Review - "Soldier of the South: Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson at War and Peace" by Edward Hagerty

[Soldier of the South: Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson at War and Peace by Edward J. Hagerty (University of South Carolina Press, 2026). Hardcover, 7 maps, illustration, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,368/436. ISBN:978-1-64336-622-7. $36.99]

South Carolina's Richard Heron Anderson was a high-ranking general in the Confederacy's premier field army, holding a corps-level command for most of the late-war period, yet a full biography has not been a part of constructing his historical memory until now. Anderson's life, U.S. and C.S.A. military careers, and what factors possibly contributed to this comparative neglect are all convincingly explored by Edward Hagerty in Soldier of the South: Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson at War and Peace.

The structure of Hagerty's study mirrors that of the traditional Civil War military biography. Of its nineteen chapters, five together explore Anderson's early life, West Point education, and Old Army career (which included fighting in the Mexican-American War), and one, located at the end of the book, is devoted to his postwar life and activities. In between are a series of predominantly military-themed chapters examining Anderson's Confederate service, nearly all of it spent as a general officer. Beginning the Civil War in Charleston and Pensacola before being transferred to the eastern theater and the series of campaigns fought there between the Peninsula and Appomattox, Anderson became by any measure a major leadership cog in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Indeed, much of the narrative is spent describing and analyzing Anderson's generalship. In those sections, Hagerty gives credit where he feels credit is due, but he is also unsparingly critical of Anderson's conduct across numerous campaigns. From the perspective of a reader used to how Civil War biographers typically treat their general officer subjects, that unflinching approach is unfailingly interesting, even when it occasionally borders on being overly censorious.

When it comes to measuring Anderson's response to his environment's socio-political milieu, Hagerty finds little evidence to suggest that Anderson's attitudes and beliefs about slavery and the sharpening antebellum sectional divide significantly differed from those of his planter class peers. Anderson is portrayed in the book as an unassuming and even-tempered gentleman whose nature contrasted sharply with the bombastic personality traits exhibited by fellow South Carolinians of the stereotypical fire-eater type. In discussing the one event that pointedly challenges that assessment, Hagerty satisfactorily frames Anderson's challenging the notably tactless Nathaniel Lyon to a duel as being signally uncharacteristic, he being more or less forced into it by Lyon's fiery eruption of insults during an officer dinner hosted by Anderson. There is no indication that Anderson's decision to resign his commission was a particularly anguished one, nor is there evidence that his northern wife or her very prominent Pennsylvania family, with whom Anderson maintained cordial relations, strongly campaigned against it.

As recounted by Hagerty, Anderson's leadership displayed during the early-war fighting on Santa Rosa Island was about what one might have expected from an officer inexperienced in handling amphibious operations involving large numbers of troops. But what really irked his commanding officer, Braxton Bragg, was Anderson's commitment to a full-on New Year's artillery exchange with the Union defenders of Fort Pickens that expended a great deal of precious powder and ammunition to no discernible benefit. Worse, it was reported to Bragg that Anderson was drunk from the holiday festivities during the exchange. It's probably safe to say that the vast majority of Civil War readers wouldn't associate Anderson with the war's many hard-drinking generals, but it seems clear that Anderson imbibed heavily on occasion. The fact that such an incident never recurred supports the notion that his usage was not that of a debilitating alcoholic on the order of fellow Confederate generals Henry Hopkins Sibley or George Crittenden. Though Bragg intended to prosecute Anderson, a face-saving transfer to the Virginia front was ordered instead. There, Anderson was assigned to serve under James Longstreet. One might ponder how Anderson's Civil War career had turned out had he escaped Bragg's disfavor and stayed in the western theater (at one point, he was apparently considered for the New Orleans command, but Bragg considered Daniel Ruggles more capable).

