General Joseph Reid Anderson
Anderson was of Irish descent and was the son of Colonel William Anderson (1764–1839) and Anne (née Thomas) Anderson. Anderson’s father was a self taught engineer and a surveyor. He was also a veteran of the American Revolutionary war and commanded a Virginia regiment during the War of 1812. Anderson was the fifth of six sons and ninth of ten children.
Growing up he attended a school in nearby Fincastle. Joseph Reid Anderson obtained an appointment to West Point and graduated in the class of 1836. Anderson graduated 4th of 49 in his class at West Point.
Upon graduation, he served briefly in the 3rd Artillery, U.S. Army. He was then transferred to a job as an assistant engineer in the Engineer Bureau in Washington. He was officially transferred to the United States Army Corps of Engineer on July 1, 1837. He served with the Corps of Engineers in Washington, DC, Fort Monroe, Va at the mouth of the James River and Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River.
In May, 1837 he married Sara Eliza Archer, the daughter of the Army surgeon at Fort Monroe. The Andersons would have five sons and seven daughters, of whom three sons and four daughters reached adulthood.
Anderson resigned his commission in 1837 to seek more lucrative employment with the Virginia Board of Public Works. Anderson became Assistant State Engineer and served as chief engineer of the Valley Turnpike Company. The Valley Turnpike was a toll road which connected Staunton and Winchester, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley from 1838 until 1841.
This service on the turnpike stimulated his interest in Virginia’s economic development. He promoted the construction of canals and railroads to connect the Valley of Virginia to Tidewater Virginia, and his concern for internal improvements led him into the southern commercial convention movement and into the Whig Party. Those activities brought him to the attention of the owners of Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Company.
In 1841, Francis B. Deane hired Anderson as The Tredegar Iron Work’s commercial sales agent. Anderson would be associated with Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond Virginia for most of the rest of his life.
At the time Anderson joined Tredegar, the four-year-old company was in financial difficulty. He actively sought and obtained contracts with the federal government to manufacture munitions and other supplies for the army and navy and rapidly brought about an improvement in the company’s fortunes. During the next two decades Tredegar produced 881 cannon for the armed forces, an iron revenue cutter for the Treasury Department, and engines and boilers for two navy frigates. As Tredegar became profitable, Anderson tired of the board of directors’ meddling in technical matters, and in November 1843 he leased the entire ironworks for five years. Anderson prospered as superintendent of Tredegar and also from 1846 to 1848 as president of the Armory Iron Company. In April 1848 he purchased the Tredegar Iron Company and assumed complete control over all phases of the work.
One of Anderson’s most notable innovations was the introduction of slaves in skilled industrial work. He began using bondsmen in unskilled jobs in 1842, and in 1847 he proposed using them in skilled work at the Armory rolling mill. When the skilled white workers, many of whom were northern- or foreign-born, responded with strikes at both the Armory and Tredegar rolling mills, Anderson fired the strikers and put slaves in skilled jobs at both establishments. The replacements successfully demonstrated their ability to perform such labor, but before the Civil War slaves were given skilled work largely in the rolling mill and the blacksmith shop. The company owned many of them and hired others from local owners, but despite Anderson’s determination to employ skilled slaves, he continued to rely heavily on northern and European immigrant workers, with whites constituting the vast majority of his workforce in 1860.
Through his success in making Tredegar the largest ironworks in the South and one of the largest in the United States, Anderson became one of the region’s leading industrialists. Although Tredegar produced a substantial amount of armaments for the government, the largest part of its production was railroad iron. Tredegar also turned out a wide variety of finished iron products, including steam engines for gristmills, sawmills, and sugar mills, and iron for bridges. By 1860 the Tredegar workforce of about eight hundred was the fourth largest of any American ironworks. In the face of competition from northern mills and from England, Anderson entered into a series of partnerships that permitted him to complete the payments on the purchase of Tredegar in 1856, and in 1859 he formed Joseph R. Anderson and Company, combining Tredegar with Archer and Company, a rolling mill that Anderson’s father-in-law and brother-in-law owned.
Anderson was elected to the Richmond City Council in 1847 and served five terms before the Civil War. In 1852 he was elected to a vacant seat in the House of Delegates and was reelected in 1853. He served on the Committee on Roads and Internal Navigation and promoted state support for the construction of railroads and canals. Following the collapse of the Whig Party, Anderson became a Democrat. He was elected to the House of Delegates again in 1857, but he was defeated in 1859. After Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, Anderson advocated secession and actively promoted the sale of arms to the Southern states. Tredegar sold munitions to South Carolina during the Fort Sumter crisis and geared up to increase arms production. Anderson also negotiated arms contracts with the provisional government of the Confederacy. He was a member of a Southern rights convention that met in Richmond on April 17, 1861, and that would have passed an extralegal secession ordinance if the Virginia convention had not done so that day. When Virginia left the Union, Anderson offered to turn Tredegar over to the Confederate government by lease or purchase, but the government declined the offer.
