Richard Anderson’s slaves had a life that was better than most of their peers in the region and substantially better than most slaves in the Deep South. The colonel ruled his entire household with a sense of justice that led more zealous slaveholders to remark that the old soldier was “just ruining all the slaves in the county.” His sons and their slave counterparts played innumerable games, ran races, and occasionally fought with each other as boyhood pals often do. When one of the colonel’s young pugilists tiptoed into the house with a bloody nose from one of these illicit affairs and sought comfort from the ladies in the household, the master of Soldier’s Retreat was called to adjudicate. He usually began his trial by repeating his oft-broken family law prohibiting close associations with the servants. Since one of his sons, by playing and fighting with a slave, chose to place himself as an equal with the servant, “they must stand to the bitter end by their own chosen colors.” Colonel Anderson would not treat the offending slave with injustice; nor would he have his boys “indulged into becoming cowardly tyrants.” After a fair hearing, the guilty party, slave or son, was taken to a special peach tree near the family graveyard to endure “whaling” with a tree switch. Fights were frequent but usually kept secret to avoid the master’s sentence.
Colonel Anderson fought a losing battle against familiar relations between his brood and his servants. He believed, like most of his contemporaries, that the system of slavery was warranted by innate deficiencies in character and ability among the blacks. He forbade slaves telling ghost stories and traditional tales to his children, as these “lies” worked against his standards of “good morals, good manner, and good English.” He tried to avoid what he felt were the “demoralizing and vulgarizing” influences that close fellowship with the slaves engendered. Despite his rules, daily life on the plantation encouraged intimate relations between masters and servants. White children were wet-nursed by their black “mammy” from infancy. Patsy was Charley’s nurse. She was one of three black women of child-bearing age on the property. The birth of Patsy’s son Richmond in 1817, like the other slave births, were recorded in the family records. Patsy nursed Charley in her slave cabin bed, loving him, as he later wrote, “with more than a maternal love.” She was, in Charley’s opinion, “a woman whom for mental and moral qualities I rate with any woman of any race or sphere.”
When each Anderson child was old enough to walk, they were assigned a “nurse boy,” and later a personal servant, to attend to their every need. Charley’s servant, Edom, was just a year older than Charley, his master. As was the custom among the slaves, each personal servant invented a nickname for his young master. Edom dubbed Charley “Marse Chunk”—not for his appearance, but rather for his habit of scrounging for a piece of wood to use as a chair in their frequent trips to the woods. The practice of assigning personal servants to the master’s children led to ardent friendships between child and slave. It also promoted what Charley called “the servile vices.” The Anderson children were spoiled. They rarely engaged in hard labor of any sort. A slave saddled their horses, blackened their shoes, chopped their wood, and fetched their clothing. Charley later blamed some of his poor work habits on the slave system, but there were other factors at play, not the least of which was his unquenchable curiosity. He loved learning much more than work.
Young Charley was fascinated by aspects of the African slave subculture. He often stole away to watch the slaves perform the juba, a dance set to the rhythmic clapping and patting of hands and feet, rather than to music. He called this dance a “marvel of artistic perfection.” Their own “uncle” Benjamin was the most accomplished juba performer in the county. Looking back as an adult, Charley claimed that Ben gave the best lessons in the art of oratory that he ever had. The plantation hierarchy was suspended on rare occasions such as during large corn-shucking festivals, where master and servant competed together for top honors. Despite the temperate colonel’s best intentions, rewards of corn whiskey led to nights of revelry when customary rules of slave fraternization were somewhat relaxed. To Charley, the African race possessed the “most social, genial, amicable, peaceable, and fun-loving traits of personal character of any peoples inhabiting the earth.” As he matured, he began to view slavery as his father’s “one, but most grave, parental error.” Such feelings were unusual for a southern man from a slaveholding family. Charley grew to become “a strong anti-slavery man” in moral matters but would struggle to reconcile this stark example of American injustice with the political exigencies of his tumultuous times.
