George Pickett: The Pig War, New Bern Hangings and a Five Forks Shad Bake

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George Edward Pickett was born in 1825 into a Richmond planting family whose Turkey Island estate relied on enslaved labor. A popular story says Abraham Lincoln secured his West Point appointment, but Lincoln was then a state legislator with no such power, and the appointment came from Illinois congressman John T. Stuart, an associate of Pickett's uncle. Pickett graduated 59th of 59 in 1846, then carried the colors to the top of Chapultepec in 1847 after James Longstreet was wounded. On the frontier he lost his first wife, Sally, in childbirth and later his second wife, Morning Mist, of the Haida people, after the birth of their son.

In the Pig War of 1859 on San Juan Island, Pickett and 68 men faced three British warships and about 1,000 men after an American farmer shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig, and he refused to withdraw until diplomats defused the standoff. In the Confederate army he rode a horse named Old Black and wore perfumed ringlets. On July 3, 1863, his division was one of three in Longstreet's assault on Cemetery Ridge, which Richmond papers named for him. Every one of his 13 regimental commanders was killed or wounded, along with brigade commanders Richard Garnett, Lewis Armistead and James Kemper, and Pickett told Lee he had no division left.

• After a failed attack on New Bern in 1864, Pickett ordered 22 captured Union soldiers from North Carolina hanged as deserters, one of them 15 years old.
• At Five Forks in April 1865, he was about two miles behind his lines at a shad bake when Union forces overran his position.
• Facing a federal investigation of the hangings, he lived in exile in Montreal for a year until Ulysses S. Grant intervened.
• He later sold life insurance and farmed, and died in 1875 at age 50 of a liver abscess.
• His widow LaSalle Corbell Pickett outlived him by 55 years and published letters historians consider largely fabricated, casting him as a Lost Cause hero.