The Anderson-Reavis correspondence includes nine letters and three undated postscripts written in 1861-63 by Gainesville, Alabama physician Leroy Hammond Anderson to Mary S. Reavis. Mary Reavis was the second wife of Turner Reavis (1811-1872), a prominent Sumter County, Alabama lawyer and judge who served in the state senate during the war. The Reavises were friends and near neighbors of Dr. Anderson and his mother. Two of Anderson's letters were written from Richmond, one (28 May 1861) just after his arrival to join the Confederate army and one (1-2 January 1862) just prior to the army's acceptance of his resignation. The remaining letters and fragments were written from Aiken, South Carolina from September 1862 to August 1863. Also in the collection are two ink sketches by Anderson, of prospective gravestone designs for his mother; a printed obituary of Hannah Anderson; a prewar letter written by Turner Reavis to his wife Mary (which mentions the Andersons); and a receipt. Anderson's letters include casual personal news, with frequent inquiries after members of the Reavis family — especially Mary's two daughters, Lucy (b. 1842) and Mittie (b. 1848). They also include discussions of his own, and Mary's, health (she too seems to have been consumptive); and war hearsay. In this latter regard Anderson is generally optimistic about Confederate military prospects (as in the letter of 18-19 March 1863) but less assured of the capabilities of the politicians, especially Jefferson Davis. Of his own military service little mention is made, perhaps due to the lack of surviving correspondence from the months in question. The greater purpose of Anderson's letters, however, was the management in absentia of his affairs in Gainesville. For this he relied in no small part on Mary Reavis; Anderson had no family in Sumter County, and Judge Reavis spent much of his time at Montgomery. Some of this involved the shipping of personal items from Gainesville to Aiken, as Dr. Anderson's stay in South Carolina assumed an increasing air of permanency. And though nothing in the letters indicates that Anderson planted cotton or other cash crops, there was still much to attend to on his "lot," not least with regard to his slaves. The wartime disposition of these household slaves (or "servants") is a frequent concern of the letters. The doctor was not a major slave holder by Sumter County standards (where the average holding was twenty slaves, and where by 1860 the slave population outnumbered the white population by three to one). Still, his protracted absence meant that his slaves had to be situated elsewhere, or sent to join him at Aiken, or sold. Each of these options was debated and probably acted upon in individual instances, through the agency of the Reavises.