Stonewall's Man: Sandie Pendleton (review)

214CIVILWAR HISTORY SionewalTs Man: Sandte Pendleton. By W. G. Bean. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Pp. viii, 252. $5.00) t? read this slim volume is to go back a century to Civil War Virginia and know some of the men and women who lived and died there. For the student of war, thebook offers littìe in the militaryline (alluding to tactics and strategy in his preface, the author asserts that ". . . Freeman has exhausted this subject ."); its valuelies in analysis ofthe intimate aspects of war and in its insights into the impact of the conflict on Virginia society. With scholarship and discrimination , Dr. Bean, professor of history at Washington and Lee University, has shadowed forth the past largely in the words of the men and women who experienced it. The flavor is Victorian as well as Virginian. Wide use of contemporary letters and diaries helps in this direction, and the attitudes and style of the author are in tune with his materials. Alexander Swift Pendleton lived from September 28, 1840, to September 23, 1864, dying of wounds after Fisher's Hill. His life was distinguished by no great literary, political, or military accomplishments; death denied him achievement of the intellectual and religious goals he had set for himself. He is representative of the upper stratum of a generation taken by the war, used and trampled down by it. His supreme achievement was the manner in which he executed his duties as a member of Stonewall Jackson's staff, the member closest to the great commander, the only one Jackson ever addressed by his Christian name. This biography is important not so much for what it says about Sandie Pendleton, Jackson's "chief of staff," as for what it shows of the way his society faced the war and was swallowed up by it. The war was something to be endured and won, but few details of combat and campaign appear. Rather, Dr. Bean has followed the main threads in Pendleton's life as Sandie himself wrote them down in his letters. Supporting these, the author has made judicious use of the diaries, letters, and memoirs of Sandie's close associates and relatives, notably Henry Kyd Douglas, Jedediah Hotchkiss, and William Nelson Pendleton, his father. The result is a revealing reconstruction of Virginia society as it met the war with blind courage in the face of recurring disaster and loss. Most poignantìy revealing are the chapters dealing with the romance between Sandie and Kate Corbin. Here is the tragedy etched most sharply: The tides of war brought them together at Moss Neck for a month or two, gave them a few hours of love and peace, grudgingly after many postponements let them be married, and then tore them apart forever. The author sensitively allows the letters of Kate and Sandie to tell their story in their own words. It is Kate Corbin Pendleton, bereft of husband, son, and kinsmen, who, in the epilogue, sums up the overwhelming tragedy of the war, not for herself only but for all her generation: "I wonder people's hearts don't break. When they have ached and ached as mine has done till feeling seems to be almost worn outofthem. Mypoor empty arms, with their sweet burden torn away forever." This biography reveals the personal and private aspects of war, the slow and steady attrition of men and materials, the unjointing of family and society Book Reviews215 as the casuality lists grew, the poverty of the advocates of the Lost Cause as they stood surrounded by graves and ruins when the war was done. Most important , itshows the character of a young man torn from the springtime of life in a Virginia college town, thrust into the fires of war and developing in those fires, still deeply religious, occasionally still an undergraduate at heart, intellectual and literary interests still strong in chance hours of leisure, the indomitable will and ingrained devotion to duty leading inexorably on from Chancellorsville to Fisher's Hill and the grave at Lexington, hard by the grave of the great general he served. Dudley T. Cornish Kansas State College ofPittsburg. From Cedar Mountain to Antietam...