While the McDonalds and other families in Lexington struggled to sustain themselves, they struggled also to come to terms with the reality of Confederate defeat. The period of uncertainty following Lee’s surrender ended on June 9, when a detachment of U.S. cavalry rode in and took possession of the town. This temporary occupation force was succeeded in July by a permanent force of forty soldiers of the 58th Pennsylvania Infantry. With the Yankees’ arrival, martial law was in effect in Lexington.6
Slavery, which the local authorities had preserved more or less intact since the demise of the Confederacy, collapsed abruptly with the coming of federal troops. The occupiers decreed that no blacks were to be held against their will, and those who had been forced to labor without pay since the war’s end must receive back wages for that time. Any whites who continued to resist emancipation would be arrested and jailed, the federals warned, as would all other “refractory persons.”7
Even before the troops appeared, the people of Lexington experienced a Yankee invasion of sorts, but it was one they had not anticipated. Beginning not long after Appomattox, a number of Northern entrepreneurs rolled into town on wagons loaded with merchandise and proceeded to set up shop as tradesmen. Many of the townsfolk deeply resented this intrusion. The Reverend William Pendleton, husband of Cornelia’s friend Ann Pendleton, spoke bitterly of the “Yankee adventurers” who came “to cheat our people out of their little remaining coin.” By early summer an informal boycott was in the making. The Northern merchants, as Reverend Pendleton’s daughter Rose reported in June, “have a great deal of custom among the negroes, but very little if any among the white people.”8
The citizens reserved their fiercest hostility, however, for the occupation troops. They saw no reason why U.S. soldiers should be lording it over them, no reason why martial law should prevail in their town. They had accepted Confederate defeat and laid down their arms. While few regarded the reunion of the nation with any enthusiasm, no one was resisting federal authority. They wanted only to be left alone to restore order and prosperity to their community. Cornelia was one of many in Lexington who thought military rule gratuitous, despotic, and humiliating. “In every way possible the town people were annoyed and persecuted,” she wrote, “I among the rest. Some new and oppressive prohibition or arbitrary command [was] inflicted on us every day.”9
By word and gesture, Lexington’s citizens let the Yankee soldiers know they were unwelcome. Cornelia was an old hand at this sort of thing. Back in Winchester during the war, she had earned a reputation for standing up to the enemy soldiers who periodically occupied the town. A neighbor of hers there described her as “daring in her audacity,” and “one of the talking heroines.” Her audacity was carefully gauged, however: while she made it clear to the Yankees how she felt about them, she always stopped short of the kind of brazen remark that would provoke retaliation. She was a master of the cold stare, the condescending voice, the subtle insult.10
In the eyes of Lexington’s occupiers, the smoldering hostility displayed by citizens like Cornelia only proved the need for a military presence in the town. What they saw as they patrolled the streets in the summer of 1865 was a sullen, unsubdued mass of rebels who, if left to their own devices, would undoubtedly try to reenslave the blacks and probably try again to overthrow the U.S. government. Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Clay, commander of the military subdistrict that included Lexington, was outraged at their behavior. They are “impudent and insulting to officers and soldiers,” he wrote, and “There are many … who openly glory in the part they have taken in the rebellion.” In his view, anyone who did not sincerely embrace the national government was defying it, and he saw “very little real affection for the Union” in this section of Virginia. “The inhabitants of Lexington,” he added, “are perhaps the most bitter.”11
In truth, the conqueror’s hand rested lightly on the citizens of Lexington. The townspeople may have been “annoyed,” as Cornelia claimed, but they were hardly “persecuted.” With the war over, the federal army relaxed its stern policy of retribution and destruction aimed at bringing Southern citizens to their knees. The first contingent of occupation troops in Lexington did commit some depredations in and around the town and taunted the inhabitants to some extent—even Colonel Clay admitted they “were rather a hard party”—but for the most part the soldiers posted in the town during the summer were restrained and well disciplined. They seized no private property and occupied no citizens’ homes, although Colonel Clay did require them to confiscate all U.S. and Confederate government property in the citizens’ hands and did give them permission to take possession of any public building they needed. Nor did the occupation troops interfere in the citizens’ attempts to make a living and get the local economy back on its feet, except to make sure they did not abuse their black laborers.12
All things considered, the little Yankee force in Lexington was something less than tyrannical, and Cornelia—who had experienced truly harsh and destructive Union army rule in Winchester—knew better than most that this was so. Now and then the troops even won the citizens’ gratitude, as, for example, in late July, when they rounded up all the unemployed freedmen in town and put them to work cleaning the streets. The editor of the Lexington Gazette remarked on that occasion that the federals deserved “double thanks for thus ridding the town of two nuisances—idle negroes and dirty streets.”13
If the oppressions of Yankee rule in Lexington were more symbolic than otherwise, injuring honor and pride more than anything else, they were nonetheless galling to the citizens. In July the town was shaken by a controversy that aggravated the citizens’ resentment, even as it confirmed the Yankees’ belief that these people were still rebels at heart.
