Leaders of the American Civil War

A Biographical and Historiographical Dictionary

Charles F. Ritter, Jon L. Wakelyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135936259
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Provides an overview of the careers of the great military leaders and the critical political leaders of the American Civil War. Entries consider the leader's character and pre-war experience, their contributions to the war effort, and the war's impact on the rest of their lives. An assessment of their historical treatment puts their long-term reputations on the line, and results in a thorough revision of some leaders, a call for further study of others, and a reaffirmation of the accomplishments of the greatest leaders.

JOSEPH REID ANDERSON

(February 6, 1813–September 7, 1892)

Jon L. Wakelyn

As president of Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works and brigadier general in the Confederate Army, Joseph Reid Anderson was the South’s major manufacturer of military weapons. He was born at “Walnut Hill,” the family residence in Batecourt County, Virginia, on February 6, 1813. His father William, descended from Scotch-Irish immigrants, began his career as a surveyor, fought in the War of 1812, and was a staunch Presbyterian and stern master of his household. His mother Anne Thomas came from a successful Maryland plantation family and belonged to the Episcopal Church. The youngest of nine children, the precocious Joseph was sent to Logan’s Classical School near Fincastle, Virginia, where many planter’s children prepared for their future lives. But young Anderson was not destined to be a planter because there was too little land and he was last on the list of sons. Others of his brothers also gave up on having a future in Virginia agriculture. Two became lawyers, and one a doctor. Their success would someday come in handy for young Joseph.

So how did that young man make his way in that proud but floundering economic world of his native state? The legend that Joseph left home to strike out for himself is incorrect. Instead, family contacts and his own keen intelligence landed him a place at the United States Military Academy in 1832. Young Joseph, like many bright scientifically and mathematically inclined young men, wanted to become a civil engineer. West Point was almost the only way he could gain such training. He came to the banks of the Hudson River determined to find the means to seek his fortune. An imposing and earnest young man, his peers soon noticed that his work ethic left little time for play. To them he appeared direct, daring, and disciplined. He was seen as a leader because of his good judgment, but a few of his fellow Southern classmates remarked that Anderson lacked interest in any studies but the sciences. Also, his near anti-Southern correctness in behavior earned him few merits among his fellows and few demerits at the academy. But that diligent and ambitious student—he finished number four out of forty-nine cadets—had earned enough respect from his classmates to be named captain of the Corps. He also had realized his earlier ambition by gaining appointment to the elite artillery corps.

Within a year, however, understanding there was no way to rise to prominence in a peacetime army, he resigned his commission to take a position as chief engineer of the Valley Turnpike Company near Winchester, Virginia. Anderson had taken the ideal job to launch himself on the path to success. He would use his skills, family links to the valley, and an insatiable ambition to rise in Virginia public and business life. As chief engineer with a speciality in building paved roads, he was in a position to help link a growing West with the business world of Richmond by building those roads. Soon he had made a name for himself in Winchester, as his attendance at the Norfolk Commercial Convention demonstrated. In late 1836, he married Sallie Archer, the daughter of a Norfolk dock owner and a descendant of the first families of colonial Virginia. Anderson had also begun to represent the interests of an iron company, the Augusta Company.

He held the turnpike job until 1841, when he moved to Richmond to become an agent for the Tredegar Iron Works. Tredegar had been founded in 1837 to make the iron structures to build a growing commercial Richmond. But Anderson soon realized that the company needed a larger market and required a man who was ambitious and willing to work to expand that market. Expand he did, as he soon created a large market for the company’s produce. His rise had paralleled the growth of an urban and industrialized upper South.

His descendant Kathleen Bruce’s work on Virginia in manufacturing chronicled just how he succeeded. Her book also discussed the many young and ambitious Virginia farm and planter boys who had been forced off their ancestral lands. So many of them had left Virginia to settle in the new Southwest. The antebellum success of the Anderson brothers in Virginia, she hoped, would be a model to future ambitious young Virginians. Indeed it was. Alas, post-Civil War Virginia experienced an even more rapid exodus of its best and brightest youth.

