Leroy Hammond Anderson, M.D., was born in Richmond, Virginia on 29 April 1814, the son of Leroy Anderson and Hannah Wright Southgate. Like his brother, the noted physician William Henry Anderson (1820-1887), he was educated in Virginia and received medical instruction both in the United States and in Europe. In 1836 Anderson's parents moved west to Mobile, Alabama, where the elder Leroy Anderson died in 1837. By 1840 L. H. Anderson and his mother had settled in Sumter County, in the cotton growing Black Belt in west-central Alabama. Anderson resided in Sumter County, in Sumterville and subsequently in Gainesville, until the war, practicing medicine and making at least one significant contribution to the literature on Alabama's infectious diseases (a differential diagnosis of typhoid and malarial fever, published in the 1852 Transactions of the State Medical Association). Business interests included speculation in the burgeoning East Tennessee copper industry. The 1860 census values Anderson's personal estate at $50,000, and the family real estate (most of which is listed as the property of his mother, who died that July) at an additional $25,000. The 1860 slave census indicates that Dr. Anderson held eight slaves, of whom only two were above the age of fourteen.
In May 1861 Anderson traveled to Richmond "to take a share in what is going on;" his military records show him to have been enlisted in the Confederate army from 9 July 1861 to 2 January 1862, when his resignation was accepted. For at least part of that time he served as surgeon of the 9th Alabama Infantry. The letters leave no doubt that Anderson resigned because of his health; he was a self-described "pulmonary invalid" who appears to have suffered from tuberculosis. In August 1862 he left Richmond for the reputedly healthful resort town of Aiken, South Carolina. He was married at Aiken in the summer of 1863, to Charlotte Whitsitt, but died on 3 October.
By George Rugg
University of Notre Dame
Copyright © 2006, 2009, 2011