The controversy involved the Reverend Pendleton, rector of Grace Episcopal Church and former chief of artillery in Lee’s army. A man of great dignity and aristocratic bearing, he was also among the most bitter and unyielding of Lexington’s ex-Confederates. Writing to a kinswoman two months after Appomattox, Pendleton characterized the victorious Union army as a host of “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches [who] invad[ed] our homes under the impulse of Northern envy and malice, stimulated by fanatical madness in some, lust of power and plunder in others, and iniquitous passion in all, though sought to be covered over by the shallow preten[s]e of virtuous devotion to constitutional liberty.” Regarding the justness of the Confederate cause, he told another correspondent in June that “my convictions remain wholly unchanged.” The secession of the Southern states was a proper response to “the great wrongs inflicted … by their Northern copartners, in … flagrant violation of the compact of union.” He now accepted defeat, but only grudgingly: “As it has … pleased the Almighty Ruler of the world to permit us to be overwhelmed, I … am willing to submit myself peaceably to an authority which, whatever I think of its justice, I cannot resist to any good purpose.” At the same time, he continued to hope “for some ordering in the future by which divine Providence may yet enable us to achieve the independence which is our birthright and of which we have now been despoiled by a mighty combination.”14
As one of Lexington’s most prominent citizens and stoutest champions of the Southern cause, Pendleton took it upon himself to defend the townspeople against military misrule. The Yankee troops had been in town only a month when he fired off his first letter of protest to the commanding officer. “On my way from church yesterday attending several ladies,” he wrote, “I met two of your soldiers. They so occupied the foot walk as to compel the ladies to yield the way and walk round to avoid them.” He knew of similar incidents of “disrespectful obstruction” by the troops, he said, and he advised the commander that such “offensive conduct” was “irritating to our people.”15
Four days later Pendleton dispatched another protest to the same officer. This time he had been personally offended, and grievously so. He had gone to the cemetery on the south end of town to visit the grave of his son, Alexander “Sandie” Pendleton, a Confedera
te officer mortally wounded in battle in 1864. To his horror, he found that it “had been very recently desecrated by a serious mutilation of the headboard. This indignity has, I have no doubt, been perpetrated by some of your men. I found three of them in the grave yard at the time of my visit, one of them indecently exhibiting himself under a call of nature near the gate.”16
Pendleton also voiced his protests from the pulpit, and in doing so he sparked a conflict with the military authorities that disturbed the town for months. On Sunday, July 9, he preached from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In his sermon he spoke of the material as well as spiritual poverty that now afflicted his homeland, and he pointed a finger of blame: “The spoliations of iniquitous power and the atrocities of devastating enemies, have spread this experience through our beloved South.” Those responsible would ultimately be punished by a just God, he assured the congregation, and the righteous would be vindicated.17
He never mentioned Yankees specifically, but the sermon’s message was obvious to his listeners, including whoever subsequently reported it to the military. The following Sunday, three federal army officers were seated in the pews. Pendleton nevertheless delivered his sermon just as he had prepared it, including passages in which he alluded to the occupiers as “representatives of the Gigantic power which oppresses the land” and spoke of the destruction that God invariably inflicts on an ungodly kingdom, especially an “Infidel blasphemous, atrocious tyranny … in its pride of power.”18
This was too much for the military authorities. Shortly after the service ended, a sergeant and three armed privates marched into the church and confronted Pendleton in the vestry. The sergeant told him he was under arrest. Despite his insistence that he “be treated with propriety,” he was locked up in the guardhouse. There he penned yet another letter to the commanding officer, protesting his confinement in a filthy and uncomfortable cell—the guardhouse was a converted corncrib—where he was forced “to listen to the ribaldry and profanity of your common soldiers.” Released after eight hours, he was summoned the next morning to an interrogation by several officers. He refused to answer questions and condemned his persecutors’ “ungentlemanly conduct.”19
