When the Rev. Pendleton exchanged these peaceful scenes for an army commission a few months later, he brought no hint of military experience or prowess to his new undertaking. In the spring of 1861, his brief stint as a subaltern in the U.S. Army lay more than a quarter-century in the dim past. He parlayed that slender experience into the command of a local artillery company, the Rockbridge Artillery, as a captain on May 11. Two months later, six days before the First Battle of Manassas, Pendleton was commissioned as a colonel in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States. On July 2 he and his battery had performed capably at Falling Waters in a skirmish that seemed important in those innocent days. At Manassas, his artillery did well in supporting the command of fellow Lexingtonian, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. On March 26, 1862, Pendleton advanced to the rank of brigadier general. Nine weeks later, on the same day that Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia, he appointed Pendleton chief of that army’s artillery.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Civil War Times magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The war’s first year, however, had begun to expose Pendleton’s rigidity and pompous outlook, perhaps a natural extension of decades of speaking as God’s representative without anyone to contradict him. In one revealing episode, Colonel Pendleton wrote to General Joseph E. Johnston on New Year’s Day 1862 insisting that the camp correspondent of the Richmond Dispatch, who wrote under the nom de plume “Bohemian,” obviously was “a cunning spy & villain.” Those articles, Pendleton believed, included so much accurate detail that they “can hardly mean anything else.” Johnston had the good sense to ignore this paranoid judgment. “Bohemian” in fact was the irre­proachable Dr. William G. Shepperson, whose patriotic book War Songs of the South, issued soon thereafter, became a Confederate favorite.

In similar high-handed spirit, Pendleton reacted to the accidental food poisoning suffered by members of a Georgia battery by presuming there had been some sort of conspiracy and arresting the Virginia farmer who had supplied the men with tainted milk, together with “his entire family and slaves.” Fortunately, two days later a judge in Petersburg, Va., quickly acquitted the farmer, as well as the women, children and the servants.

The Seven Days’ battles around Richmond brought Pendleton neither shining accolades nor any serious criticism. Two days after the debacle at Malvern Hill, an artillery mule kicked the general viciously in the leg, seriously injuring him and by one account breaking a bone. Lee responded to Pendleton’s absence by ignoring rank and succession and directly issuing orders for artillery movements to the brilliant, though still low-graded, Lt. Col. E. Porter Alexander. It was not the last time Lee would assign artillery roles to Alexander out of proportion to his rank. By that time the commanding general must have been aware that Alexander constituted a monumental upgrade over Pendleton.

The fact that Pendleton wasn’t up to his assignment seemed obvious to the men in the ranks. A steady stream of complaints from soldiers about his military performance began early in the war and continued unabated. A Georgia soldier wrote of the general with unbridled scorn in 1862 diary entries: “Gen. Pendleton displayed an utter want of confidence & fearlessness…it was an absolute disgrace to the army….[Pendleton] succumbed like a whipped puppy.” When Pendleton heard mutterings “that I had shrunk from my post and gone to the rear,” he assiduously tracked them back to an artillery major, then complained bitterly about the rumors in a long letter to Stonewall Jackson.

The battlefield failure most often connected with General Pendleton concerns the affair at Shepherdstown, Va., on September 19, 1862. Lee assigned his artillery chief the apparently easy task of defending the Potomac River crossings after the army returned to Virginia following the Battle of Sharpsburg. As early as the 17th, with the main battle still raging, Lee had directed that Pendleton defend the crossings with artillery and “some infantry with it if possible.” But the commanding general also asked that whatever artillery could be spared should be sent to Sharpsburg. On the 19th, with the Potomac behind his army, Lee instructed Pendleton to hold the river line until nightfall, and overnight if not pressed.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to