Background
Robert Sanford Foster was born on January 27, 1834 at Vernon, Jennings County, Indiana, the son of Riley S. and Sarah (Wallace) Foster.
Robert Sanford Foster was born on January 27, 1834 at Vernon, Jennings County, Indiana, the son of Riley S. and Sarah (Wallace) Foster.
Robert attended the local schools, and at the age of sixteen went to Indianapolis, learned the tinner’s trade, and later was employed in his uncle’s store.
Robert Foster was mustered into the volunteer service, April 22, 1861, as captain of the 11th Indiana Infantry, a three-months “Zouave” regiment of which Lew Wallace was colonel and which met the enemy at Romney in June.
Appointed major of the 13th Indiana Infantry, June 1861, he served in Rosecrans’s brigade at the battle of Rich Mountain and in the West Virginia campaign of the summer and fall of 1861.
He was promoted lieutenant-colonel of his regiment on October 28, 1861, and colonel, April 30, 1862, and commanded it in the Shenandoah Valley campaign against Jackson, in the spring of 1862. Ordered to the Peninsula to join the Army of the Potomac, the regiment arrived at Harrison’s Landing July 3, in time to help cover the retreat of the army. Later, it was transferred to Suffolk, Virginia, whose fortified lines covering Norfolk and Portsmouth against attack from the south withstood a siege by Longstreet in the spring of 1863.
Foster was appointed brigadiergeneral of volunteers, June 12, 1863, and commanded a brigade stationed on Folly Island, Charleston Harbor, during Gillmore’s siege operations against the city, in the fall and winter.
In the spring of 1864 the brigade was transferred to Florida, but returned to southeastern Virginia before summer.
Foster was then on duty for some weeks as chief of staff of the X (Gillmore’s) Corps, in Butler’s Army of the James. In June, in command of an infantry brigade to which was attached a small force of cavalry, artillery, and engineers, he crossed the James and seized a base at Deep Bottom, near Richmond; and through the summer took part in many demonstrations, under Hancock and Sheridan, against that city.
In October he was put in command of a division of the X Corps for the operations around Petersburg; and after the X Corps was merged (December 1864) in the newly organized XXIV Corps, he served at first as its chief of staff and later in command of its 16th Division in the siege of Petersburg. It was Foster’s division which assaulted and carried Fort Gregg. It took part in the filial pursuit of Lee’s army, and was in action at Appomattox up to the last.
He resigned from the volunteer army, September 25, 1865, and declining an appointment, offered him in 1866, as lieutenantcolonel in the regular army, he spent the rest of his life in Indianapolis.
Foster's wife was Margaret R. Foust, whom he married in May 1861; she died thirty years later, on May 7, 1891.