“Gentleman George” Hunt Pendleton: Party Politics and Ideological Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
By Thomas S. Mach

Introduction, notes, bibliography, index, 307 pp., 2007. Kent State University Press, 307 Lowry Hall, Kent, OH, 44242, $39.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Dr. Allen C. Guelzo
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.

Review:
 It will be hard for anyone to make an attractive case for remembering George Hunt Pendleton. His one brief moment in the national spotlight was as George McClellan’s vice-presidential running mate in the election of 1864, an election McClellan and Pendleton lost by a whopping margin, and even that was something less than a happy moment for Pendleton.

As this new biography acknowledges at the start, Pendleton “left no memoirs, diaries, or journals,” and whatever personal papers survived him were destroyed in a house fire in 1926.

Although he also served as a state senator, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator, and minister to the new German Empire, and authored the first federal civil service bill, Pendleton remains curiously opaque, mentally incurious, and happily uncomplicated.

 Mach’s biography of Pendleton is an academic tome, although Professor Mach tells Pendleton’s story with more verve than his meager sources or the limitations of an academic press might suggest.

Born in 1825 to a wealthy Cincinnati family with ancestors decorating the House of Burgesses and the Continental Army, Pendleton enjoyed a privileged European education, marriage to a daughter of Francis Scott Key, and an early entrance into politics as an Ohio state senator in 1853. But his political loyalties were, from the first, tied to Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, the party of the “common man” – something Pendleton demonstrably was not.

This was not unusual. Andrew Jackson himself was scarcely a son of toil, nor were the Southern kings of the cotton trade who dominated Jackson’s party up to the Civil War.

What tied these elites to an alliance with small-scale farmers and the urban working-class was a shared hostility to an upwardly-mobile American middle class (represented first by the Whigs and then by the Republicans) and a fever-pitch racism which saw a threat in anything which looked like an end to black slavery.

The latter, as Thomas Mach shows, was Pendleton’s particular hobbyhorse, and at the outbreak of the Civil War, it put him firmly on the side of the anti-war “Copperhead” Democrats.

Mach tries to position Pendleton among the more moderate of the Copperheads, and it is true that Pendleton never reached for the peace-at-any-price banner carried by his fellow Ohio Congressman, Clement Vallandigham.

But Pendleton did oppose nearly every measure the Lincoln administration proposed for carrying on the war – confiscation, emancipation, banking, suspension of the write of habeas corpus, the draft – and he was clearly added to the 1864 Democratic ticket to appease the Copperheads when it was feared that McClellan might not appear sufficiently dovish.

Up until the critical victories at Atlanta, Mobile and Winchester turned the tide of public opinion, Pendleton might have had more than an even chance of putting Copperheadism onto the front seat, if not the driver’s seat, of a new administration.

It is some measure of how closely the fury of wartime politics matched the fury of wartime combat to contemplate how very easily Pendleton and McClellan might have been the way we remember the Civil War.

Especially when linked with Ethan Rafuse’s McClellan’s War (2005), Mach’s Pendleton stands as a useful reminder of what a national catastrophe that kind of administration might have been.