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After the Civil War, George E. Pickett lived
a difficult existence. Under investigation for the 1864 hanging of twenty-two
Union prisoners in North Carolina, he fled with his wife and their infant son
to Montreal, fearing prosecution as a war criminal. Intervention by his old
West Point acquaintance Ulysses S. Grant led to the quiet termination of the
inquiry, allowing Pickett to return to Virginia in 1866.
Back home, Pickett discovered that neither
his health nor his reputation would support a prominent public role. Unable to
re-enter the U.S. Army, he attempted farming near Richmond and worked as an
insurance agent.
He lived modestly, often brooding over
Gettysburg and the destruction of his division, and rarely spoke publicly about
his wartime service. In 1874 Congress removed his remaining political
disabilities, granting him a formal pardon, but the gesture could not repair
his declining health or restore his fortunes before his death the following
year.
Pickett died in Norfolk, Virginia, on July
30, 1875, at the age of fifty, his health broken in the hard postwar years.
Suffering from what contemporaries described as a liver abscess or “gastric
fever,” he passed away far from the Pennsylvania fields that had made his name
synonymous with the doomed assault at Gettysburg.
Pickett was first laid to rest in Cedar Grove
Cemetery in Norfolk, a modest interment for a man once celebrated across the
former Confederacy. Within months, however, friends and admirers arranged for
his remains to be moved to Richmond, the old Confederate capital, a shift meant
to honor both his rank and symbolic status.
On October 23–24, 1875, Pickett’s body was
disinterred and carried in solemn procession to Hollywood Cemetery, where
thousands lined the route and joined the funeral cortege. There he was buried
among other Confederate dead, his grave later marked by a prominent memorial
dedicated in 1888, though the exact spot of his remains beneath the monument is
uncertain.
Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War
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