Colonel Anderson’s patriot connections and honored position meant that Soldier’s Retreat became a way station for many important visitors to Kentucky. Social and political circles of the early nineteenth-century elite were small. Intimate friendships were maintained long distance by letter, and when old friends came to call, they sometimes stayed several days or even as long as a week. As the colonel and his Revolutionary War comrades advanced in age, they often made strenuous efforts to see each other one last time. In the fall of 1819, when Charley was just five years old, one of his father’s old brothers-in-arms came to see him. On this occasion, James Monroe (now president) visited. The two rehashed past times, reopening the old wounds each had suffered at the Battle of Trenton. Eventually the large retinue dispersed across the lawn and around the property.
One of the party guests was the famous hero of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson. While General Jackson and Colonel Anderson traded recollections of wars in the republic’s young history, Charley’s eight-year-old brother, John, sauntered up to meet the general. The colonel immediately interceded, suggesting that Jackson might not wish to speak to the lad. “He got drunk—dead drunk—in the harvest field with all the other hands yesterday,” Anderson explained. “Did he though?” Jackson inquired. “Come to me, my lark!” he beckoned. Jackson grasped the boy by the shoulders with his strong hands and gazed intently into his eyes. The general then placed his palms over the boy’s ears and raised him to eye level, presumably as a show of punishment. Setting the lad back down, he patted him on the head and cried, “By the eternal, you are a little Hickory of a fellow.” The slaves took the cue and followed with a nickname. They rechristened young John as “Marse Hickory.” John and his brother Marshall became life-long devotees of Jackson and his political allies from that day forward.
Jackson visited Soldier’s Retreat again nearly eight years later. It was April 1825, and the election of John Quincy Adams by the House of Representatives had recently denied him the nation’s highest office. Colonel Anderson’s health was failing at the time, and this visit was an appropriate way to honor the old patriot. A month later, another longtime friend arrived somewhat delayed after his steamboat sank on the Ohio River. The Marquis de Lafayette was in the middle of a two-year triumphal tour of America, nearly forty years after his service during the American Revolution. It was a touching scene as the two old friends kissed each other and renewed their close bonds in the twilight of their lives. After this visit, Anderson traveled with Lafayette to Frankfort, Kentucky, for a ceremony honoring Lafayette. It was his last trip away from home.4
Charley’s entire world was turned upside down in his twelfth year. The first blow came with the sudden death of his oldest brother, Richard Clough Anderson Jr. The colonel’s namesake son was serious and diligent, much like his father. Like all of Colonel Anderson’s children, Richard had attended only the best schools. He received his earliest education from a tutor in Louisville. A brilliant boy, he graduated from the College of William and Mary at the age of sixteen. An attorney by vocation, Richard had been elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1815, and he served in the U.S. Congress from 1817 to 1821. He reentered Kentucky’s House of Representatives in 1822 and was elected its speaker. President Madison appointed him minster to Colombia in 1823. He contracted yellow fever while returning to his post in Bogotá and died on board a ship on July 24, 1826. His heartbroken father, already failing from a hernia related to his old war
wounds, died less than three months later.
When news of the colonel’s imminent demise broke, Anderson’s eldest son, Larz, was away at Harvard. Robert, a recent graduate at West Point, was at his post with the Second U.S. Artillery. The only son of age in the state at the time was nineteen-year-old William Marshall Anderson, then a student at Transylvania University in Lexington. Marshall raced home in record time, via a relay of three swift horses. His father died in his arms. Marshall served as executor of the colonel’s estate, which took three years to sort out. Suddenly he was the man of the household, caring for his mother, four siblings, and twenty slaves for whom it seemed there was less and less work. The isolated farmstead barely produced enough to support itself.
