Pendleton coped quite capably with West Point’s rigorous curriculum. He stood seventh among 63 cadets at the end of his first year, advanced to third place at the end of each of the next two years, and finally ranked fifth among 42 graduates in the class of 1830. In that era, the U.S. Military Academy ranked cadets on conduct, based on demerits, across all four classes. Cadet Pendleton did not fare as well in conduct as he did academically. His standing in conduct dropped a bit each year: from 72nd in his first year to 74th, then 98th. At graduation he stood squarely in the middle of the West Point conduct register: 107th out of 215 cadets. During Pendleton’s third year, Robert E. Lee graduated with a rank of fifth in conduct—not first, as has often has been reported.

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After graduation Brevet 2nd Lt. Pendleton, assigned to the 2nd U.S. Artillery, went on duty at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, where some of the Civil War’s opening shots would be fired three decades later. Within a few weeks of arriving in the swampy environs of Charleston, the freshly minted lieutenant became so seriously ill with a fever that the Army arranged his prompt transfer to a healthier zone, the arsenal at Augusta, Ga.

Just a year after his graduation, Pendleton returned to West Point for a stint as an instructor in mathematics. In the fall of 1833, he resigned to accept a professorship in a small Episcopal College in Pennsylvania. The man destined to head the artillery of one of the most famous armies in American military history had accumulated only three years of experience before switching to a career as a pedagogue and cleric. He spent virtually none of that short early period with troops or in the field, and never saw any hint of action. After shedding his lieutenant’s frock coat and donning a surplice, William Nelson Pendleton saw nothing of military life for nearly 30 years.

After five years of teaching in Pennsylvania and Delaware, Pendleton was ordained as an Episcopal priest. With that credential, he became principal of the new, and destined to become renowned, Episcopal High School of Virginia in Alexandria. Later he taught in Baltimore. For six years, beginning in 1847, he served as rector of All Saints Church in Frederick, Md. When Pendleton accepted a call to Lexington, Va., in 1853, he made his final relocation. For the next 30 years he would fill the Episcopal pulpit there, excepting only his stint in Confederate uniform.

The post of Episcopal rector in Lexington proved wonderfully congenial to Pendleton. He doubtless shared the sentiment of his soon-to-be-famous fellow townsman, Thomas J. Jackson, who wrote in an 1852 letter: “Of all places which have come under my observation…this little village is the most beautiful.” As a leading figure in the Rockbridge County hierarchy, Parson Pendleton created a printed testimonial for a mathematics text written by the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, joined the town’s prestigious Franklin Society and even played a prominent role during an 1859 smallpox epidemic.

From his cozy perch in Lexington, Pendleton also made something of a name for himself in pious circles. In an article titled “The Philosophy of Dress,” which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, a popular periodical, he called for a dress code based on “dignity…moderation…neatness…above all of true penitence and celestial faith.” In a substantial book (350 pages) issued by a major publisher, Science a Witness for the Bible, the Rev. Pendleton urged piety on the nation, else “this entire planet shall one day be the funeral pile of all that is consumable.” Devout Southerners embraced the book as well as its author. A visitor to Pendleton’s church on Christmas Eve 1860 marveled at the elegantly decorated sanctuary and credited the rector with having “gained quite a hold upon the affections of the people of the village.”

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