A Year in the South (33 page)

Pendleton was not the only prominent ex-Confederate in Lexington whose behavior the Yankees were watching during the fall. There was a newcomer whose influence on the citizens was potentially far greater than the rector's. He arrived in town on a September afternoon, a gray-haired, gray-bearded man in a gray suit, riding a gray horse. He came to assume the presidency of Washington College. He was Robert E. Lee.
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That Lexington was the new home of the Confederacy's greatest hero was a matter of enormous pride to the citizens. It had come about quite fortuitously. When the war ended, Washington College found itself on the brink of extinction. The student body had enlisted in the army en masse in the spring of 1861, and for the next four years the institution had limped along as a preparatory school for boys under military age. It had suffered badly during General Hunter's raid in 1864—library books were stolen or destroyed, laboratory equipment wrecked, windows and doors smashed—and when the federal garrison troops arrived after the war, they seized some of the college buildings for offices and barracks and did a good deal more damage. On top of all that, much of the college endowment was in now-worthless Confederate bonds. The school needed not only funds, repairs, and students, but also a president, for the last one had been run out of town in 1861 because of his Union sentiments.
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In the summer of 1865, a member of the college's board of trustees happened to learn that Robert E. Lee—who had remained in Virginia since the surrender, first in Richmond and then on a farm west of the city—was looking for a job. Sensing an opportunity, the trustees acted boldly. On August 4 they held a meeting and unanimously elected Lee president of the college. They then sent him word of their action, hoping he would consider the matter seriously, but well aware that he would have many other, and certainly more lucrative, offers.
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Other leading citizens of Lexington seconded the trustees' appeal to Lee. William Pendleton wrote to his old commander, acknowledging that the town was “a place of no great importance” but assuring him that he would find it congenial and reminding him that, as president of the college, he would perform “an important service to the State and its people.” Former governor John Letcher, back home in Lexington after six weeks in a federal prison, likewise encouraged Lee to come. “You can do a vast amount of good,” he wrote, “in building up this institution, and disseminating the blessings of education among our people.”
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Lee mulled it over for nearly three weeks. A man of deep religious convictions and a profound sense of duty, he finally concluded that Providence was calling him to Lexington, and he accepted the summons. Packing some clothes in a saddlebag and dispatching his other belongings by canal boat, he set out on his beloved horse, Traveller. He went alone, intending to send for his family when he was settled. After a four-day journey, he arrived in Lexington on September 18. The citizens were anxiously awaiting his arrival, but because he was not expected until the nineteenth, there was no formal welcome of any sort when he got to town. That suited the modest Lee just fine.
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The McDonalds were among the first to see him, for he rode into town from the north, on the road that became Main Street. Allan spotted him and ran to his mother's room to tell her, and Cornelia watched reverently from her window as the great man passed, dignified as ever in his bearing, bowing slightly and doffing his hat to acknowledge the greetings from men and women on the sidewalk. He rode on up the street toward the Lexington Hotel, where he intended to stay until the college president's house was made habitable. Allan followed him and, while Lee was making arrangements for lodging, he plucked some hairs from Traveller's tail. These he proudly showed to his mother, vowing that when he married he would give them to his wife to wear in a breastpin.
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On October 2 the college officials held a very simple inaugural ceremony for the new president in a second-floor classroom, Lee having vetoed their plan for a grand ceremony replete with a band and a chorus of girls wearing white robes and flower head-wreaths. He went to work immediately thereafter and soon established a routine. Rising early each workday morning, he would breakfast in the hotel at seven and then walk to the college chapel, where one or another of the town's ministers was usually on hand, at his invitation, to lead a brief devotional service. From eight until two he would work in his office or attend to duties elsewhere on campus, then return to the hotel for dinner and a short nap. If there was no late-afternoon faculty meeting or other business, he would mount Traveller and go for a ride in the countryside. After a light supper he would read until ten and then retire to bed.
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He did not seek the adulation of the local folk, but of course he received it. He could go nowhere without being hailed and cheered. Sometimes he was greeted with the rebel yell, there being any number of his former soldiers living in the town and county. This behavior Lee discouraged, for he was sensitive to the scrutiny he was getting from the local military authorities and, indeed, from the whole nation. Southerners were looking to him for guidance; Northerners were watching to see what example he would set. For his own part, Lee genuinely accepted defeat and sincerely pledged his loyalty to the federal government; he was no Pendleton, bitter and prickly and unreconstructed. Publicly and privately, Lee urged his fellow ex-Confederates to put aside their hostility and get on with the business of rebuilding the South. “I think it the duty of every citizen,” he wrote in his letter of acceptance to the college trustees, “in the present condition of the Country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony.… It is particularly incumbent on those charged with the instruction of the young to set them an example of submission to authority.”
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Lexington was by now becoming something of a model for those who, like Lee, were anxious to rebuild the South. Not only did Washington College survive and prosper—it had fifty students by the time Lee took office, a hundred by year's end—but so also did the Virginia Military Institute. The institute had been even more disrupted by the war than had the college, for General Hunter's troops had burned much of it to the ground in June 1864, and it had remained closed from that point on. But under the leadership of its long-time superintendent, Francis H. Smith, it was resurrected in October 1865—although by order of the federal occupation authorities the cadets were forbidden to wear uniforms or to drill with muskets.
