University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XLV.

The occupation of Lexington by Federal troops became a
source of much annoyance to the people of the town, and General
Pendleton seemed a special mark for indignities and petty
insults. He had given up using the prayer for the President of
the Confederate States since that government had ceased to exist.
But taking the ground that there was no "civil authority" in Virginia
or the South, that military power had no control over men's
consciences or their prayers, and that the Episcopal Church in the
Southern dioceses had formally set aside the prayer in the Prayer-Book
for the President of the United States, he also omitted it,
using in its stead a prayer for rulers and all in authority compiled
from different petitions in the Prayer-Book.[1] Most of his congregation
and the vestry sympathized in his views and approved
his course, while a few—from fear, policy, or a real preference for
Yankee character and rule—professed to be greatly outraged at
his action. In some way the omission of the prayer for the President
of the United States was reported to the officer commanding
in Lexington, and General Pendleton was confidentially informed
by a young lady friend living a few miles out of town that he had
"given great offence to the powers that be" on Sunday, July 9:
that his sermon on that occasion was pronounced "very inflammatory,"
and that it was threatened that "if he did not mend his
ways" he would be put under arrest and his pulpit given to a
"loyal man."

On Sunday, July 16, one of the Yankee officers, accompanied
by several armed men, came clattering into church, and there was

apprehension in the congregation lest they should commit some
outrage during the services, as had been done elsewhere. General
Pendleton, however, proceeded calmly with the service and
sermon, but on returning to the vestry-room was arrested and
conducted to the dirty, uncomfortable guard-room, where he was
detained until late at night. This arrest was accompanied by great
brutality of language and manner, the superior officer replying
to a remonstrance addressed to him, "Damn the proprieties!"
They also demanded the sermon, which had been, as was frequently
done, handed to a deaf parishioner to read. General
Pendleton refused to give up either this sermon or that of the
previous Sunday[2] until he had them copied. Accordingly, on
Monday morning he was escorted under guard to a room in the
court-house, where the copies were made by a gentleman of the
congregation. The Federal officer then asked to see the original,
averring solemnly that he would give it back as soon as he had
examined it. Immediately, however, upon receiving it he put it
in his pocket and absolutely falsified his promise.

From this time the church was closed by military authority
for a number of months and a series of annoyances practised.
General Pendleton was stopped by soldiers, who cut the brass
United States buttons from his gloves. His daughters covered
the Confederate States buttons on his gray uniform—the only
coat he possessed—with black cloth and thus saved them from a
like fate. The wooden head-board which marked his son's grave
was scribbled over with improper language and mutilated by the
soldiers' knives. He was forbidden to leave home, even to present
in person an application he wished to make for the vacant
mathematical professorship at the University of Virginia, and
every written or spoken remonstrance was replied to with rude
insults by the illiterate men to whom was committed an arbitrary
power over thousands of their fellow-creatures.[3]

While the church was thus closed, service was held every
Sunday at the parsonage, and the Holy Communion there
administered at the regular times. Finding himself, however,
constantly hampered and his usefulness impaired by the military
persecution practised against him, General Pendleton yielded to
the solicitations of some of his friends, especially of his eldest
daughter, and in the late summer took the required "amnesty
oath" and made a formal request to the Federal authorities to be
restored to his civil rights as a citizen of the United States.

The midsummer brought to the household a great joy in a
visit from the absent daughter, and a bitter sorrow in the death
of the beloved little grandson, the child of so many hopes and
prayers. His baby life had been the one bright influence amid
long months of hopeless sadness, and his removal seemed to
deepen and intensify the unappeasable sorrow for his father's
death. He passed from earth to join that father's glorified spirit
before he was a twelvemonth old.

