Kentuckian Major Robert Anderson assigned to take command of Fort Moultrie in South Carolina

Major Robert Anderson, a fifty-five year old Kentucky-born artilleryman and former slaveowner, was assigned to replace the long-serving Bostonian Lieutenant Colonel John L. Gardner as commander of Fort Moultrie near Charleston, South Carolina.  Secretary of War John B. Floyd saw Anderson as a cooler head for the tense relations between federal and state authorities in Charleston and as a conciliatory appointment at the time.  (By John Osborne) 
Source Citation
The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1861 (New York:  D. Appleton and Company, 1864), 315.
Samuel W. Crawford, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter: Being an Inside History of the Affairs in South Carolina and Washington, 1860-61 , (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2006), 59.
    Date Certainty
    Exact
    Type
    Battles/Soldiers
    How to Cite This Page: "Kentuckian Major Robert Anderson assigned to take command of Fort Moultrie in South Carolina," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/34601.