The Lost Gettysburg Address

by David T. Dixon

  When the storm finally ceased on Sunday, the ship was a long way from its destination. The Ursulita had exhausted her supply of fuel and had to rely solely on her sails to make it to Vera Cruz. The storm was followed by a dead calm, and the ship lolled languorously while the crew and passengers regained their bearings. Several days passed with occasional glimpses of shore, until finally on November 28, at about four in the afternoon, they reached the port of Vera Cruz. Eliza and her daughters had been at sea for more than eleven days. No one was there to greet them.

  The Andersons found their way to the house of the U.S. consul, Mark H. Dunnell. From there, the party found rooms that looked quaint and foreign, even to such seasoned travelers. The single beds were quite high off the ground and the floor tiled with square bricks. A stout iron door was the only opening in the windowless room, and a set of narrow stairs led down to a surprisingly fine French restaurant. They had been settled less than a day when a well-dressed Don Marcos Cruzado called and boldly asked Kitty to accompany him to Mexico City. She politely refused. All that was left to do now was to wait for word from her father.

  Charles Anderson was 140 miles out of Monterrey when he was greeted by a welcome and familiar face. Will Bayard had escaped the same day that Anderson had arrived at Governor Vidaurri’s residence in Monterrey. Bayard joined Anderson near Victoria for the trip to Tampico. The two fugitives spent many happy hours on the road together on the way to their port of liberation. When they finally arrived at Tampico on November 28, the city had been under siege by the rebel forces of Don Luis de Carvajal for eight days. Not long afterward, half the town, including the U.S. consulate, would be burned down to mere ashes. The escapees were warmly received by U.S. consul Franklin Chase, who was preparing to abandon the city. Bayard took the schooner, Sallie Gay, bound for New York, while Anderson boarded the British Royal Mail Packet, Clyde, bound for Vera Cruz and Havana.

  When Charles stepped ashore in Vera Cruz just days after his family’s arrival, he was greeted by Consul Dunnell, who rushed Anderson to his wife and two daughters. Tears flowed in abundance at their reunion. The family had plenty of time to swap stories and reconnect on the voyage to Havana. Once there, the Andersons transferred to the U.S. steamship Columbia and sailed for New York, where they finally disembarked seventy-three days after their first attempt to leave Texas. Their arrival on December 11, 1861, created a sensation.3

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hero

  THE LAND WAR HAD BEEN going badly for the Union while Charles Anderson and his family were on the run. Since the embarrassing defeat at Manassas in July, federal armies had failed to make significant progress in Virginia. They had not yet established firm control in Kentucky. Lincoln realized that he was in for a long conflict. Despite successes on the seacoast, ultimately the war had to be won on the ground. He needed new leadership.

  Robert Anderson had taken command of the Department of the Cumberland a short time after he surrendered Fort Sumter. Overwhelmed by the enormity of what he had already experienced in the war, and having never fully recovered from his old wounds in the Mexican War, he finally succumbed to nervous strain and resigned his commission. By early October 1861, William T. Sherman had replaced him in command of the department. Aging general Winfield Scott, a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, resigned on November 1. He was replaced by thirty-four-year-old general George McClellan. Lincoln’s new top general led a force that exceeded seven hundred thousand men. With most of the fighting done for the winter, the Northern press was hungry for some good news. When Charles Anderson arrived in New York, they christened him a hero.

  Anderson was the talk of the town. He and his family lodged in the finest hotels, dined at the best restaurants, and were visited by the cream of New York society. He gave numerous interviews and appeared at festivals and private dinners. His most prestigious invitation came from Peter Cooper, who asked him to speak at the heralded Cooper Institute on the night of December 21. This Anderson did in typical dramatic fashion, telling the story of Major General David E. Twiggs’s treachery, the Alamo speech, and Anderson’s subsequent escape. The New York Times described Anderson’s story as “among the most moving and romantic episodes of the war.” The capacity crowd loved it. Two days later, as Eliza and her daughters were traveling back to Ohio, Anderson and his brother Robert were feted at Astor House during a meeting of the New England Society. The dinner was lavish. The table included a scale model of Fort Sumter with toy cannons that fired and smoked. When the toasting was done, Robert’s suddenly famous little brother boarded a train bound for Washington to meet with Winfield Scott. Scott and Anderson were attempting to arrange an exchange for Will Jones. After just a day in the capital, Anderson left for Ohio and arrived in Cincinnati, two days after Christmas.1