A people who, like the Virginians, had endured the shock of battle
and the tramp of contending armies for four years—who had
given their all for what they believed the sacred rights bequeathed
them by their forefathers—could not be expected to sit supinely
down amid the ruins of their hopes and their fortunes and make

no effort to retrieve their losses and wrest what energy and resolute
diligence could acquire from the hands of destiny. With the
same fortitude and industry we have seen exhibited by General
Pendleton, Southern men everywhere set to work to do what the
time made possible to better the condition of their families, their
country, and themselves. Gallant officers who had been used to
command armed hosts ploughed and planted their desolated
fields; men of high breeding and broad culture drove street-cars
and drays, acted as night-watchmen, went into the woods and cut
cord-wood by the day, turned their hands and their labor to any
and every occupation which could procure the necessaries of life for
their families and give them time to look for better employments;
and all this without lowering their manhood or losing one particle
of their self-respect or the respect of their countrymen. True,
it seemed at first a hopeless task to restore anything like prosperity
and comfort to a land and people so bereft and devastated.
When Mrs. Lee, early in August, went from Shepherdstown, on
the Potomac, to Lexington, the journey had to be made by private
conveyance to Winchester and from there by stage, and along
the hundred and fifty miles of road there were not two miles of
fencing standing, nor any cattle, hogs, or sheep to be seen. Solitary
chimneys, burnt bridges, and broken mills marked the track
of Sheridan's ruthless invasion, and the whole land lay deserted
and voiceless, a spectacle to move even an enemy to compassion.
And as was the valley so was the greater part of the State,—a
wide, open wilderness. Little by little the condition of affairs
improved. A bounteous nature and genial climate favored the
out-door labors everywhere and hid the scars of battle under an
abounding verdure. Men gathered up the remnants of their fallen
fortunes and turned them to what use they could; smaller homes
were built out of the débris of stately dwelling-houses; neighborhood
and county government was gradually taken hold of by the
residents, who knew the needs and requirements of their sections;
and the marvellous activity and prosperity which to-day marks
Virginia, from the ocean to the Ohio River, is the outcome not of
immigration or Northern capital, but is the legitimate result of
native energy and indomitable resolution. It furnishes one of the
most unanswerable proofs of the doctrine of heredity, and illustrates
the profound truth of the maxim noblesse oblige. The men
who to-day control the destiny and conduct the ever-improving
fortunes of Virginia are the soldiers and sons of soldiers of 1861
–1865. Nay more, in immense proportion, they are direct descendants
of those fearless spirits who first planted Anglo-Saxon
civilization on this continent, and who, after creating an empire
here, first vindicated their right to govern it according to their
own principles and then gave to the Federal Union the mighty
territory from the Ohio to the lakes and the Mississippi,—and that
without recompense, even almost without acknowledgment.

Washington College, Lexington, had been kept open as a
grammar school during most of the war. Now the trustees felt
it their duty to restore it to its former collegiate position. They
therefore offered the presidency of the college to General Robert
E. Lee, who was living in retirement in Cumberland County.
Other organizations, insurance companies, railroad corporations,
etc., also proffered that great soldier highly-lucrative positions,
but believing that in becoming a college president he could do
work at the same time more useful to his oppressed section and
more congenial to himself and family, he accepted the place in
Lexington, and in the fall of 1865 removed thither with his
family. His coming was an inexpressible gratification to his old
friend, who became by this move his pastor, and the relations of
cordial intimacy thus rendered permanent became a great comfort
to both noble men amid the ruin and disappointment of hopes
and aims they had striven to achieve for their beloved Virginia.

The Virginia Military Institute also, so utterly crippled and
destroyed by fire and sword under General Hunter's ruthless
hand, was by the wonderful energy and unremitting diligence of
its devoted superintendent, General Francis H. Smith, set upon
its feet, and in the fall of 1865, some six months after the downfall
of the hope of Southern independence, both these educational
institutions entered upon a new career of usefulness and honor.

The odds against them were great. Washington College was
the better off, for her buildings were in a condition of tolerable
soundness, though she had neither apparatus nor library fit for
use, and her endowments were absolutely unproductive. At the
Institute there were neither buildings, books, nor equipment of
any kind. But it was resolved to do the best possible with
temporary appliances, and at all events to open both colleges.

