Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 14.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[389] ignoble, the one universal ambition—the desire to be remembered after death. Dead even during life is the man in whom it has ceased to exist as an incentive to high achievement. Perishing, too, is that Commonwealth in which the people no longer care to preserve and perpetuate the memory of those who have served it with distinction and passed from earth. But no one whom I ever knew would have been less willing to enjoy unmerited honors in life or after death—for no one disdained shame and falsehood more than he. Truth and manliness were his distinguishing characteristics, and to them in whomsoever found he was ever ready to do reverence.

Near the town of Hillsboroa, in the county of Orange, which has been the residence of as many, if not more, distinguished citizens than any county in the State, George Burgwyn Anderson was born on the 12th day of April, in the year 1831, and was the oldest son of the late William E. Anderson, Esq., and his wife, Eliza Burgwyn. In his early years he exhibited the intellectual and moral traits which, in their full development, adorned his manhood, and attracted the admiration, and commanded the respect of all who knew him. A better illustration of the adage, that the child is often father to the man, than his case furnished, is seldom to be found. Gentle and modest in disposition, respectful and obedient to authority, he was at the same time lively and spirited among his companions, but always studious and attentive to his duties, scrupulously honorable, strictly conscientious, and absolutely fearless in the maintenance of what he believed to be true and right. These qualities, in combination with intellectual gifts of a superior order, gave him a precedence among his schoolmates, which he afterwards sustained at college and at West Point, so long as he cared to do so. While at the State University he divided the first honors of his class with three others, and received the unqualified commendation of all his professors, including the distinguished president. In the year 1848, when seventeen years old, he received—what he ardently aspired to—a cadetship at the Military Academy, and going to West Point he was very soon recognized as a youth of uncommon promise, and—as one of his classmates, who afterwards became a distinguished general in the United States army testified—was ‘not only one of the brightest intellects, but the very superior mind of his class.’ At the first examination, six months after he entered, his number was two in a class of ninety-four members, but his taste for literature, and his desire to be a generally well informed man of the world, tempered his ambition to excel in a knowledge of the textbooks; and as he devoted much of his time to general reading, and