A Year in the South (27 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 husband alive.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nature had not yet hidden all traces of the little skirmish on the mountainside when Cornelia visited the site in the summer of 1865. “There were the piles of ashes still where the trunks had been burned,” she noted, “with leaves of books and scraps of paper lying about. The prints of their footsteps were still there, and marks of the bullets on the fences and trees.” Before returning home, she went to see Wilson. His family, having heard he was killed, had gone to recover his body the day after the fight, only to find him clinging to life. Although the ghastly head wound he suffered cost him an eye, he survived. Perhaps he thought Angus's decision to make a stand was more foolish than valiant; if so, he did not tell Cornelia.
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Haunted by memories and consumed by anxiety, Cornelia sought the comfort of friends. She had many in Lexington, but only two—Mrs. Powell and Mrs. Dailey—whom she felt comfortable pouring out her heart to. After Mrs. Powell's husband returned at war's end, the couple moved away. Cornelia thus turned more and more to Mrs. Dailey, who was, like herself, a refugee from Winchester. Their friendship had begun there, and she and her husband had helped Cornelia get settled in Lexington in 1863. Cornelia felt close to her not only because of their long friendship, but also because her situation was almost as bleak as Cornelia's own. She was without her husband in the early summer of 1865, for he was away seeking employment, and she and her children were, as Cornelia wrote, “in a great state of distress, being even for a time without bread.” One day Cornelia called on her and found her in tears. She had just sent one of her most treasured possessions—a silver bowl that had been her mother's—to the mill to be swapped for a barrel of flour.
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Cornelia saw other friends that summer, including Ann Pendleton and her daughters, Madge Paxton, and Anne McElwee, but she would never admit to them how desperate things were in the McDonald household. Partly it was because they were friends of recent vintage and there was still a touch of formality in their relationship, a bit of distance. But mostly it was because of Cornelia's pride. While few if any of her friends were financially comfortable at this time, all except Mrs. Dailey were better off than the McDonalds. If Cornelia confessed her poverty, they would of course come to her aid; but she could not stand the thought of being a charity case, an object of pity. She would never let her children starve, of course, but it had not yet come to that. Until it did, she would keep up appearances. When friends stopped by her house, she recalled, “I would sit and talk to them, and be as cheerful as I could.” When they left, she would “go up stairs and throw myself on my knees and cry to God for food.”
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She was already nearing the limit of her physical and emotional endurance when disaster struck. It happened on a morning in July. She was working in the kitchen, which was in the basement. A kettle of boiling water hung in the fireplace—the house had no stove—and she was preparing to take it up to the dining room to wash the breakfast dishes. This was normally the duty of Susan, the cook, but she was at the moment busy elsewhere in the house. Rather than lug the kettle to the dining room, Cornelia emptied it into a dishpan, took the pan by the handles, and started up the steps.
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Somehow the dishpan slipped from her grasp, dumping the boiling water on her right foot. She screamed, ran up the steps to the back porch, and then into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom. There she removed her right slipper and then her stocking. “[O]n taking off the stocking,” she recalled, “all the skin came with it.”
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When the shock wore off, the pain set in. A doctor confirmed that the burns were severe. For the next several weeks she was confined to bed, suffering terribly. “I could not turn in the bed, and could not endure … the slightest jar. A door shut too suddenly, would occasion a nervous shock and intense pain.”
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Friends rallied to help her. Many sent food, and once she was well enough to receive, they called frequently. Madge Paxton, especially, proved to be a saint. She came every morning bearing an orange or a bunch of grapes or some other cheery little gift, and while there she would straighten up Cornelia's sickroom and bathe and dress little Hunter. When Nelly came down with diphtheria, Madge tended her as if she were her own, carefully washing out her throat each day. Harry and Allan were a great help, too, staying home to minister to their mother, lifting and carrying her as needed until she was able to get around on crutches.
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