Anderson’s rise in that competitive antebellum business, which Bruce so ably chronicled, was based on a combination of intelligence, will, an understanding of the meaning of local public service for business, and super salesmanship. He met the growing Southern demand for Southern-produced iron goods. Anderson also tapped into a growing national market, using his contacts in Washington from his army and valley days, especially his friend John Tanner of the Navy Yard, and the promise of some financial backing from his wife’s Archer relatives. In September 1842, he won a contract to produce cannons for the U.S. Department of the Navy.

That successful sales agent at first wanted no part of the production end of the business. But the directors talked him into assisting in reorganizing its productivity capacity. With the profits from the navy contract as well as his inlaws’ investments, during the next five years Anderson remodeled the old production plant, streamlined the sales division, and continued to gain contracts in the North, including iron sales to New York businesses and construction developers. According to Kathleen Bruce, he also sold the U.S. government chain cable, tested his own new cannon, and built a new foundry for military goods production. He became an expert in the use of hydrostatic pressure and, after 1845, a specialist in cannon making. By 1860 the U.S. government had bought 1,200 cannons from his company. With aid from the Archers, he set up a shipyard to make iron steamers. Anderson also produced heavy railroad equipment, including engines, for the burgeoning Virginia transportation system.

Anderson’s successes for the company and Virginia business also brought him much wealth. In April 1848, he invested $125,000 to become the major proprietor of Tredegar. His efforts had made a national market for the company and had brought much wealth and prestige to Richmond and to the Valley of Virginia. By 1854 the company had become synonymous with his name, and Anderson had become a pillar of the Richmond community and the South’s most important producer of iron goods. Anderson’s home became a meeting place for ambitious business leaders and politicians alike.

His many services to Richmond and Virginia went far beyond his business activities, however. Anderson set up charity organizations to help the poor and homeless, and he served on the boards of a number of church and civic foundations. As warden of prestigious St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, he worked to remodel that old structure. He even took a fling at public political activity. A staunch expansionist Whig, he spoke often of diversified business opportunities for the South, and he lobbied for state investment in internal improvements. Anderson also supported the tariff protectionists in the Federal Congress because he wanted to aid infant industry in his state and the country. In 1847 he was elected to the Richmond city council. In 1852 he became a member of the state legislature. As a member of the legislature, he continued to contribute to local charitable institutions.

But his politics gradually began to change from those of the nationalist Whigs, and in 1856, after his party had collapsed in the South, he joined the Democratic party. Events that he regarded as harmful to his state began to temper his usual conservative positions. He soon took up with the more radical sectionalist wing of the Democratic party. The John Brown raid and its aftermath made him fear for the Union’s future. Although he was reluctant to support straight out secession, by 1860 he believed the Southern states should unite to protect their major interests. How had a leader with national political ties and business interests become so radical?

There are a number of theories to explain his behavior. For one thing, Anderson had used slave labor in his factories, and he was committed to protection of that institution. The paucity of skilled foreign labor and the unwillingness of Southern farmers to take menial factory work had led him to develop a factory slave labor force. He often rented slaves from local planters during the fallow season. He trained a number of the slaves to do skilled “puddling” work at Tredegar. For another, Anderson had gradually lost his national market as Northern businesses undercut his prices for iron. The federal government, too, cut back on contracts from his company. Tredegar then began during the 1850s to vigorously pursue a Southern market. Anderson sold iron goods to help build Southern cities and became almost the exclusive producer of railroad engines and track for the growing Southern transportation market. Although Tredegar charged more for iron than its Northern competitors, the fact that it was a Southern business and that it gave favorable purchase terms to Southern concerns soon made the company’s market almost exclusively Southern. Those purchase terms, which amounted to loans to Southern businesses, Charles Dew suggests, meant that Anderson was too heavily invested in the South not to support the Southern Confederacy. His heart, or national feeling, therefore, was where his investments were.