The next Sunday, Grace Episcopal was closed by order of the federal authorities. Pendleton was told that it would remain closed until he agreed to make no more seditious or insulting remarks in the pulpit and agreed to offer a prayer for the president as part of the service. He was also told to stop signing his letters “Late Brigadier-General and Chief of Artillery, A. N. Va., C. S. A.”20
He was prepared to give in on every point except the prayer, the exact wording of which the federals prescribed, based on that traditionally offered for the U.S. president in the Episcopal Church. To the rector this was a matter of principle. Four years earlier, the Southern dioceses of the church had ordered that the customary prayer be replaced by one for the Confederate president. Since the Confederacy no longer existed, Pendleton now omitted that prayer, but he insisted that he could not restore the former one without approval from his diocese, which had not yet acted on the matter. And besides, as he wrote in yet another letter to the authorities, “cordially as I can and do pray God to guide the Pres[ident] into all wisdom and usefulness, I cannot ask unconditionally for his prosperity, irrespective of his course.”21
By now the Yankees had had enough of the rector’s protests. A formal order was issued: if he held church services in violation of their decree, he would be arrested, tried by a military commission, and punished. Pendleton thereupon suspended services.22
Not all of Grace Episcopal’s congregants approved the rector’s course. In the opinion of some, he had provoked the authorities, he was being obdurate, he should back down in the interest of the church. But the majority applauded his stand, as did most other citizens of Lexington. As Sunday after Sunday passed and the pews and pulpit of Grace Episcopal remained empty, the town seethed with resentment over Pendleton’s treatment as well as all the other perceived injustices of Yankee rule. In no other part of the subdistrict, the commander noted, was there so much “hatred [of] the Gov[ernment] and its Officers.”23
Cornelia despised the Yankee intruders as much as anybody else in Lexington, but she was too preoccupied to brood over their misdeeds. The struggle to provide for her family was absorbing nearly all her energy. It was wearing her down, too, and not just physically but emotionally. As the summer went on, she grew increasingly anxious and depressed. In later life she would remember this as a time of “tormenting anticipations.” She was becoming obsessed by the fear that she and the children would “descend to the lowest level” and end up in “squalid poverty.”24
Her thoughts that summer were haunted also by a ghost. It was that of her husband, Angus. He had died in December 1864, and she grieved deeply for him still. That she had not been at his side in his last hours made the pain of losing him keener. She had been denied a final farewell, denied the comfort of his last words. Although she had hastened to Richmond at his summons, she had arrived one day too late. What she found there—an image burned forever into her memory—was his corpse, “stretched on a white bed with a large green wreath around his head and shoulders, enclosing them as in a frame.”25
15. Angus McDonald in 1852
Angus had suffered in his last years, and that too preyed on Cornelia’s mind. The man she had married in 1847, although old enough to be her father, was a robust six-footer, handsome and strong, with a forceful presence. But by 1860, severe rheumatism was taking a toll on him, and he declined precipitously during the war. By 1863 he was a feeble, pain-wracked old man, emaciated and crippled, unable to mount a horse or even dress and undress without help. When Cornelia saw him that year after an absence of many months, she was stunned: “I at first could not believe that wreck was my husband.”26