  Back home in Dayton, Anderson began the New Year by seeking ways to contribute to the Union war effort. His son Latham was still fighting valiantly in New Mexico, where he was brevetted a major at Val Verde in February. Seven of Anderson’s nephews were in U.S. Army service at various locations. Cousins, neighbors, and friends had rushed to the aid of his beloved Union. Anderson was now in his late forties and hardly the soldierly type. Surely he had other talents he could lend to the cause. His first priority was to assist more than three hundred Union troops, including the brave officers who had helped finance his escape, still held hostage back in Texas. On January 9, Anderson began a withering, two-month letter-writing campaign to military and administration officials in Washington. Writing to Edwin M. Stanton, Anderson mentioned that he had already appealed to generals Henry Halleck and Lorenzo Thomas, along with former New York governor Hamilton Fish, among others, to rescue his friends. His efforts and those of others would take months to succeed, but by the end of April all of the remaining prisoners had been exchanged.2

  On January 10, Anderson addressed the Ohio General Assembly. His speech, in tone and content, established consistent themes that he repeated throughout the war. Political leaders and the general public needed to have an intimate understanding of the true nature of the terrible conflict and the causes that precipitated it. The war was the result of treason, pure and simple. It was planned by evil, ambitious politicians intent on establishing an oligarchy based on slavery. They had to be stopped and the Union restored at all costs before it was too late. Anderson felt it was his urgent duty to proceed to Washington and offer his services.3

  He arrived in the capital on Thursday, January 16, and met with both President Lincoln and General McClellan the following day. “The president strikes me as one of the most unreserved, honest men I ever saw,” Anderson wrote to his wife. “General McClellan impresses me exceedingly.” Despite Eliza’s worries that her husband would be made a brigadier general and Larz’s latest scheme to get his younger brother the post of minister to Mexico, Anderson vowed not to seek any office. He trusted that the president would help him find a role in the effort to restore the Union. Lincoln did just that.4

  The president asked Anderson to use his most powerful weapon—his speaking ability—to support the Union cause. The prelude was a brief tour of New England with the famed poet and editor of the Atlantic Monthly, James Russell Lowell. Lowell had admired Robert Anderson who, in Lowell’s words, “served for a brief hour to typify the spirit of uncompromising fidelity to duty” during his ordeal at Fort Sumter. He saw similar qualities in Robert’s youngest brother. When Lowell reflected back on their brief acquaintance years later, he remembered Charles Anderson as “the handsome, fair-haired Norseman who, with all his refinement, had a look as if he would cheerfully have gone out with a battle-axe to a holmgang.” Anderson returned from his eastern tour excited and energized, for he was about to undertake an important mission: Lincoln was sending him to England.5

  A critical foreign policy dilemma facing the Lincoln administration was the prospect of recognition or aid from England landing in the laps of the nascent rebel government. The Confederacy had sent commissioners to London
in early May 1861, but the British were not eager to upset their delicate relationship with the United States. In October, Louisiana governor Thomas O’ Moore banned the shipment of cotton to Europe in the hope that this action would pressure those nations to recognize the Confederate government. Opinion in England was split. The London Times supported the Union, while the Post expressed sympathy for the Confederacy. A Union naval blockade of Southern ports put additional pressure on European relations.

