A Confederate staff officer dubbed Gen. William Nelson Pendleton 'A Stupid Old Useless Fool'

‘A Stupid Old Useless Fool’

One dreadfully humiliating episode best illustrates Brigadier General William Nelson Pendleton’s reputation in the Army of Northern Virginia. In 1864, as General Robert E. Lee rode past a marching column, his troops cheered him vociferously. But when “Old Mother Pendleton,” the chief of artillery who was riding a bit farther back in the cavalcade, approached those same men, a lone soldier yelled “three cheers for Genl Pendleton”—to which not a soul responded. The embarrassed trooper “then very faintly cried Oh! whereupon the whole column broke out in a laugh.”

Pendleton was an Episcopal minister, and early in the war Southerners relished the notion of a highly placed cleric becoming a Christian soldier of sorts. Tales about Pendleton’s prayers for the Yankees at whom he was shooting circulated among avid audiences. “He fights with the sword in one hand and the bible in the other,” a correspondent wrote admiringly. An impressed soldier-worshipper loved to see Parson Pendleton in the pulpit: “large and tall…with rough, shaggy irongray beard, dark complexion, rich, full, sonorous voice, fertile imagination, rapid utterance, easy flow of language…fine effect.” More than one observer mistook the dignified, gray-bearded Pendleton for General Lee.

Numerous missteps on the battlefield quickly tarnished Pendleton’s military reputation, however. In his three-volume Lee’s Lieutenants, Douglas Southall Freeman’s magisterial history of the leadership of Lee’s army, he generally passed judgment on the performance of Confederate leaders without displaying much subjective fervor. General Pendleton, however, had stumbled often enough in discharging his considerable responsibilities to earn straightforward mention of those gaffes in Freeman’s narrative.

Freeman remarked in his private diary precisely what he thought of Pendleton in an entry dated December 8, 1939. He wrote of that day’s labors: “Worked on that pompously-pathetic old fraud, Pendleton.” An examination of the Southern artillery chief’s military career confirms the validity of Freeman’s judgment.

The Pendleton patrimony ran back through a succession of notably distinguished Virginians of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. The family had roots in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, but William was born in Richmond on the day after Christmas 1809. Plans to secure an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy for a slightly older brother, Francis Walker Pendleton, foundered on the boy’s lack of interest. William went to West Point in Francis’ stead in June 1826.

Higher education changes everyone’s life, but young Pendleton’s West Point years surely affected him even beyond the expected norms. Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston graduated a year ahead of Pendleton, which meant he spent three years with those later-famous individuals on the banks of the Hudson River. Jefferson Davis finished in the class just before Lee and Johnston. John B. Magruder, also destined for Confederate generalship, graduated with Pendleton in 1830; the two Virginians, who shared a Caroline County background, roomed together. The next younger class included Lucius B. Northrop and Andrew A. Humphreys; the former would serve as the Confederacy’s commissary general, while the latter became a Union corps commander.

Pendleton’s youthful association with Lee seems to have been particularly pivotal to his military career. It is difficult to imagine the Episcopal clergyman of Pendleton’s later life having the chance to become Lee’s chief of artillery, and even harder (despite Lee’s characteristic loyalty) to envision the Confederate leader putting up with Pendleton’s repeated fumbling during the war except for their previous friendship. In addition, his youthful association with Jeff Davis also probably served the militarily maladroit Pendleton in his time of need.