Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,425

This is the grave of George Pendleton.

Born in 1825 in Cincinnati, Pendleton went to the local public schools in Porkopolis and then was off to the precursor of today’s University of Cincinnati. He did further study at Heidelberg University in Germany before returning home to those sweet smells of pork production and opened a law practice in Cincy. He married the daughter of Francis Scott Key.

As was common in these years, law meant a path to politics. Pendleton was in the state senate for a term, lost a bid for Congress, and then won a bid in 1856. Incidentally, when he left the state senate for Congress, his replacement was none other than the future horrifically awful Supreme Court justice Stanley Matthews.

Pendleton was a toad, a racist scumbag of the first order. Needless to say, he was a Democrat. But he wasn’t just any kind of Democrat. In these years, there were still antislavery Democrats, there were moderate Democrats on slavery, and then there were Democrats who thought the Slave Power was juuuuuustt a touch too moderate in their demands to make the U.S. effectively a slave country. Pendleton was among the latter. His goal was to eliminate any restrictions on slavery in the western territories, no matter how far north they were and no matter how few actual white residents of these places wanted slaves. This was to be a slave nation for George Pendleton. This was his platform and this is what the people of Cincinnati wanted. They elected him repeatedly on this platform. So to say the least, he was a big fan of the Lecompton Constitution, the attempt by the Slave Power to do a run-around on popular democracy in Kansas to force it to be a slave state.

When the South committed treason to defend slavery, Pendleton was one of the biggest supporters in the North. He kept up the fight for slavery in Congress. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like Lincoln. It’s that he saw Lincoln as a traitor to the white race and the Civil War as the greatest abomination in American history, and not for the reason you and I might think that. He was the leader in Congress of the Copperheads, the pro-southern northern Democrats. Ohio was the strongest state for these people, but they existed in other places too.

In 1864, the Democratic Party was split into two basic factions–War Democrats and Peace Democrats. War Democrats wanted the war to end, but only if the South rejoined the nation. They would fight for that. Peace Democrats wanted the South to be free to have slavery and were happy to end the war without any guarantees the region would rejoin the Union. Given that many Americans saw the Peace Democrats as outright traitors, they were the minority platform in the party. So the Democrats nominated leading War Democrat George McClellan as their presidential candidate that year. Now, McClellan was far from a saint. Not only did he have an ego the size of Texas, but he legitimately thought Lincoln was as great a threat to the nation as any Confederate leader and he steadfastly believed in the institution of slavery. So he was the moderate. To balance this out, the Peace Democrats needed to have the VP slot and it went to Pendleton. So that’s how bad Pendleton was–he makes McClellan look like Thaddeus Stevens.

Well, luckily, the soldiers’ increased outrage over the Peace Democrats combined with Sherman’s advances in Georgia swung the election to Lincoln, although it is always worth remembering that even in the heart of the Civil War, with the entire South out of the Union, 45 percent Americans voted to throw him out and give the Oval Office to George McClellan.

Pendleton was pretty discredited for awhile. After all, he was now associated with the worst the North had to offer at a time when the Union had won, slavery had ended (naturally Pendleton was outraged not only by the 14th and 15th Amendments, but also by the 13th Amendment), and there was real energy to pursue a vigorous Reconstruction, at least for a little while. In fact, the candidate to replace Pendleton in Congress lost his race to the Republican that fall. Pendleton ran for his seat in 1866 and lost that race. The man had no shortage of ambition and so he tried really hard to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1868. He lost that to Horatio Seymour, who went on to run the most openly racist presidential campaign in American history. In 1869, he ran for governor and was the nominee, but Rutherford B. Hayes defeated him.

So Pendleton did what any good Gilded Age loser would do–he went into the railroad business and became president of a questionable railroad, the Kentucky Central. From what I can tell, that went into bankruptcy during the Panic of 1873.

By 1878, the U.S. was simply in a different place than it was in 1865. The North had given up on Reconstruction. The romanticization of the Civil War was beginning and the erasure of the politics and Black history behind it was underway. Northern whites increasingly came to believe that ultimately the South was right about race, if not slavery per se. So traitors like George Pendleton had a new life in politics. Democrats won the state legislature in Ohio in 1878 and so they decided to send Pendleton to the Senate. If he made any positive contribution to American life, it was in leading civil service reform after James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker. I suppose that a Democrat writing the legislation after an assassination of a Republican president by a member of the other major Republican factor made sense. In any case, the Pendleton Civil Service Act is unquestionably a hugely important law and go ahead and give the man credit for it. However, what we should know him for today is being a racist scumbag. But to his credit, Ohio Democrats were so mad at him for spoiling their future spoils that they did not send him back to the Senate in 1885.

Grover Cleveland paid Pendleton off by making him Minister to Germany. He was there the whole four years. But on the way back to the U.S. in 1889, while visiting Brussels, he died. He was 64 years old.

George Pendleton is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio.

If you would like this series to visit other senators sent to Washington in 1878-79, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I’d like to say they can’t be as bad as Pendleton, but this is the late 1870s we are talking about here. Daniel Voorhees is in Terre Haute, Indiana and Wilkinson Call, who was a senator from Florida, is in Washington, D.C. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.