Still, it was not until January 1861 that Anderson believed civil war inevitable. He welcomed the war. At first there were cancellations of some Southern contracts, and some Southern customers, especially state governments, had to suspend payment on their purchases of weapons. Adroitly, Anderson positioned Tredegar as the major munitions producer for three states, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, all of whom had coasts to protect and all of whom had few means of defending themselves. He offered to produce ordnance for those states, and he soon became their most important arms supplier. Those southeastern state contacts would be of much service to his company as the war deepened. Anderson would also become the largest and most important supplier of all weapons to the Confederate States’ military, army and navy.

This West Point graduate wanted to be more than an iron maker, however. He wanted to test his skills as a military commander. His first miltary test was to provide for the defense of Richmond and his own iron works. Anderson organized a number of his employees into the Tredegar Battalion, which he commanded. In September 1861, he asked for line command duties, and President Jefferson Davis (q.v.) reluctantly named this iron maker a brigadier general. The president placed Anderson in charge of the defenses around the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. But that was not enough action, so he asked for duty in the upcoming Peninsula Campaign against the Northern invaders. In April 1862, he opposed Union general Irwin McDowell at Fredericksburg and helped forestall that Union advance. He served ably in the June 1862 defense at Mechanicsville and Gaines Mill. The businessman general won praise from General Joseph E. Johnston (q.v.). At Frayser’s Farm, however, in heavy combat, he received a wound that disabled him for the duration of the Peninsula Campaign.

Finally, realizing he was needed to conduct affairs at Tredegar, Anderson resigned his command on July 19, 1862. To the relief of President Davis and ordnance officer Josiah Gorgas (q.v.), their arms manufacturer would return to what the Confederacy wanted him to do. During the rest of the war, despite severe production handicaps owing to the paucity of labor and the inability to get to Southern mines, he would serve the Confederacy as its most important arms producer.

In 1861 Anderson had offered to sell his company to the Confederate government and to stay on as its manager for a nominal fee. But the government resisted privatization and preferred the market mechanism and patriotic loyalty to persuade the private sector to sell at a fair price. At first Anderson was the only producer of cannons for the army, and despite a shortage of skilled artisans, he managed to supply weapons for the army and coastal defense. Anderson used local businesses to produce new materials for his factory, and he reorganized them to give him a nearly integrated production system from mine to factory.

Although some of his early weapons were of shoddy make, Anderson soon managed to improve his smelter system to make a sturdy cannon. The government’s needs also exceeded his factory’s capacity, so he built new works in Richmond, as he worked closely with Josiah Gorgas, chief of ordnance, to make timely shipments to the areas where weapons were needed most. Anderson’s designs for heavy guns, especially the rifled Columbia, were used at the defense of the new Confederate forts in Tennessee, Forts Henry and Donelson. In 1861 Anderson made iron plate and marine engines for Secretary Stephen Mallory’s (q.v.) navy and, with the assistance of maritime engineer John Mercer Brooks, outfitted the fabled Merrimack. Anderson also built machinery, engines, and lockers, as well as made the torpedoes for the coastal ironclad C.S.S. Mississippi. Although never able to meet the demand for railroad materials, and by 1862 weapon production forced Tredegar out of engine building, the company did provide axles, spikes, and rails for the private companies who sold to the government.

By late 1862, the raw materials necessary to make weapons could not be produced fast enough for Tredegar’s production schedule, and often the plant lay idle. Anderson tried to revive the pig iron industry, but he was never satisfied with the quantity of raw goods he produced. The price of finished goods rose to meet inflation, and Anderson soon found himself at odds with his friend President Davis. War Secretary George W. Randolph defended Anderson’s pricing system, but when James Seddon (q.v.) took over at the department, there ensued nasty scenes and mutual accusations between those two loyal Virginians. But Anderson continued. He bought coal mines and tried to find ways to equip their furnaces. By 1863 it was clear that Tredegar war supplies could no longer reach lower and southwest defenses, so Anderson joined George W. Rains in advocating building additional plants in Georgia and Alabama. Then the finances of the Confederate government began to break down. Historian Charles W. Ramsdell maintained that the government’s failure to finance the war forced producers like Anderson to falter on their contracts.