In May 1861 Anderson organized 350 of his white workmen into a home defense unit known as the Tredegar Battalion, which he commanded with the rank of major. On August 21 he requested a commission in the Confederate army and on September 3, 1861, was appointed a brigadier general. He commanded the District of Cape Fear, North Carolina, from September 30, 1861, to March 19, 1862, and the Department of North Carolina from March 19 to 24, 1862. He led a brigade at Fredericksburg in April and May, where General Field was then stationed, and instructed by General Lee to assume command in that quarter, attack the enemy or confine his field of operations. He was assigned to A. P. Hill’s division during the Seven Days’ Battles. The brigade consisted of the 14th Georgia, the 35th Georgia the 45th Georgia, the 49th Georgia regiments and the 3rd Louisiana Battalion. He participated in the battles of Mechanicsville, Gaines’ Mill and Frayser’s Farm. Anderson was slightly wounded in the face on June 30, 1862 near White Oak Swamp. He temporarily commanded Hill’s division from July 13 to 18, 1862, when he resigned his commission on July 18, 1862 to resume management of the Tredegar ironworks.
Tredegar was the largest supplier of arms and other iron products to the Confederate government and produced 1,099 cannon during the war. Tredegar also produced armor plate and machinery for Confederate warships, including the CSS Virginia; artillery shot and shells; machinery and tools for the production of small arms by other armories and for the powder mill at Augusta, Georgia, and for the naval ordnance plant at Charlotte, North Carolina; and an armor-plated railroad car mounting a heavy cannon. Tredegar was also a major supplier of iron for Southern railroads. The company grew enormously during the war. It expanded the Richmond plant, acquired blast furnaces to produce pig iron, and purchased coal mines to supply the furnaces. The total workforce rose as high as 2,500 men, and Anderson increased the use of slave labor after many of the white workers entered military service or fled the Confederacy. By 1864 more than half of the workers were slaves, many filling skilled positions. Even though shortages of food became widespread in the Confederacy, Tredegar fed not only its slaves, but also its white employees and their families, to whom it sold food at cost.
Anderson and his partners also purchased large quantities of cotton during the war and shipped them to European markets on blockade runners, including a ship called the Coquette that they purchased from the Confederate navy in 1864. Anderson insisted that the cotton sales were used to finance greater production of military and railroad supplies at Tredegar, but most of the money went into a sterling account in London, and Anderson used those funds to keep control of Tredegar after the war.
At the end of the War the Confederate authorities ordered that warehouses and munitions be destroyed during the evacuation of Richmond. To guard the Iron Works from arsonists, Anderson reportedly paid over fifty armed guards to protect the Tredegar facility. As a result, the Tredegar Iron Works is one of few Civil War era buildings in the warehouse district that survived the burning of Richmond.
Following the fall of Richmond on April 3, 1865, Anderson became a strong peace advocate. With other Richmond leaders he met with Abraham Lincoln in the city on April 4 to discuss how to end the war, and Anderson headed a citizens’ commission to call the General Assembly into session to take Virginia out of the Confederacy. By taking part in the peace movement, Anderson hoped to keep the Union army from taking possession of the ironworks, but he was unsuccessful even though the surrender of the Confederate army brought a speedy end to the war. The Federal government confiscated the Iron Works at the end of the war. Anderson enlisted the aid of many prominent southern Unionists, Virginia railroad executives, and even some northern businessmen and Richmond African Americans, and obtained a pardon from U.S. president Andrew Johnson on September 21, 1865.
Anderson was able to regain control of The Works in 1867, but the company remained in financial difficulty, and he had trouble attracting new capital.
In February 1867 he and his son Archer Anderson and three other partners reorganized the venture as Tredegar Company, with Joseph Reid Anderson as the majority stockholder. The reorganization enabled Tredegar to attract northern capital and expand its operations. By 1873 Anderson had doubled the factory’s prewar capacity, and its labor force exceeded 1,000 men, many of them black laborers and skilled workmen who received equal pay with the whites. The panic of 1873 and the resulting depression forced Tredegar into receivership in 1876. Anderson served as receiver of the company until September 1879, when the company successfully funded its debt, but Tredegar failed to make the transition from iron to steel production late in the nineteenth century and lost its position as one of the premier southern industrial enterprises, although the Richmond plant continued in operation until the 1950s and the company survived as a manufacturing entity into the 1980s. His son, Archer Anderson, became involved in the business, and became president of the Tredegar Iron Works after his father’s death.
Anderson remained one of Richmond’s most successful and famous citizens. He returned to public life in the 1870s and served in the House of Delegates in 1874 and 1875 and again from 1877 to 1879. He was president of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce from 1874 to 1876, when he resigned to become president of the Richmond City Council. Anderson served on the vestry of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church from 1844 until his death and was a senior warden for twenty-one years.
After his wife Sara died in 1881, Anderson remarried. His second wife was Mary Evans Pegram. Mary Pegram’s brothers were Confederate General John Pegram and Colonel William Ransom Johnson Pegram, both of whom had been killed during the war.
Joseph Reid Anderson died on September 7, 1892, while on a vacation at the Isles of Shoals, New Hampshire.
It was estimated that 30,000 citizens came to his funeral when he was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.