  On October 12, the Confederate commissioners to France and Britain, John Slidell and James Mason, slipped past the Union blockade at Charleston on their way to Cuba. They intended to purchase arms for the Confederacy in Europe. As the commissioners sailed in the British packet ship Trent on November 8, they were intercepted by the USS San Jacinto and taken prisoner. The Trent affair, as it came to be called, created an international crisis, with talk of possible war between England and the United States over this alleged breach of international law and diplomatic protocol. The rebels could not have been more pleased with this turn of events. The crisis dragged on for months. Finally, on December 26, the United States agreed to release the two commissioners into the custody of Great Britain and admit that their actions were not legal. Serious damage had been done to relations between the two powerful nations, and embarrassed British politicians were lining up to support recognition of the Confederacy. Southern blockade runners using British ports created additional tension.

  Lincoln’s task was difficult yet straightforward. He needed to keep Great Britain and the other European powers neutral. To do this, he needed to employ deft diplomacy while shaping British public opinion. Charles Francis Adams was the kind of skilled diplomat that Anderson had always admired. The son of John Quincy Adams and grandson of John Adams, Adams was a distinguished politician in his own right. Lincoln pulled Adams from his congressional seat and appointed him Minister to the Court of St. James in May 1861. After the Trent affair had died down, the question of British recognition of the Confederate government persisted at the forefront of public discourse. Adams and Lincoln needed influential men to publish articles in the newspapers and give speeches supporting neutrality.6

  Charles Anderson was a logical emissary and took on the job willingly. He left New York on March 29 aboard the Glasgow. He had waited more than a week for a letter of introduction from the president, which he never received. When Anderson dined with Winfield Scott a few days before his departure, Scott suggested that the U.S. government ought to pay his expenses. “I’ll see them damned first,” was Anderson’s reply. He was going to England at Lincoln’s request but would not be his hired man. Anderson would do what he did best: speak the truth and help restore the Union, no matter what the political implications might be.

  The mission was short and fruitless, however. Anderson made some progress in social circles. During the month of April he introduced various English gentlemen who supported the Union to Minister Adams, but London newspapers declined to publish any of his articles. By May 2, he was already frustrated and felt he had little productive work to do. He stayed in London a few more weeks and made several speeches at the request of British politician John Bright. After a six-day holiday in France, Anderson returned home with bitter feelings toward the British. “They wish our nation ruined,” he lamented. “The liberals sympathize with us, but mainly to end slavery. . . . They are all fools on this subject.” He was sick of politics, fed up with diplomacy, and frustrated that he had wasted his efforts. It was time to make a tangible contribution toward saving the Union he so adored.7

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rank Amateurs

  WHEN CHARLES ANDERSON arrived back in Ohio, he had a job waiting for him. New governor David Tod began his term in January 1862. Three months later, the state suffered more than two thousand casualties at the horrific Battle of Shiloh, Tennessee. Faced with filling his federally mandated quota of seventy-four thousand troops, Tod needed leaders who could raise regiments. He guessed that Anderson, with so many family members involved in the fighting, could not resist this call to duty.

  Tod was right. Anderson proved as effective a recruiter as he was a speaker. Recruiting posters painted a romantic picture of what was to come for Anderson’s new Ninety-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry: “An Anderson is at our head, We follow where he leads, And in our Paths of Glory, Will be traced most Noble Deeds.” Neighbors and friends from Montgomery, Preble, and Butler Counties rushed to enlist. The regiment met its quota in just two weeks, with four companies coming from Dayton. Citizens there raised ten thousand dollars at one meeting to help equip the troops. Few of the volunteers had any military training.1

  On August 9, Anderson himself enlisted and was awarded the rank of colonel. His previous military experience consisted of two years commanding a local militia called the Dayton Grays. He threw himself into his work, studying military tactics from the same manuals that his brother and son had used at West Point. Despite his intelligence and diligence, however, Anderson was woefully ill-prepared, like so many of his fellow officers, to lead an army into combat. What he did have were some of the intangibles that successful military leaders possess. His men loved, respected, and trusted him. In a war where so many thousands of ordinary citizens were being thrust into hellish conditions with inadequate training and support, this would have to be enough.2

