkable life but to explain why that life came to be forgotten; why Tanner, in the words of his obituary, “outlived his fame” and became, in effect, a footnote in history (159).

At the end of the war, Tanner was working as a government clerk whose meager salary was supplemented, albeit barely, by a disability pension of eight dollars a month. Within five years, he had passed his bar exam and found work in the U.S. Custom House in Brooklyn. A lifelong Republican and active member of the Grand Army of the Republic, he soon achieved public prominence through his political and “veteranizing” activities. An advocate of sectional reconciliation, Tanner was a fixture on the national lecture circuit, a “Gilded Age phenomenon of superstar speakers crisscrossing the country for fairly high fees” (86). But it was his advocacy for war pensions that brought him, in the 1890s, to Washington to argue the veterans’ case on a national stage, at a time when old soldiers were often seen, not so much as saviors of the nation, but as drains on its financial resources.

Tanner’s record in this regard was mixed, partly because, in his politics as in his person, he was a vocal and visible but also unsettling reminder of...