On a bleak hillside overlooking the battleground of Sailor’s Creek, General Robert E. Lee watched as hundreds of his men fled through the fields and wooded ravines below. “Men without guns, many without hats,” one witness recalled, “all mingled with teamsters riding their mules with dangling traces.” A relentless barrage of Union attacks on the afternoon of April 6, 1865, had sent the remnants of the once-proud Army of Northern Virginia scrambling wildly toward safety. “My God!” Lee wondered aloud. “Has the army dissolved?”

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Most of this gray-clad mob belonged to Lt. Gen. Richard Heron Anderson’s Corps, referred to sometimes today as the Fourth Corps. After Ulysses S. Grant’s Federal army shattered the Confederate defenses around besieged Richmond and Petersburg, Va., four days earlier, Anderson’s soldiers had joined Lee as he retreated west along the Appomattox River.

When Anderson rode up to Lee in the aftermath of the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, the distraught army commander merely moved his head toward his vanquished subordinate without looking directly at him. With a brusque wave of his arm, he ordered the general to “take the stragglers to the rear….I wish to fight here.” As Lee diverted his attention to rallying as many troops as he could to make a stand, Anderson turned his horse and joined the backwash of his ruined corps in its flight.

The moment was a far cry from the one 11 months earlier when Lee had confidently turned to Anderson for help on a different Virginia battlefield. During the Battle of the Wilderness in early May 1864, when Army of Northern Virginia First Corps commander Lt. Gen. James Longstreet was mistakenly shot by his own men, Lee chose then-Maj. Gen. Anderson to replace “Old Pete” while he recuperated.

Longstreet’s chief of staff, Colonel G. Moxley Sorrel, had confided in Lee that the 43-year-old native of Statesburg, S.C., would be a worthy surrogate for Longstreet, saying, “We know him and shall be satisfied with him.” Anderson was moved to tears when the veterans of the First Corps cheered and flung their hats in the air as he rode among them.

An 1842 graduate of West Point, Anderson had distinguished himself as a lieutenant of dragoons during the Mexican War. He later honed his military skills on the Western frontier, rising to captain. “He was a favourite in his Regt.,” Lee recalled, “& was considered a good officer.”

When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, Anderson entered Confederate service. He rose from colonel to brigadier general within six months. After initially serving in command of defenses at Charleston, he was transferred to Florida, where he was wounded while leading an attack near Fort Pickens. By mid-February1862, he was in charge of a South Carolina brigade in then-Maj. Gen. James Longstreet’s command.

For his aggressive leadership at the Battle of Seven Pines during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, Anderson earned the nickname “Fighting Dick.” In July 1862, Lee commissioned him a major general and assigned him to command of Longstreet’s Second Division.

Fighting Dick was liked and respected throughout the army. Confederate artillerist E. Porter Alexander called Anderson “a sturdy and reliable fighter” and “as pleasant a commander to serve under as could be wished.” Diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, a childhood friend of Anderson’s, called him “the most silent and discreet of men.”

Anderson shined in command throughout the summer of 1862. At the Second Battle of Manassas in August, his division went into battle following a grueling 17-hour march. At Sharpsburg a few weeks later, Anderson was seriously wounded in the thigh but left the field only after fainting from loss of blood.

Anderson recovered in time for the Battle of Fredericksburg in December, though his division was involved only on the fringe of the action. After the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee recommended to President Jefferson Davis that Anderson would make a “good corps commander.”

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