The Lost Gettysburg Address (27 page)

Anderson’s four months back in the national spotlight were over.
He had few plans and essentially no political capital. He had always
stood resolute on principle in the face of whatever forceful winds
might be blowing against him, but he had never encountered a gale as
strong as that being produced by
Sumner and his Radical Republican
acolytes. The changes they wrought were certain to wipe Anderson
clean off the political map and transform his beloved country in ways
he had barely begun to imagine.

I
T DID NOT TAKE CHARLES ANDERSON
long to realize that the
country that he had loved since boyhood was gone forever. The
great republican Union of free and slave states had been tenuously
stitched together like a garment that was beautiful in its outward
appearance but flawed in its construction. It had literally come apart
at the seams. Anderson had dedicated his very soul to preventing
disunion, predicted its disastrous consequences, and risked his own
life to hold it together. Now the war had been won, not to preserve
the Union that his father had fought to create but to usher in a radical
new government construct that departed from the practical vision of
the Founding Fathers.

Anderson spoke a few words early in the 1866 election canvas
at Dayton for which he was roundly condemned, thus signaling the
abrupt end of his political career. He called the U.S. Congress
“traitors to their principles.” They fought a war while denying that there
was ever any secession, then passed laws and amendments while
eleven of the thirty-six states were disqualified from participating. “I
must tell the North,” Anderson predicted, “that in following the lead
of Congress, they are plunging into another civil war.” He warned
that radical measures create “national and social destruction  .  .  . 
through anarchies and despotism.” Anderson was revolted by “petty,
paltry politicians filling the olden places of our departed statesmen.”
Republicans howled in protest at his brazen attacks.
¹

President Johnson’s moderate reconstruction policies suffered a
death blow in the midterm elections of 1866, when Americans elected
huge Republican majorities of more than two-thirds in both houses
of Congress. Radical Republicans like
Senator Charles Sumner and
Representative Thaddeus Stevens were unhappy with what they saw
as measures by Southern white leaders to restore their own
political rights while squelching economic and political opportunities for
freedmen. They demanded universal manhood suffrage and finally
had the political power to attain that goal. Ignoring Johnson’s veto
of both the Freedman’s Bureau and Civil Rights bills, Congress
approved the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which
guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law. To
enforce the new statutes, the
Military Reconstruction Act of 1867
split the former Confederate States into five militia districts
administered by the U.S. Army. The South became a police
state.
²

Anderson was heartbroken. He moved his family to Eddyville,
Kentucky, near the Lyon County iron lands he had purchased
previously where he could divert his mind from his “ruined, lost country
(a wreck of prosperities and liberties).” He tried to express his grief
at the aftermath of the war but struggled to find the proper words.
“Suffice it to say,” he lamented, “this is no longer a free country.”
Anderson drafted a letter to
Senator John Sherman, admitting “an
inextinguishable desire to leave this Country” and suggested that the
vacant mission to Vienna would be appropriate. But he knew that
he had killed that dream by his own irresistible impulse to alienate
former political allies. He never posted the letter.
³

Abraham Rencher, a former U.S. congressman from North
Carolina and former governor of the New Mexico Territory (whose
daughter had married Anderson’s son), was less remorseful and more
defiant. “Almost any alternative would be preferable,” Rencher
exclaimed, “to that of having your property and character and even
life itself depend on stupid Negroes recently emerged from a state of
slavery  .  .  .  directed and controlled by those who would feel
nothing for us but bitter hatred.” Reconstruction was not reconciliation,
as Lincoln, Johnson, and Anderson had hoped it would be. It was
retribution.
⁴

When
Governor A. G. Curtin of Kentucky invited Anderson to a
convention of Union war veterans in Philadelphia in 1869, he could
not bring himself to attend. “I certainly do sympathize with the cause
for which we fought,” Anderson explained, but he could not abide
“the present motives of a majority of [his] associates in that war.” He
found himself in a “strange position between the two parties,” and
his conscience would not allow him to align with either. Anderson
believed that the Republicans intended to create a partisan, sectional
dynasty that would be just as evil as the slavery-based Confederate
oligarchy they had so recently defeated. Despite the deep despair
Anderson felt in separating from his former comrades, his conviction
that the Republican Party had further “debased into a vast,
organized faction to secure personal plunder and power” disgusted him.
He would rather abandon politics altogether than throw in with his
old allies or certain Southern Democrats, who looked the other way
as groups like the Ku Klux Klan used violence and intimidation in an
attempt to preserve the old social order.
⁵