  The Union Army’s situation in Kentucky and Tennessee in the summer of 1862 was perilous. Confederate John Hunt Morgan was wreaking havoc all over the region with his daring cavalry raids on federal positions. On July 13, general Nathan Bedford Forrest’s rebel troops overwhelmed Union general Thomas Crittenden’s force at Murfreesboro, capturing a startling number of men and supply wagons. While Confederate major general Edmund Kirby Smith menaced Union positions in Kentucky, fellow general Braxton Bragg pushed into Tennessee. Union major general Don Carlos Buell and his Army of the Ohio faced the important task of halting the Confederate advance well short of the Ohio River.3

  Anderson established a camp within sight of his Dayton home and began training his regiment. After just a week of drilling, the call came. Buell’s army needed all available men, ready or not. Anderson ordered all furloughed men to report to the regiment immediately. On August 20, the regiment mustered in to service. Three days later, the 39 officers and 929 enlisted men of the Ninety-Third Ohio finally received their arms and departed for Lexington, Kentucky. By the time Anderson’s troops reached Cincinnati by train from Dayton, it was past eleven in the evening. The Ninety-Third Ohio stepped off the train, formed into some semblance of order, and marched to the river. The regiment took the ferry across to Covington, where the exhausted volunteers arrived about two o’clock in the morning. Having had no food since leaving Dayton, the soldiers simply collapsed on a pile of boards or on bare ground and slept until daybreak. It was a harsh beginning to their romantic dreams of glory. Most would look back on this first journey, however, as one of their easiest.4

  The next day, the regiment boarded a train to Lexington, arrived in midafternoon, and marched to their assigned camp. They had not eaten since early that morning. Despite an alluring grove of trees just off the road, the men obeyed orders to lie down on either side of the turnpike. The previous morning’s defeat of General Ormsby M. Mitchel’s Union Army division about twenty miles from their present location had Anderson on high alert. The colonel lay down beside the road alongside his officers for a much needed rest. They slumbered for about an hour before they awoke to three rifle reports. One of the Union pickets had fired shots about fifty yards from where Anderson was sleeping. He jumped on his horse and galloped down the road as his officers ordered the men to fall in. Confusion reigned. When he returned a few minutes later, the colonel explained that some Union cavalry had ridden up the road toward the regiment, and failing to hear the command to “halt,” had been fired upon. Fortunately, the only casualty was a hole in the cavalry lieutenant’s coat. The regiment stood down into an uneasy rest and the officers wondered how their men
would have reacted in a real emergency.

  When they finally settled in at their fairground camp adjacent to Transylvania College in Lexington, the men were again in good spirits. Their baggage had finally arrived. The surrounding countryside was described by one soldier as “the garden spot of Kentucky” because of its attractive farmsteads. For five days, the soldiers enjoyed the first cooked food they had eaten since leaving Ohio. Anderson was appointed commander of the post at Lexington and camp life seemed pretty good. Late in the evening of August 30, however, General William “Bull” Nelson gave Anderson orders to move.5

  The Ninety-Third Ohio, two other regiments, and nineteen wagons, all under Anderson’s command, advanced toward Richmond, Kentucky, all night, arriving on the bluffs of the Kentucky River eleven miles from the town at about four o’clock in the morning. Anderson sent one company forward as pickets and they came back with terrible news: a rebel force of nearly seven thousand commanded by Major General Edmund Kirby Smith was on the opposite side of the river. Instead of falling back and joining Anderson’s regiments as ordered by Nelson, U.S. brigadier general Mahlon D. Manson had engaged the enemy at Richmond and was routed. Nelson slashed at some of his troops with his saber when they began to retreat. The Union Army suffered 5,353 casualties, while the Confederates lost just 451 men. Anderson’s regiments were given three hours to rest before being marched back to Lexington. A thunder shower drenched the troops and they arrived back in camp at ten o’clock at night. The soggy men grumbled as they were immediately ordered to counter-march to the farm of James B. Clay, where they ate some hard bread and finally laid down on the bare earth at midnight. Captain Samuel B. Smith of Company K called these troops “the most woe-be-gone, demoralized force I ever saw.”6