Off the bat, Anderson and Longstreet harmonized on both professional and personal levels. If any of the fallout from Pensacola followed Anderson east, the career harm was minimal. The mutual friendship and trust that blossomed between Anderson and Longstreet boosted Anderson's standing within the Confederacy's eastern army as overall direction of it shifted from Joseph E. Johnston to Robert E. Lee. Longstreet was, in Lee's estimate, one of the newly minted Army of Northern Virginia's brightest stars, and the army commander accepted both Longstreet's high opinion of Anderson and his key subordinate's insistence that Anderson's alcohol abstinence pledge was ironclad. The result was that, after Lee removed Benjamin Huger from divisional command for poor performance during the Seven Days, Anderson was promoted to major general and elevated in Huger's place.

In exploring his subject's less than professional traits, Hagerty determines that Anderson, though always solicitous of his men's welfare, was consistently indifferent to the dictates of requisition paperwork and other administrative responsibilities. This fault is traced back to his Old Army dragoon service, and it remained problematic throughout his time with the Confederate Army. In not writing reports for the Second Manassas and Antietam battles (though it is possible they might have existed but were subsequently lost), nor making certain his subordinates did so, Anderson continued to neglect key documentary responsibilities. Among other things, the absence of those reports denied critically important recognition (in the form of enhanced reputations and promotions) to top-performing subordinates. On the other hand, it was a testament to Anderson's sustained popularity that those failings apparently did not create resentment among those who served under him.

Hagerty to a large degree agrees with Longstreet staffer G. Moxley Sorrel and Longstreet favorite General Micah Jenkins that Anderson was intelligent, popular, and generally knew what needed to be done but possessed a streak of command inertia that required a superior officer of Longstreet's caliber to shake him out of. What Anderson had in abundance was coolness and courage under fire, both of which went a long way with the men who fought with and under him. Given Longstreet's softly-toned admonition after the Battle of Fredericksburg that several of Anderson's brigades were on notice for how they conducted themselves over recent battles and needed to shape up, it seems clear that the corps commander himself had concerns about his friend's performance. If Lee still had misgivings about Anderson, they were cleared up by the end of the Chancellorsville Campaign, where Anderson, with the exception of some confusion on May 4, did well on both the Chancellorsville and Salem Church fronts. The author even goes so far as to credit Anderson's deft handling of his division as contributing to Lee's confidence in detaching Jackson's entire corps for its legendary flank march. At the end of the campaign, Anderson was transferred to the new Third Corps, and Lee remarked that future corps command was a distinct possibility if Anderson kept improving.

According to Hagerty, however, the next campaign was a clear setback to Anderson's upward trajectory. After Gettysburg, Anderson came under fire with allegations that he and his less-engaged brigadiers failed to adequately support the July 2 attacks of generals Cadmus Wilcox and Ambrose Wright against the Union center. Hagerty effectively dispels much of the criticism related to both July 1 and 2, but he does still maintain that Anderson did not act aggressively enough on July 2, the general's common "lethargy" denying needed support to the heavily engaged right of his division. Nevertheless, one might also question how much difference it would have made given that the division held an overextended front with no real reserve, which would have limited the amount of assistance that realistically could have been given to Wright beyond bolstering his left flank.