Angus had suffered in spirit as well as body. A proud and ambitious man, he had dreamed of winning glory in the war. The Confederate government had high hopes for him, too. He was a West Point graduate who had spent two years as a U.S. army officer and five years as a western adventurer—just the kind of man to help lead the Confederate army to victory. When the war began, he was commissioned a colonel and given command of a cavalry regiment. He proved a disappointment, however. He failed to win the confidence of his troops, and they grumbled about his leadership to the point of demoralization. He also failed on the battlefield. In a minor engagement in northern Virginia in October 1861, his troops were routed by the enemy and fled in panic, abandoning their baggage train. Angus held himself blameless, arguing that the enemy had ten times his number, but his superiors considered his performance disgraceful. Recognizing that his career in the field was at a dead end, and that in any event he was too infirm for such a command, he asked to be relieved. His request was granted, and thereafter he was assigned to desk jobs. He was left with “a wounded spirit,” as Cornelia wrote, bitter about his tarnished honor and his frustrated dreams.27
Angus’s visage and voice crept into Cornelia’s thoughts again and again through the melancholy seasons of 1865. One day in early summer, around the time of her forty-third birthday and not long after the eighteenth wedding anniversary that Angus did not live to celebrate, she borrowed a horse and rode fifteen miles into the countryside to the place where he had been taken captive one year earlier. She had not visited the site until now, but she knew every detail of the story. When the Union force under General Hunter invaded the upper valley in June 1864, Angus, who was then serving as post commander of Lexington, prepared to leave town to avoid capture. He managed to secure an army ambulance for his journey and had a mattress and blankets loaded into it, along with his official and personal papers, a trunk of clothes, and several guns. Harry was to serve as driver. As the Yankees approached and the small Confederate force holding Lexington prepared to withdraw, Angus said good-bye to his family. The ambulance then set off, with Harry at the reins and Angus lying in the back. It was the last time Cornelia saw her h
usband alive.28
Harry and Angus headed south, trying to stay ahead of the advancing enemy columns. Late in the day they stopped at the home of an elderly man named Wilson, who put them up for the night. The next day they heard that the enemy was in the vicinity. Wilson then gathered some of his valuables and set out with Harry and Angus in search of a refuge.29
They found a secluded, wooded spot on a mountainside not far away and made camp there, intending to stay hidden until the Yankees left the area. On the morning of their third day in the woods their luck ran out. A local man whom Wilson knew to be a Union sympathizer stumbled on their campsite and eyed them suspiciously before passing on. That afternoon they heard the sound of approaching horsemen, and then a voice demanding their surrender. A fence ran along the edge of the woods they occupied, and beyond it was a field, only recently cleared of trees and still littered with stumps. In the field there, just sixty yards away, they saw three Union cavalrymen. Harry grabbed a gun and fired, knocking one of the soldiers from the saddle. The other two retreated, taking the wounded man with them. Angus, Wilson, and Harry immediately decided to move to a new place of concealment. Before they could get away, however, the Yankees reappeared in strength and again demanded their surrender.30
Although they were only two old men and a boy against nearly two dozen federal cavalrymen, Angus insisted they make a stand. They took cover and began firing. The troopers dismounted and returned fire. Angus and Harry held their ground even after Wilson was cut down by a bullet and Angus was wounded in the hand. At last, however, Angus recognized the futility of resisting. He called out that he was surrendering, and he and Harry laid down their guns.31
The federal soldiers took them prisoner, burned their belongings, and led them away in the ambulance, leaving Wilson for dead. After several days traveling northward under guard with a number of other captives, father and son were separated. Harry soon escaped and made his way home, but Angus spent the next five months in various Yankee prisons. What remained of his health was destroyed. Exchanged in early November, he was transported to Richmond, where he was taken in by relatives. He died less than four weeks later.32
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