The political landscape that Anderson had known was inverted, as
black legislators entered the hallowed halls of Congress while many
of the South’s former white leaders were denied the franchise. In a
time of political extremism, Anderson retired to his rural
surroundings, determined to start a new life for himself and his family. The
long-deferred boyhood dream of becoming a gentleman farmer had
become a reality, only this time Anderson’s ambitions were much
grander. He aimed to create a model community from scratch. His
new home would incorporate all the beauty, economic prosperity,
and high-toned social intercourse that he so loved. The project
continued for the rest of his life and never came to full fruition, but it
gave Anderson a chance to fill a void in his soul. At his new paradise
he called Kuttawa, Anderson finally became the man he had always
wanted to be.

He chose his retirement place carefully. Much of the land was part
of a failed iron mining speculation. He was certain that it still held
great promise with the proper application of capital. Anderson’s
experience with railroads in the Ohio legislature helped him foresee
that a need to build new rail lines meant a postwar boom in iron
production. But such growth was slow to develop in the economically
devastated South. The property incorporated great scenic vistas of
the Cumberland River, mineral hot springs, and plenty of pasturage
for his stock. It was an ideal location for the country lifestyle that the
younger Anderson had envisioned. It also suited his goal of
founding an entire community based on his own elaborate plans, since it
had natural beauty, abundant resources, and the potential for easy
access to the Illinois Central Railroad. Such ambitions required
significant investment, however. In 1873, Anderson’s description of his
finances boiled down to three words: “poverty, debt, and
hopelessness.” Despite these challenges, he laid out the new town of
Kuttawa
in 1874 and solicited residents and investors.

Anderson produced extensive plans and drawings of his model
community in his own hand. He took care to name each feature in
the same sort of romantic language that
Frederick Law Olmsted had
used decades earlier in enticing Anderson to settle in Texas. Vista
Ridge overlooked the river on one side and the town on the other.
Mineral springs named Mint, Diamond, Opal, and Wild Rose
promised youth-renewing waters capable of curing various diseases and
afflictions. The thirty-acre artificial Loch Clough was perfectly
situated for visitors traveling to a planned resort to enjoy boating,
swimming, and other recreational pursuits. Silver Cliffs was a lovely park
that stood hundreds of feet above the languid Cumberland. Anderson
envisioned a world-class university perched atop these cliffs, if he
could only get Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, or Cornelius
Vanderbilt to fund the project. When a friend asked Anderson why
he had planned the streets and avenues to be unusually wide, he
responded that someday a new method of conveyance would grace the
streets of his beautiful Kuttawa. He just did not know what that new
vehicle might look like.
⁶

Anderson walked his property daily, meticulously planning each
landscape feature. He also took time to write letters to old friends
and family. There was much to correspond about, especially with old
Texas friends whom he had left behind. Foremost among those friends
was his “deliverer, that noblest of all the heroines of this dreadful, yet
glorious war,
Mrs. Ludlum.” Anderson found her reasonably well,
despite her harsh treatment at the hands of the Texas rebels. He
petitioned for Ludlum’s appointment as postmistress in San Antonio, but
the job was given to someone else.
Will Bayard, the young man who
had joined Anderson in his escape from Camp Dorn, was attempting
to advance a stalled military career. He reported being shunned by
Texas relatives who felt betrayed by him.
J. C. Houzeau, who had
also risked his life to free Anderson, was living in New Orleans,
editing the bilingual
New Orleans Tribune
.

