Joseph Reid Anderson. Despite the Napoleonic pose, Confederate General Joseph Reid Anderson,the head of Tredegar, appears bedraggled. The photograph is attributed to Matthew Brady. Whether Brady shot the Civil War photographs credited to him or whether the photographer was one of two prominent members of his team, Anderson's ledgers in the archives of the Library of Virginia show that he purchased photographs for eight dollars from Matthew Brady in January 1866.Photo attributed to Matthew Brady, circa 1865.
Richmond, View from Gamble's Hill. Richmond, Virginia, led the urban South in industrialization. By the Civil War, 87 kinds of industries operated in the city including 77 iron establishments. Photographs and paintings of the city from the period emphasize industrial growth. Smoke from manufactories fills the countryside and the activity of tranport is visible. In this 1857 lithograph, Tredegar Iron Works is to the right. The panoramic perspective of the river, the countryside, and industrial development appears frequently in nineteenth-century representations of Richmond.Edward Beyer, published in The Album of Virginia (Berlin: Loeillot, 1857, from the Valentine, Richmond, Virginia. Image cropped.
View of Tredegar, 1865. This view of Tredegar Iron Works from the road just above the facilities and facing the James River, is attributed to Joseph Reid Anderson. Small Special Collections, University of Virginia
Haxell Flour Mill, 1865. On April 3, 1865, the Confederate government and army left Richmond. The Confederate army torched the city to prevent valuable factories and munitions from falling into Union hands. Riots ensued as residents and refugees swarmed the streets to see the carnage, to loot, and to escape the flames. Civil War photographs, 1861-1865 / compiled by Hirst D. Milhollen and Donald H. Mugridge, Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress, 1977. No. 0479
n 1890, Joseph Reid Anderson, President of Tredegar Company, spoke about the history of his corporation at a meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering in Richmond, Virginia, an audience filled with representatives from northern states. He remembered the years of the Civil War.
The distance of almost 40 years may have tempered Anderson’s understatement of the devastation and upheaval of the Civil War on the Tredegar. Certainly, he minimized his own inventiveness and entrepreneurial creativity in maintaining corporate operations. Plagued by shortages of raw materials, deficiencies of skilled labor, insufficient financial resources, a devastating fire, and the decimated southern transportation infrastructure, Tredegar operated throughout the war as the major private source of ordnance to the Confederate government and military.
The government and the army themselves were rent by disorganization, money shortages, fluctuating fiscal policies, and ambivalence toward industrial development. They frequently misdirected supplies, placed and cancelled contradictory orders, and were consistently unable or unwilling to honor payment to the iron works. The military needs of the Confederacy eroded the workforce as the southern government conscripted free laborers. Anderson was forced to negotiate with government officials—in some sense, the enemy within—in order to maintain a sufficient and skilled supply of labor.
espite the difficulties, Anderson, a West Point graduate served as a general in the Confederate Army until 1962, resigning his commission in order to continued producing munitions at Tredegar for the Confederacy. He strove for corporate solvency and persisted in his support of the Southern cause, writing to his brother in 1864, “My own faith in the final success of our cause is stronger as each year of the war rolls round.”
Despite the exigencies of wartime production, between 1861 and 1865,only the R. P. Parrott Company in New York produced more cannon on a national level than Richmond's Tredegar.