The Lost Gettysburg Address (4 page)

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

L
ARZ 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.