Marked success accompanied both efforts from the outset, and
though the general destitution of money prevented many parents
from sending their sons, the very liberal terms offered drew together
numbers of youths and young men whose education had
been interrupted by their country's call to arms. These students
and cadets had to be accommodated among the residents of the
town, to which their coming gave a fresh and vigorous activity.
General Pendleton's old house was, among others, filled to overflowing
with young relatives, sons of his old friends, or young
soldiers desirous of carrying on their studies. A number of
these latter, wholly unable to pay for their maintenance and instruction,
were not the less willingly taken into the household,
trusting to the rectitude of themselves and their friends to make
compensation when they should be able so to do. With no
salary from the church and so many of the large family consumers
and not producers, it became necessary for the daughters
to engage in teaching. Work at home their father did not object
to, but it was a serious trial to him to have them leave home, and
one in which he never freely acquiesced.

In September, General Pendleton attended the Council of the
Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia, which met in Richmond,
and decided by a large majority not to make any overture to the
General Convention, which was to meet in October, but elected
delegates to the Council of the Southern Church, which would
assemble in November, some weeks later. When the General
Convention did meet, Bishops Atkinson, of North Carolina, and
Lay, of Arkansas, went to Philadelphia, and after an informal
conference with the presiding bishop, Horatio Potter, resumed
their seats in the House of Bishops, "trusting to the honor and
love" of their Episcopal brethren to do them or their Southern
coadjutors no wrong. Christian charity and an ardent desire for
the unity of the Church so far triumphed over partisan and sectional
feeling that in the legislation and published expressions of
this memorable convention a genuine spirit of kindness and
good will towards the Southern Church was manifested, and a
liberal hand extended to help it in its time of great need; and
when the Southern Council, at which were represented the five
dioceses of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and
Mississippi, met in November at Augusta, Georgia, it was resolved

that any one of them might return to its former connection
with the Northern Church, while, at the same time, any two
of them which might agree in desiring to preserve the separate
organization of the Southern Church were authorized to do so.
The old prayer for the President of the United States was also
adopted, coupled with a resolution that each bishop might use
his own discretion as to the time for its introduction. Bishop
Johns had some months previous requested his clergy to use the
prayer, so that by this action of the Southern Church one of
General Pendleton's chief objections to such use was removed.
President Johnson's order forbidding military interference with
religious services, and the gradual restoration of some civil government
in Virginia obviated the others, and on these grounds
General Pendleton again applied on December 2 to the Federal
commander in Lexington to have the church opened, and declared
his willingness now to use the prayer which had been for
so long a barrier to his freedom of ministerial action. The embargo
on his church was raised only by the departure of the
Yankee soldiers in January, 1866.

Although he had been prevented from the regular exercise of
his clerical functions, work of other kinds multiplied upon him.
As soon as postal facilities were re-established, letters poured in
upon him from old and young soldiers advising with him as to
their future course, or asking his recommendation to some desired
position; from parents seeking counsel as to the education
of their sons; from clergymen and bishops discussing with him
the grave questions which affected religion and the Church
throughout the South. Men had learned more than ever during
the four years of trial just passed to look to him as one whose
large experience and calm judgment could safely be relied on in
time of doubt or emergency, and whose unbounded good will
and helpfulness could never be overtaxed. Influenced by this
confidence in his efficiency, the trustees of Washington College
requested him to make an effort to secure some additional endowment
for their impoverished institution, and enable them to
add several important chairs to their former limited curriculum,
and to this end he visited Richmond, Baltimore, and New York,
and laid the matter persuasively before a number of wealthy and
influential parties. The long interruption to their studies made

college work more than usually difficult to most of the young
men who now assembled in Lexington, and finding General Pendleton
always able and willing to help them on, it became their
custom to apply to him constantly to construe difficult sentences
in Greek or Latin, to solve abstruse mathematical problems, or
to unfold to their bewildered minds the intricacies of logic or
science in its various branches. It is not too much to say that
hours were thus occupied daily in instructing not only the youths
in his own house, but their friends also, and the salutary influence
of the broad culture and untiring kindliness then given to their
aid is to-day bearing fruit in many parts of our land.