The older Anderson brothers—Larz, Robert, and Marshall—became Charley’s role models. Although all three shared their father’s core values and sterling character, they were very different from each other. As Charley walked the meandering path toward manhood, his brothers guided him; they remained his three closest confidantes throughout most of his life. The colonel’s sons did much more than merely honor his patriot legacy. They developed into leaders themselves. The Andersons were destined to become one of the most accomplished families in the region.5
CHAPTER THREE
Born to Lead
LARZ ANDERSON WAS THRUST into the role of family patriarch at the age of twenty-three. It was a job that perfectly suited his talents and temperament. Brilliant like his late brother Richard, Larz was also warm and compassionate like his younger brother Charley. Larz’s shrewd business sense and laser focus made him a financial success. He guided his brother Marshall’s Transylvania College education, even sending money to Marshall on his father’s behalf while Larz himself was a student at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Be not the least niggardly in your expenses,” he advised Marshall, “but be prudent.”
Acting as executor of Richard Jr.’s estate in the summer of 1826, Larz found that his ill father’s affairs were a mess. He hired out slaves to other plantations where they could at least generate some income. By the summer of 1827, it was clear that something had to be done about the plantation at Soldier’s Retreat, so Marshall left college to help his mother manage the farm. Marshall was dutiful but extremely unhappy in his captivity back home. While Robert may have been a likely candidate to manage the struggling plantation, he would need to resign his commission to do so. This he just would not do. Larz refused to throw away his father’s investment in his children’s education. He planned to place sixteen-year-old John in a customs house job in the fall; to move his mother, Charley, and his two sisters to Louisville; and to sell the place after the estate was settled. His mother refused to leave the farm, however, so Larz sent Charley off to board at the famous Pickering School in Cincinnati, Ohio.1
Larz was a pragmatic man. He was determined to advance in society, and he needed a wife to do that. In a letter to his sister, Maria Latham, in late August, Larz vowed to be wedded by Christmas, though the identity of the lady was “yet a secret even to myself.” A week later, he revealed that he had identified the “contenders” for his spouse as Misses Prather, Armant, Bullitt, and Steele. Larz seemingly had it all planned out, but he had forgotten one critical element—love. That emotion hit him unexpectedly when visiting Louisville during Harvard term break in late February 1828. He met a girl whom many contended was the most beautiful and accomplished young woman in the state. Miss Ann Pope, the daughter of a wealthy Jefferson County farmer, was known not only for her great beauty but was said to have a quick wit and acerbic tongue, which made her charming in social situations. Larz had to have her. After graduating in June 1828, he rushed home to Kentucky and married his sweetheart. Back at home, Larz found that Marshall was “disgusted” with farm life and had “pretty much abandoned it.” Marshall spent more than half his time in Chillicothe, Ohio, working with his brother-in-law, Alan Latham, who had assumed Colonel Anderson’s land office responsibilities. Larz insisted that his mother get an overseer or take herself and Charley off the plantation.2
Nineteenth-century families faced many challenges, but serious illness was certainly one of the most threatening. Nearly everyone in the Anderson household contracted a gastrointestinal malady known as “bilious fever” at some point during the 1820s. Larz’s and Marshall’s cases were so severe that both nearly died. Charley developed asthma in childhood and lived with it all of his life. Childbirth was also dangerous. Larz’s wife Ann gave birth to their only son, Richard Clough, in 1829, but she was too weak to nurse him. The infant was nursed by a slave woman while Ann tried to recover from the birth. She never did. Heartbroken, Larz buried his first love in the Bear Grass neighborhood, where both had grown up. He threw his energies into a legal career; he and Marshall passed the Kentucky bar and set up a law practice in Louisville.3
With the estate finally settled and the farm and slaves sold, the widow Anderson packed her belongings and moved to Chillicothe, where she remained for the rest of her life. Charley, not yet fifteen, immediately left for college at Miami University in March 1829. He planned to complete his final term of preparatory courses there, before matriculating in the fall. Journeying upriver from Louisville, he stopped at the great metropolis of Cincinnati. The “Queen City” of the West boasted more than twenty-nine thousand inhabitants and dwarfed all other cities in the region. Young Anderson was awed by the wax figures of Aaron Burr shooting Alexander Hamilton and the figure of the great Indian Chief Tecumseh in the Western Museum. Soon after he arrived on campus, Charley had befriended most of the inhabitants of the small town of Oxford, who appreciated his gregarious nature and keen wit. There were so many things to learn and so many new people to meet. For the bright youth from rural Kentucky, college days were among the happiest of his life.
