Anderson was never a gay person, hail-fellow-well-met. But neither was he sour, or laconic, or taciturn. He was simply a discreet, slightly restrained gentleman. He did not tolerate bawdy gossip, and he was remarkably modest in his demeanor. During the Mexican War he wrote his wife that he had met some soldiers who were quite full of themselves. “No one admires courage more than I do,” he said, “but I always regret to hear the hero trumpeting his own fame.” As to pushing his name forward to gain fame of promotion, he wrote, “I would cut my tongue out before I would allow it to commit so great and indelicacy.”
After admitting to his wife that he had purposely avoided staff duty to be where the fighting was, he said that he would never have told anyone else this, because “it looks exceedingly like egotism.”
He was so sensitive about any scent of overweening pride that he avoided even looking at Mexican soldiers who had been captured: “I was afraid they might detect something of triumph in my countenance, when I thought them so humiliated by their surrender.”
Source:
Detzer, David. “A Gentle Man.” Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, 2002. 20. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Anderson, Artillery Officcer, pp. 30, 56, 103, 124.
Further Reading:
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