After the war, again serving as Lexington’s Episcopal rector, Pendleton joined most other former Confederates in a scramble for some kind of livelihood. He and his wife took in paying boarders to help balance a sparse budget. A local investigator for R.G. Dun & Co. (predecessor of the familiar modern credit-rating firm, Dun & Bradstreet), assessed Pendleton’s status as: “Pays v[er]y badly but occupies high social position…poor & proud….always ‘Hard Up.’ ”

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Pendleton’s public image suffered even more following the war, were that possible. During the postwar controversies of the late 1870s, he said things that were palpably untrue—though perhaps due to senility rather than dishonesty. For instance, he blamed James Longstreet for ignoring a direct order from Lee to attack at dawn on July 2 at Gettysburg, a wholly fabricated assertion. The parson’s friends found it impossible to defend him, and his detractors ratcheted up their disdain.

After his death on January 15, 1883, most former Confederates remembered him without favor. One of the army’s last surviving battalion commanders, Colonel David G. McIntosh, wrote of him early in the 20th century, “He and his ponderous staff was regarded in the army as a sort of joke.”

In his later years, however, Parson Pendleton kept his eye fixed on the immortal prize. Not long before he died, he wrote to Jefferson Davis that there could be no enduring good government in America until the dawn of “a far more thorough and prevailing influence of the blessed gospel.”

Following his death, Pendleton’s vestry paid glowing tribute to his religious career: “The last day, and almost the last hour, of his earthly existence found him still employed in the active service of his Divine Master, and he fell, as he desired to do, with his Christian armor on.”

For more about William Nelson Pendleton, go to “Resources,” P. 71 of the June 2008 issue of Civil War Times.

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