MAJOR GENERAL ROBERT ANDERSON - INSCRIBED PHOTOGRAPH SIGNED TWICE - HFSID 287833

ROBERT ANDERSON
Carte de visite, shown as a major general, signed on the front and also inscribed by him on verso on the Fourth of July
Photograph inscribed and signed twice: "Robert Anderson/Major Gen. U.S.A." and on verso "For Mrs. Geo. Griswold/from her friend/Robert Anderson/Dresden/July 4th, 1869, 2¼x3¾ carte de visite affixed to a 4x2½ card (two surfaces). Bottom right side of verso soiled. Otherwise, fine condition. Accompanied by 4x5 lithograph of Anderson's wife "Eba" (Eliza Bayard Clinch), set into a period gilt and black painted decorative wooden frame. Bottom of from lightly chipped.Worn on verso. Otherwise, fine condition. ROBERT ANDERSON (1805-1871) was born near Louisville, Kentucky to a prominent slaveholding Virginia family. It has been suggested that Secretary of War John B. Floyd - later a Confiderate general, sent Anderson to command the federal garrison in Charleston harbor (November 15, 1860) in the expectation that he would readily surrender it. Everything in Anderson's background, including his wife's Georgia family and his friendship with Jefferson Davis, implied southern sympathies, but Anderson's sense of duty was stronger than these proclivities. When South Carolina seceded (December 1860), Anderson moved his troops from Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter . His situation grew steadily worse, but he continued to refuse to surrender. On the morning of April 12, 1861 South Carolina guns began firing on Fort Sumter. On April 14th, Major Anderson accepted the terms of evacuation offered by Confederate General Beauregard. Greeted as a hero upon his return to the North, Anderson was brevetted to brigadier general on May 15, 1861 and given the command of the Department of Kentucky which was merged into the Department of the Cumberland on August 15th. Ill health removed Anderson from field command (October 8, 1861). He retired from the regular army on October 27, 1863 and brevetted Major General. After the recapture of Charleston, on April 14, 1865, Major General Robert Anderson took part in a ceremony in which he raised the same Union flag he had lowered exactly four years earlier. Eliza Bayard "Eba" Clinch (d. 1905), daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, had married Robert Anderson in 1842, with General Winfield Scott standing in for her father at the ceremony. The Andersons had five children. Two items.