Ohio had set aside land for a university as early as 1803, but it was not until 1824 that the college was actually founded. The board of trustees, on which Anderson would later serve as an adult, envisioned a Harvard of the West, hewn out of the raw wilderness and attended by the most promising young minds in the region. Half of the students in Charley’s class were from wealthy Southern families. The South’s dearth of first-class higher education was readily acknowledged. Despite its rural setting, Miami University was no backwoods institution. Two literary societies were founded just a year after the university opened. Charley chose the Erodelphian Society as his social club and was elected its secretary in his second year.
He flourished in this new environment. The club raised money to expand their growing library, and Anderson read everything he could get his hands on. The Erodelphians often engaged their rivals in the Union Literary Society in lively debates, ranging from philosophy and history to current events. A classmate recalled a time when Charley debated a young man who lamented the lack of a large standing American army. Anderson overwhelmed his debate opponent with his booming voice, denouncing militarism as “hostile to human liberty.” Another debate considered whether the citizens of Ohio should prevent free blacks from settling in the state. One student thought Anderson’s frequent passionate outbursts were a sign of an “impetuous and impulsive nature.” This charge followed Charley most of his adult life, as he exercised his political independence on a larger stage.
Young Charley Anderson was a precocious teen with many talents. He was among a select few, in the opinion of one classmate, who ranked “far above their fellows in superior mental endowments, high-toned morality, and upright conduct.” Most people agreed that Anderson’s finest attribute, however, was his “genial warmth and gladsome society.” Charley seemed to be everyone’s boon companion. He was the “soul of social life and the center of its circles,” as another former student described him. Colonel Anderson’s youngest son discovered that he was a natural leader, and that he could use that power for all manner of ends. This sometimes resulted in a practical joke with Charley as the instigator. One such instance occurred at the house of a Mr. Bingham in Oxford, where An
derson first boarded. A skittish young man named Solomon Mitchell was one of his housemates. In May 1832, U.S. Army troops, including some led by Charley’s brother Robert, were fighting the Sauk Indian chief Black Hawk in Illinois. Just a short distance away in Indiana, Native American villages predominated, and the threat of Indian attack was a constant concern. A rumor circulated that Black Hawk was fifteen to twenty miles from Oxford and advancing. Anderson was following the war and knew this was extremely unlikely, but Mitchell was beside himself with apprehension. Charley gathered a band of friends, dressed them as Indians, trained them to yell and “hoop” like warriors and made a mock assault on the boardinghouse room where young Mitchell was sleeping. Once he had recovered from the shock, the “victim” was too humiliated to report the incident.
After the Union Society unveiled a portrait of university president Dr. Robert Hamilton Bishop in the fall of 1829, the Erodelphians racked their brains for a way to outdo their rivals. Anderson recalled the lifelike wax figures he had seen recently in Cincinnati and proposed that they procure a statue of Bishop for their hall. “Too costly,” the members retorted. “Then perhaps a bust,” Anderson replied. When the members asked Charley who would create the work, Anderson suggested that the artist who made the wax figures could accomplish the task. The society voted to allocate seventy-five dollars in subscriptions for a plaster bust and sent Charley, William Woodruff, and James Stagg to find the artist. The boys found a handsome young man in a dirty apron named Hiram Powers and offered him the commission. Powers agreed to make the bust for one hundred dollars, and his clay-covered handshake with Anderson sealed the deal. The bust was a hit with both Bishop and the Erodelphians. Then unknown Powers later gained the patronage of Larz Anderson’s father-in-law, self-made millionaire Nicholas Longworth, and became a world-renowned sculptor. Powers’s masterpiece “The Greek Slave” was viewed by more than one hundred thousand people on its American tour in 1847. The sculpture became a potent symbol for the abolitionist movement.4
The Lost Gettysburg Address Page 3