George Paschall reported that
Governor Pendleton Murrah had
robbed the Texas treasury and had drunk himself to death in
Monterrey, Mexico, where a number of ex-Confederates had settled.
Paschall called it a “buffalo stampede.” Anderson’s jailor,
Henry E.
McCulloch, “had the temerity to remain,” but Texas chief justice
Royal
T. Wheeler, who had boasted of his part in Anderson’s arrest, proved
himself “a coward even in suicide.” Paschall described Wheeler
“shooting at himself a year before he took his shameless life.” One
of Anderson’s closest Texas friends was
Presley Edwards, who had
stayed on and cooperated with the rebels. “I think you do injustice to
many of your old friends,” Edwards wrote in 1870. “There was a
discrimination to be made between Unionists and Anti-Secessionists,”
Edwards claimed. Hard-core, unconditional Southern Union men
like Anderson were a rare breed. Most men stood by Anderson until
the war began, Edwards explained, but then accepted the sectional
reality of the conflict. The war had been over five years, and even
Anderson admitted that he still loved old neighbors like his cousin
Florida Tunstall, “even if she is a rebel.”
⁷

There was one relationship in
Anderson’s life that needed
repairing most of all. His brother Marshall had been shunned by many
Ohioans on account of his Copperhead sympathies. Marshall was
estranged from his family due to his strident Catholicism and his
attacks on Charles during the 1863 gubernatorial election. Marshall
elected to move to Mexico in 1865, ostensibly to join an archeological
expedition. His primary aim was to assist Matthew Maury in
establishing the New Virginia Colony as a refuge for former Confederates.
The scheme was a failure and Marshall returned home the
following year. His sons and sister were not speaking to him by this time.
Charles, on the other hand, reached out to his older brother
immediately upon his return and made a generous overture to resume their
brotherly affection. Their brother John had died after contracting
dysentery while visiting a Union Army camp in August 1863. Robert
was failing steadily, and Larz had become chronically ill. This was
no time to let past political or religious differences diminish the
importance of family.

In December 1872, Charles Anderson began an extended
correspondence with Marshall and revealed an intimate secret that he had
never shared with anyone outside of his immediate family.
Charles
was an atheist. “I have long struggled to conceal this want of faith
from others as well as myself,” the younger brother admitted. It was
a lonely situation for Anderson, seeing his brothers and sisters “safe
and happy in a Christian faith,” while he remained an outsider in
“a mere prescribed negation, a vacuity in faith.” It had been this
way his whole life, he said, despite the positive examples set by his
brothers. Once he had read the Bible, Charles suffered “a chronic
doubt of its truth,” its “strange statements,” and its scheme of
redemption. Marshall pleaded with his brother to make an attempt at
salvation, but Charles could not accept Jesus as savior even to save
himself, as that would betray his conscience. He poured his heart
out in an attempt to lift this “weighty restraint” that had existed so
long between the two brothers. “I have gone beyond my warrant I
am sure,” Charles admitted, “but when did I ever do otherwise?” His
confession of disbelief was an admission that very few politicians or
licensed attorneys could afford to make. Now that he was out of the
public eye, Charles no longer pretended that he believed. He needed
Marshall to know the truth while they both still lived.
⁸

The 1870s was an uncertain time for Anderson and his Kentucky
neighbors. A financial panic in 1873 caused a loss of confidence and
general deflation that lasted nearly six years. Despite these
challenges,
Anderson’s interests in iron mining and the rapid growth
of the railroads meant that he fared better than most. The
political winds changed direction in the 1876 presidential election. As
Anderson watched from the sidelines, a seismic shift was taking place
that would change the South dramatically. Southern states were back
in the Union and
President Grant’s administration was suffering from
a corruption scandal. Southern Democrats were eager to expel the
carpetbaggers and restore their agricultural economy to a system
that more closely resembled the prewar period. They nominated New
York governor
Samuel J. Tilden as their candidate. Anderson was
“grieved, shocked and stunned” at this result. It was not Tilden or
the Democrats whom he opposed, but rather the way that the
nominee’s henchmen bribed editors in Kentucky and purchased delegates
at the convention. Now Tilden was pandering to the base prejudices
of Southerners who wanted to divide the country once again “by the
old slavery line.” He could not abide what he considered “the
gangrene” of politics.
⁹