In 1863, at the age of seventeen, Robertson James and the rest of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army were involved in a secret mission to construct an island made from sandbags off Charleston Harbor, on which they planned to mount a gun. The project took months, under the worst conditions possible; at no time were the soldiers given relief from heat, disease, hunger, vermin, dysentery, or exhaustion. Robertson later described the construction of the gun, which was nicknamed the “Swamp Angel,” as “a monotonous, joyless pursuit.” Once mounted, the gun collapsed after the first few discharges.
This incident is characteristic of the histories of Robertson James and his older brother, Garth Wilkinson James, both of whom, in their inexpert stumbling through unlucky lives, might at times appear more like Marx brothers than James brothers, were it not for the fact that their misfortunes were too great to be funny. They are the subjects of a new book, Biography of Broken Fortunes, by Jane Maher, an English professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Maher claims that these brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James “have been relegated to the background of the James family biographies, where they appear only as failed, shadowy figures whose troubled lives sometimes disturbed the lives of their siblings. It wasn’t like that at all.” The author’s purpose is to explain more accurately how the two brothers fit into the complicated James family structure.
The only previous “biography” of Robertson