During this fall some of General Pendleton's former parishioners
in Frederick, Maryland, gave a most gratifying and acceptable
evidence of their affectionate remembrance by sending through
the saintly Miss Eleanor Potts a large box of dry-goods to the
household in Lexington. All the articles in this box were carefully
selected to suit the necessities of the different members of
the family, were of the very best materials, and comprised everything
needed to fill the wants occasioned by four years of wear
and tear with no means of procuring new clothes. Not the least
pleasing portion of the packages was that containing a complete
outfit for General Pendleton,—black broadcloth suit, underclothing,
handkerchiefs, hat, and gloves. Mrs. Sandie Pendleton
and Miss Page were also generously provided for. This box
Miss Potts sent to Shepherdstown to Mrs. E. J. Lee, accompanying
it with a letter telling for which individuals certain articles
were intended, and giving a list of the generous donors. Only
those who can recall the privations and expedients to which the
women of the South had been reduced for wearing apparel, sewing
materials, etc., can form an idea of the comfort and delight
of Dr. Pendleton's wife and daughters at finding themselves once
more, through the kind thoughtfulness of their friends, in possession
of a full supply of neat and appropriate clothing, and
their work-baskets and toilet-tables fitted up with appliances once
considered necessary, but now by long deprivation become highly-prized
luxuries.

The same diligence in endeavor to restore what was wasted
and weakened by four years' decay characterized General Pendleton
in Church affairs. As he had been constant in preaching

the Gospel amid the interruptions and distractions of army-life,
so now he used all his powers to promote the cause of his
Master, and until failing health prevented he was a prominent
figure in all the proceedings and interests of the Church. The
Southern Churchman of this period contained frequent articles
from his pen directed to the maintenance of a pure faith and
practice; he also was an active agent in the organization of the
Convocation of Southwest Virginia, and gave his services to the
associations held by its members in various places. Wherever
opportunity offered he preached in different parts of Rockbridge
County and in the vacant churches in Botetourt, gradually
extending these missionary labors to Bath and Monroe Counties.

When the Episcopal Council met in Alexandria in May, 1866,
the principal and absorbing question was the resumption by the
Diocese of Virginia of its former connection with the General
Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United
States. Bishop Johns's strongly-expressed wish for the immediate
renewal of such relations had been overruled the fall before.
Now, feeling that General Pendleton was regarded as the most
likely leader of any opposition to such a measure, the bishop
appealed to him if he could not advocate union with the Northern
Church, at least to refrain from antagonizing a resumption of
fraternal relations. Finding that, whatever General Pendleton's
personal feeling might be, his judgment approved the step, the
bishop appointed him chairman of the committee to consider the
subject. This committee reported the following resolution:

"Whereas, The conditions which rendered necessary the separate
organizations of the Southern dioceses no longer exist, and
that organization has ceased by the consent and action of the
dioceses concerned; and whereas the Diocese of Virginia, unchanged
as are her principles, deems it most proper, under existing
circumstances, to resume her interrupted relations to the
Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States; therefore,

"Resolved, That this diocese do accordingly now resume its
connection with the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal
Church in the United States." . . .

This result of their deliberations General Pendleton presented
with a weighty argument for its adoption. His brother-in-law

and companion through the war, Major John Page, followed him
in a speech full of wit and pleasantry, and when the vote "by
ayes and noes and by orders" was taken, fifty-seven clergymen
and thirty-six laymen responded in favor of the resolution, while
nine of the clergy and eleven of the laity opposed it. The
members of this small minority expressed themselves as deeply
disappointed to find General Pendleton heading the movement,
when they had relied upon him to take a stand against it, and
believed that with his influence they could keep the diocese to
itself, at least for some years longer. Of this action General
Pendleton wrote his wife,—

