Gilbertus Anglicus | Page 2

poor health
compelled him to withdraw from school. No one at that time would
have predicted that the delicate youth would live to be the sage of four
score years and one. With his foster father and family he moved to
Beersheba Springs, Grundy county, Tennessee.
In 1854, in good health, the boy returned to Cleveland, prepared for
college, and entered Hobart College, Geneva, New York, where he
graduated as A.B. in 1858. Returning to Tennessee, he occupied
himself for about a year with surveying land and in other work and then
became private tutor in the family of Mr. Washington Compton on a
cotton plantation near Alexandria, Louisiana. There he remained a year

or more, then in the autumn of 1860 matriculated in the Medical
Department of the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University),
where he studied through the winter, and also heard much of the
political oratory of that exciting period.
The bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, followed by the call
of President Lincoln for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion, found
young Handerson again employed as tutor, this time in the family of
General G. Mason Graham, a veteran of the Mexican war.
With his friends and acquaintances, Handerson joined a company of
"homeguards" consisting mostly of planters and their sons, formed for
the purpose of maintaining "order among the negroes and other
suspicious characters of the vicinity."
Many years afterward Dr. Handerson wrote, in a narrative for his
family, concerning this period of his life: "Without any disposition to
violent partisanship, I had favored the party of which the
standard-bearers were Bell and Everett and the battle cry 'The
Constitution and the Union,' and I had grieved sincerely over the defeat
by the Radicals of the North, aided by the 'fire-eaters' of the South."
And again: "Born and educated in the North, I did not share in any
degree the fears of the Southerners over the election to the Presidency
of Mr. Lincoln. I could not but think the action of the seceding States
unwise and dangerous to their future prosperity. On the other hand, this
action had already been taken, and without any prospect of its
revocation. Indeed, in the present frame of mind of the North, any steps
toward recession seemed likely to precipitate the very evils which the
secession of the states had been designed to anticipate. I believed
slavery a disadvantage to the South, but no sin, and, in any event, an
institution for which the Southerners of the present day were not
responsible. An inheritance from their fore-fathers, properly
administered, it was by no means an unmitigated evil, and it was one,
moreover, in which the North but a few years before had shared. All
my interests, present and future, apparently lay in the South and with
Southerners, and if the seceding States, in one of which I resided, chose
deliberately to try the experiment of self-government, I felt quite

willing to give them such aid as lay in my feeble power. When I add to
this that I was 24 years of age, and naturally affected largely by the
ideas, the enthusiasm and the excitement of my surroundings, it is easy
to understand to what conclusions I was led."
So on June 17, 1861, he volunteered in the Stafford Guards under Capt.
(afterward Brigadier General) L.A. Stafford. The Guards became
company B of the 9th Regiment of Louisiana Volunteers, Confederate
States of America, Colonel (later Brigadier General) "Dick" Taylor
(son of "Old Zach," the President of the U.S.), in command. During the
year that followed until the close of the war, Handerson experienced
the adventures and trials of a soldier's life. He knew picket, scouting,
and skirmishing duty, the bivouac, the attack and defense in battle
formation, the charge, the retreat, hunger and thirst, the wearisome
march in heat and dust, in cold, in rain, through swamps and stony
wildernesses. He was shot through the hat and clothing and once
through the muscles of the shoulder and neck within half inch of the
carotid artery, lay in a hospital, and had secondary hemorrhage. At
another time he survived weeks of typhoid fever.
He was successively private soldier and accountant for his company,
quarter-master, 2nd Lieutenant of the line, Captain of the line, and
finally Adjutant General of the 2nd Louisiana Brigade, A. N. Va.,
under Lee and Jackson, with rank of Major. On May 4, 1864, Adjutant
General Handerson was taken prisoner, and from May 17th until
August 20th he was imprisoned at Fort Delaware in the Delaware river.
He was then confined in a stockade enclosure on the beach between
Forts Wagner and Gregg on Morris Island, until about the end of
October, when he was transferred to Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the
Savannah river, and in