Major General Samuel Read Anderson, Civil War Veteran, Sumner Co., TN
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Brig. Gen. Samuel R. Anderson
17 Feb. 1804---2 Jan. 1883 |
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"...these dead shall not have died in vain."
Abraham Lincoln, 1863
"Samuel Read Anderson, Major General of Tennessee State troops, May 5, 1861. Brigadier General in Confederate service Aug. 9, 1861. Commanding a Brigade composed of the 1st, 7th, and 14th regiments serving in the Cheat Mountain Campaign in Virginia, was retired because of ill health. Re-commissioned Brigadier General on Nov. 4, 1864. Served with Generals Lee, Jackson, Magruder and Archer. Paroled at end of war."--Edwin L. Ferguson, Sumner County in the Civil War, p. 399
Samuel Read Anderson, CSA, was born in Bedford Cty., VA 17 Feb. 1804. Anderson moved to KY then TN when they were little more than frontier, and grew up in this region as it developed. By the 1840s he had become a prominent citizen of Davidson Cty., Tenn., and was the 1st Tennessee Infantry's lieutenant colonel in the Mexican War. Later he worked for the Bank of Tennessee and on the eve of civil war was Nashville's postmaster.
In appreciation of his military experience and politician connections, Gov. Isham G. Harris appointed him Major General of Tennessee state troops 9 May 1861. He was then commissioned a brigadier general in Confederate service 9 July 1861 and attached to Gen. Robert E. Lee's first Civil War field command for action in western Virginia.
Lee's campaign was unsuccessful, but Anderson committed himself honorably in these maneuvers and played a strategic role in the Battle of Cheat Mountain, where he successfully led his brigade in an enveloping move to cut off the Federal's retreat. Following the campaign's end and Lee's transfer to the Carolinas, he was placed under Maj. Gen. William Wing Loring's command for winter duty in the western Virginia mountains. But his stay with Loring was brief and he was transferred to Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder's forces at Yorktown. The foul weather, the exertions of the past few months, and age combined to break his health and cause his resignation 10 May 1862, after the Yorktown line was abandoned.
On 7 Nov. 1864 Confederate President Jefferson Davis reappointed 60-year-old Anderson a brigadier general in a position closer to his abilities, running the Confederate Bureau of Conscription for Tennessee. But because of extensive Federal seizures in the state, Anderson was compelled to execute his office from headquarters in Selma, AL. This ended his Confederate service.
Following the war, he returned to Nashville, became a businessman, and died there 2 Jan. 1883.
---Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War,
Patricia L. Faust, Editor,
Harper Perennial Publisher, 1991,
p. 15
J. Guy Cisco (1909 publication) adds the following: He was a son of Robert Anderson, a
Virginian, and an officer in the war for independence. He received a good education, married a Miss Trousdale of
the same county, served as Lieutenant Colonel of the famous First Tennessee, "The Bloody First," in the war with
Mexico. On May 9, 1861, he was commissioned a Major General in the State Troops and Brigadier General in the
provisional army of the Confederate States on July 9, and on August 5 was assigned to the command of a brigade,
which included the First, Seventh, and Fourteenth Tennessee Regiment of infantry for service in the mountains of
West Virginia under General Loring.
---Historic Sumner County,
J. Guy Cisco,
1909
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