The question also arose at this Council whether a division of
the diocese was not desirable; but at Dr. Pendleton's suggestion
was amended by an enlarging both of the committee and their
work, and extending the scope of their inquiry to the question
whether it would not be better for the diocese to have an assistant
bishop. This subject occupied much of his time and attention
during the next twelve months. Numerous letters passed
between himself and others,—members of the committee and influential
clergymen and laymen of the diocese. Dr. Pendleton
was on principle opposed to the subdivision of dioceses and multiplication
of bishops; he believed that "small, weak dioceses
make small, weak bishops," and that the money used to carry on
the "machinery" of different dioceses might be far better employed
in supporting missionary work throughout the Church's
borders. In Virginia he had seen assistant bishops prove a
most efficacious mode of strengthening the Church and preserving
sound doctrine, he therefore threw himself earnestly into
the work of the committee, and took vigorous part in a controversy
which was waged for months in the Church papers.

The death of the Rev. Mr. Kinkle devolved the chairmanship

of the committee upon Rev. Dr. Andrews, who wrote General
Pendleton on March 18,—

"If I write the report I shall look to you to take the laboring-oar
in debate. I wish you would give me an outline of what
you think the report should contain."

Notwithstanding the wide difference of opinion among the
committee, they reported to the Council in Staunton in May,
1867, that though a division of the diocese might be required at
some future day, they recommended the immediate election of an
assistant bishop, and the Council elected the Rev. Francis M.
Whittle, of Louisville, Kentucky, to that position. Mr. Whittle
had become a communicant at the high school where he was
first a pupil and then a teacher during Dr. Pendleton's mastership,
and the affectionate relations there established between the two
continued through life. Replying to one of General Pendleton's
letters urging his acceptance of the bishopric, Dr. Whittle wrote
on July 2,—

"You have certainly made it look very much like it may be
my duty to go to Virginia, and I am trying to give due weight to
all you have said."

The report on the state of the Church, read by Dr. Pendleton
at this Council, contained the following suggestion:

"Every settled pastor within our borders can, if duly alive to
this important cause (diocesan missions), awaken a lively interest
in it on the part of his people. And more than that, he can make
occasion for useful labors in some needy neighborhood within his
reach. And by wise combination and diligent effort the settled
clergy may accomplish incalculable good in well-arranged missionary
tours."

At the Council which met in Lynchburg in 1868, General Pendleton
was among those nominated to be sent to the General
Convention in October. The general immediately rose and desired
that his name should be withdrawn, stating that as Virginia
had decided to renew her relations to the Northern Church, it
was eminently proper that she should do nothing to prevent

those relations being as amicable as possible; that he felt sure he
would be personally obnoxious to a large part of the General
Convention, and his appearing as a member of the body calculated
to prejudice the interests of the Virginia Church. General
Robert E. Lee, who had been nominated, also declined to be
voted for, as the reasons urged by his rector would apply with
even greater force to himself. But for the stand thus taken by
themselves, there is no doubt that these two representative men
would have been chosen as among the fittest exponents of the
views and feelings of their brother Virginians. At this same
Council, as chairman of the Committee on Missionary Work, Dr.
Pendleton read the report, which recommended several practical
measures, which have since proved most efficacious in building
up the waste places and in strengthening and enlarging the
Church in Virginia, such as stated collections, the employment
of itinerant missionaries, and especially reiterated the recommendation
of the previous year, "That each settled minister of the
diocese ought to consider himself free, and indeed called upon
once or more during the year, with the approval of his vestry,
for such interval (from one to four weeks) as may be deemed
best, to intermit accustomed local duties for the purpose of rendering
missionary service at points to be agreed upon by consultation
with the bishop and Missionary Committee, such service to
be rendered by the clergy—singly or in pairs or small groups—
as may be judged best in cases as they arise." This, the habit
of himself, his dear friend Dr. C. W. Andrews, and some others,
was known to have effected great good throughout the regions
where such services were given.

Rev. C. W. Andrews to Dr. Pendleton.