Upon James Longstreet's May 6, 1864 wounding in action during the Battle of the Wilderness, which required an extended absence, the shortlist of replacements included Anderson, Jubal Early, and Edward Johnson. From the conversation between Lee and Sorrel, both seemed to agree that the abrasive Early possessed stronger fighting qualities but Anderson meshed better with the existing administrative and leadership structure of First Corps. Hagerty concurs with that assessment, deeming Anderson a good fit for getting along with corps staffers and key subordinates. Denied time to adjust to the heavier responsibilities attached to his new position, Anderson rewarded Lee's trust with skillful and rapid deployment of his men to the Spotsylvania front, where he worked seamlessly with Jeb Stuart's cavalry in sharply repulsing the initial Union attacks. In assessing Lee's decision to maintain close oversight of his chief subordinates, including Anderson, for the rest of the campaign, Hagerty sees the change in Lee's command and order issuance style as having little to do with any particularly misgivings aimed in Anderson's direction. The author persuasively argues that increased top-down micromanagement post-Wilderness was a practical response on the part of Lee to the command crisis in his army (a combination of Longstreet being badly wounded and both Hill and Ewell becoming regularly incapacitated by health problems). Hagerty also keenly points out that the daily contact and aggressive army movement that U.S. Grant brought to the theater imposed an omnipresent existential danger to Lee's much smaller army, forcing his hand when it came to handling inexperienced or flagging subordinates. If any of the corps commanders lost Lee's confidence during this time, it was Ewell. However, as Hagerty astutely observes, the new arrangement only worked when Lee's own precarious health situation permitted it, and an opportunity by the corps of Anderson and Ewell to strike a telling blow at the North Anna was most likely missed because of it.

In his discussion of the remaining balance of the Overland Campaign and the early stages of the Petersburg Campaign, Hagerty characterizes Anderson's handling of his corps as generally meeting Lee's expectations, one big exception being the dangerous gap in the Confederate line at Cold Harbor that the author largely holds Anderson responsible for neglecting. In the author's accounting, Anderson, after being sent to the Valley with a division to cooperate with Jubal Early, did not distinguish himself in the Shenandoah operations of August and September 1864. Mixed performance accompanied Anderson's redeployment to the Richmond front, and his activities there north of the James River, which included a failed attempt to retake Fort Harrison, disappointed Lee. In any event, Longstreet's return to duty on October 19 ended Anderson's leadership of First Corps, which concluded on a sour note.

Placed at the head of a new Fourth Corps, a cobbled-together force of a size not quite befitting an officer of Anderson's rank, Anderson ended up commanding portions of the Petersburg siege lines. After the Five Forks disaster and the evacuations of both Richmond and Petersburg, Anderson was assigned a key blocking position before Amelia Court House that Hagerty credits with preserving the army. The author ranks that effort among Anderson's very finest work. Unfortunately for the Confederates, such gains were only temporary. Anderson soon suffered unmitigated disaster at Sailor's Creek, the final destruction of the battered remnants of his command leading to his discharge on April 8 (the day before the surrender at Appomattox) as a supernumerary officer in the army.

After the war, Anderson immediately sought a pardon from the Johnson administration and set out to retrieve the fortunes of his family's two plantations. Their previous owners, Anderson's father and his brother MacKenzie, did not survive the war, and Anderson, who had no prior experience managing a plantation, struggled with heavy debt burdens, constant labor problems of all sorts, poor crop yields, and property security. The result was that after three years Anderson went into bankruptcy, losing both plantations. To make ends meet, he worked for a time as a railroad agent. The end of Reconstruction finally afforded him a state employment position with a salary sufficient enough for he and his family to live modestly but comfortably until his death from an apparent stroke at the age of 57. During his entire postwar life, Anderson avoided political engagement, and he never mounted a public defense of his own military record or that of the Confederate movement as large (nor did he direct venom toward anyone else). In Hagerty's view, Anderson's extreme reticence in all those areas heavily contributed to his rapid fade from popular memory.

Edward Hagerty's biography of Lieutenant General Richard Anderson bridges a major longstanding gap in the high command historiography of the Army of Northern Virginia. Being highly critical in nature, the study also speaks to wider issues within the Confederate Army's general officer talent pool. Whereas southern brigade and division leadership generally excelled both east and west, corps and army leadership often operated at crisis levels. That was the case for the post-Jackson Army of Northern Virginia and for the entirety of the Army of Tennessee's existence. Though he served in his highest wartime post honorably and to the best of his abilities, Anderson's elevation to corps leadership amidst the increasingly overmatched Army of Northern Virginia's most profound command emergency was a clear case of satisficing when the critical need was for a star replacement.