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The reopening of the two institutions made Cornelia more melancholy yet, for it reminded her anew of the depths to which her family had sunk. Many of her friends were enrolling their sons in the schools; Harry should be among the students, Cornelia thought, but she had no money to pay his tuition or buy him decent clothes. Not one of her children was getting any education now, in fact, and none had gotten much for a long time. No public school was operating in Lexington, and it would be humiliating for a McDonald to go to one anyway. Private academies were open, but they were expensive. Cornelia had tried all through the war to give lessons to the children when they could not go to school, but she had little time for that now, what with her private drawing instruction and the housework; and, in any event, the children were now occupied with helping around the house or working for wages.
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Contemplating the family's plight, which seemed to her “more and more hopeless every day,” brought Cornelia to the verge of another emotional breakdown like that she had suffered in August. There was not enough money for food now, let alone firewood and rent. She and the children were hungry much of the time, the weather was turning cool, and the landlord was running out of patience. Angus's estate was still in legal limbo and would probably remain so for years; Cornelia had written to a lawyer about it, but had gotten no encouragement. Moreover, her closest friends had moved away, and she now had no confidante, no one to whom she could pour out her heart and confess her nightmarish visions of the future, visions of a life of penury and homelessness and degradation. Again she sank into despondency, a gloom that even the autumn beauty of the Shenandoah Valley could not dispel. “I could scarcely lift my heavy eyes to the blue hills, or endure the light of the lovely sunsets. The sight of the smooth, peaceful river gave me no joy of heart.”
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One evening in October she left the house, hoping that a stroll up Main Street would lift her spirits. It did not. As she passed along, she glanced in the windows of homes and saw contented families sitting around cheery fires. “[I]t made me feel all the more desolate.”
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She walked on, past the courthouse and the Presbyterian church and the hotel, past the stores and artisans' shops, until she reached the south edge of town. On her left was Lexington's cemetery, and she turned and entered it through the open gate. It was as serene and beautiful as ever, although the rose bushes that bordered it and lined its walkways were bare of blossoms now. White marble headstones and monuments crowded the grounds. These marked the older graves; the newer ones, including the many that held the remains of Confederate soldiers, had temporary wooden markers. Near the center of the cemetery was the resting place of Stonewall Jackson, a clover-covered mound of earth no different from any of the other soldiers' graves except for the tall pine pole that rose next to it, on which a Confederate flag had once waved.
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Cornelia sought out the grave of Sandie Pendleton, the rector's beloved son, Stonewall Jackson's trusted adjutant, and one of the most popular and capable young officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. When he died of a battle wound in the fall of 1864, a few days before his twenty-fourth birthday, the army had grieved, as had the town of Lexington. Cornelia had done her best to comfort his mother and sisters during that sad time. They had done the same for her several weeks later, when Angus died.
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She sat down next to Sandie Pendleton's grave, feeling “wretched and forlorn.” The headboard—mutilated back in July by Yankee soldiers, to the shock and disgust of the Pendleton family—cast a longer and longer shadow as the minutes passed. Silently she sat, “trying to regain courage and hope,” until it grew cold and nearly dark. Then she rose, went out through the gate, and headed home.
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She had not gone far when she met Ann Pendleton, on her way to visit her son's grave. Even in the dim light, Ann could see the distress on Cornelia's face. “What can be the matter,” she asked Cornelia. “Come home with me now, I will go back.”
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Touched by Ann's concern and unable to contain her misery any longer, Cornelia burst into tears. Ann took her hands and insisted she tell her what was wrong. The pride that for so long had kept Cornelia from speaking frankly to her friend now collapsed. “We are starving,” she sobbed, “I and my children.”
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Ann's reply left Cornelia astonished. “Comfort yourself,” she said. “I meant to have come and told you that help is coming for you. You are to receive a sum of money in a few days.” As Cornelia stifled her weeping, Ann explained that there existed a certain fund for the benefit of needy and deserving people, and, through the influence of her husband, one hundred dollars had been secured for Cornelia and another hundred for Sandie Pendleton's widow. More than this, Ann refused to reveal. “You must not ask where it comes from,” she said.
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17. Lexington Cemetery, resting place of Stonewall Jackson and Sandie Pendleton. The large stone cross marks Pendleton's grave, where Cornelia McDonald sat despondently on an October evening in 1865. Erected sometime after that year, it replaced the wooden marker defiled by U.S. soldiers.

That night Cornelia went to bed “with a happy heart and a thankful one.” The next morning came further proof that, as she put it, “God was … good, [and] that with the trial he provided the needful help.” She had been too depressed lately to do much visiting, but now, buoyed by the news from Ann, she decided to pay a call on her friend Mrs. McElwee. As it happened, Mrs. McElwee had just bought a quarter of beef, and she insisted that Cornelia take a roast. Cornelia was overjoyed. Wrapping it in paper and holding it tightly under her shawl, she hurried home. She and the children had it for dinner that very day. Less than a week later, Mrs. McElwee returned Cornelia's call and brought more welcome news. She had received an inheritance from her brother, who had been killed two years earlier at the battle of Chickamauga, and she offered Cornelia $300 as a loan. “I accepted it,” Cornelia wrote, “and with a light and happy heart set about making provision for the winter.”
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