American Aristocrats

Using the extensive family letters of the Revolutionary War figure Richard Clough Anderson (1750–1826) and his offspring, Harry S. Stout has written an engaging intergenerational study that traces the adventures, fortunes, and misfortunes of a single elite family across the first century of the United States' existence. Heroic war service and connections secured Anderson appointment as surveyor general of the Virginia Military District, containing 4 million acres of land in what became Kentucky and Ohio. Access to land, employment of slaves, and the removal of Native Americans enabled him build a substantial fortune, which set his children up for notable careers of their own. Among his sons, Richard C. Anderson Jr. (1788–1826) achieved prominence as the first American minister to Colombia, though tropical disease would prematurely kill him; Robert Anderson, an army officer, would become nationally famous as commander of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in 1861; Charles Anderson would also gain fame as a Unionist escapee from Confederate captivity in Texas before going on to be wounded at Stones River and to serve briefly as governor of Ohio; while William Anderson, after exploring in the Rockies in the 1830s, became a noted Catholic convert, ultimately threw in his lot with the Confederacy, and then tried and failed to found a colony in Mexico for Confederate refugees. But the family's involvement in prominent events from the Revolution to Reconstruction forms only a part of Stout's narrative, which addresses the ingredients he identifies as key to the Andersons' wealth and success: land; marriage and family support; and connections among social and political elites

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