If Tredegar could not get paid, Anderson still managed to find resourceful ways to raise needed funds for his employees. He purchased cotton to send through the blockade, not only to buy European raw goods for production but to allow him to protect his interests by investing abroad. Anderson also knew that healthy and well-fed workers were most essential to produce needed weapons. As such, he set up a farm to feed, and a factory to produce clothing for, his employees and their families. He was forced to expand the use of slave labor because foreigners would no longer come south and because the government threatened to draft his white skilled laborers. Try as he might to persuade authorities of the need for that labor, he constantly had to battle against the draft.

If Anderson fought hard to keep the factory labor system afloat, he tried even harder during the last year of the war to manufacture iron goods. But the Ordnance Bureau was no longer able to procure raw goods for him. The lower South, where the factories were, had fallen to the Yankees. Then Anderson could no longer produce long-range batteries, and he had to settle for short-range weapons. As the government could not pay its bills, and there were employees to feed, the business leader was forced to sell military goods to private companies. Even as troop numbers dwindled during the siege of Petersburg, Anderson worked to deliver the necessary weapons to the Army of Northern Virginia. In April 1865, as the government collapsed around him, Anderson used his own employees as guards to protect the iron works from looters. At the last, he seemed even at war with his own countrymen. The Confederate government owed Tredegar’s owner $900,000.

After the war ended, that business leader was left to look after himself and the Archer and Anderson families. In debt, with a damaged business, he took advantage of the disruption around him to petition for pardon. Some Virginians allowed that he was too quick to desert the Confederacy, but he knew an idle factory would soon go bankrupt. Too, Anderson feared federal confiscation of his business. So he went to work to help restore authority in Richmond, and late in April 1865, he took the oath of loyalty to the old nation. He supported Virginia Unionist governor Francis H. Pierpont. His reward was a presidential pardon on September 21, 1865. As Dew said: “His pro-Johnson sympathies would soon aid materially in his quest for northern capital” (316). Anderson dealt off some property to a New York business, sold what cotton he had left, and retrieved his finances tucked away in an English bank.

In February 1867, Anderson organized the Tredegar Company by borrowing needed capital in the North. He used ex-slaves in the factory, and he paid them a decent salary. As the South slowly stirred to life, Tredegar became its major producer of iron for railroads. The old angle of selling mainly in the South was restored. This time he did not try to manufacture iron but instead bought iron materials from the North. By 1873 the company was again a success, but impending depression soon sent it into receivership in 1876. Anderson lacked the funds to turn from iron to steel goods, and the rich veins of ore in northern Alabama soon meant that Birmingham would replace Richmond as the South’s industrial center. So Anderson was reduced to producing overpriced goods for a local Virginia market. Tredegar continued even after his death. The company finally went out of business in the 1930s. As for Anderson, he often spent time on his farm and grew progressively weaker but continued to hope that a restored Norfolk and the help of his Archer kin would give him one more chance as a great business leader. But he had to settle for the public service of church and civic work. On holiday to escape the Richmond heat, Joseph Anderson died at Isles of Shoals, New Hampshire, on September 7, 1892.

What of his reputation as the Confederacy’s great iron maker? At the end of the Civil War, despite his rush to rejoin the Union, he was regarded as a man who had persevered in the face of shortages of labor and raw goods and financial deficits to give enormous help to the Confederacy. He was considered an administrative and production genius, and he received the praise of Josiah Gorgas and Jefferson Davis. His friend and ally George Washington Rains, in his History of the C.S. Powder Works (1882), claimed for him great service to the war effort. Since that time, the Rains’s opinion as clarified and expanded by Charles W. Ramsdell in Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (1944) has given Anderson a place in the firmament of great Confederate leaders. His kinswoman Kathleen Bruce in 1930 made the major connection of Anderson’s war contribution with his Southern business genius. If the war had not happened, said Bruce, Anderson would have be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Making and Meaning of Greatness
• Biographical Dictionary
• Index
• About the Contributors