LaSalle "Sallie" Pickett (Corbell)

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LaSalle Corbell "Sallie" Pickett

Birth: May 16, 1843 Death: Mar. 22, 1931

LaSalle Corbell "Sallie" Pickett was a gifted speaker and writer, both talents that earned money for the young widow and her son after the death of Gen. George E. Pickett in 1875. Mrs. Pickett wrote and spoke about the Battles of Gettysburg and the Monitor and the Merrimac, famous people she had met, stories of her youth in Nansemond County, Virginia and numerous other topics.

Wife of Civil War Confederate General George Pickett. She claimed that she first met George Pickett in 1852, but did not marry him until September 15, 1863, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Petersburg, Virginia. After their wedding she accompanied her new husband to his new assignment as head of the Department of North Carolina, headquartered in Petersburg, claiming that she went there to assume the role of a moral superior, where she worked to check his "bad habits" and monitor his drinking and swearing. In Petersburg she busied herself with visiting hospitals, prisons and orphanages, often with other officer's wives. She would go on "day trips" to the front to visit. When she returned to Richmond, she found it in chaos and being deserted. She and her son, George Junior, stayed in the ruins.

After the War, when the United States Government issued an amnesty for all solders under Colonel and having taxable property under $20,000, George Pickett not only discovered that he did not qualify but was underneath governmental investigation for "war crimes." Fearing the worst, LaSalle and her husband fled to Canada. Details of their life there are sparse. It was recently discovered that they lived at the famous haunted St. Laurent Hotel in Montreal, with others.

In order to make a living the Picketts moved their family to Sherbrooke, where LaSalle taught French, Latin and piano. She began publishing shortly after she was forced to sell her jewelry, with both her and her husband having a difficult time dealing with their status and loss of a life of relative wealth. Through the auspices of General Ulysses Grant, a general amnesty that included General Pickett was signed in to law by President Andrew Johnston in December 1968. Their Canadian ordeal completed, the Picketts returned to Virginia. For a time they had hoped to rebuild the Pickett childhood home on Turkey Island, but they had no money to pay laborers, buy equipment or seedlings. After a while she and George moved to Norfolk to work for the New York life Insurance Company. In poor health, and with little money, they also had another son, David, born in May of 1866. In 1875, General George Pickett died three days after contracting Scarlet Fever, at the age of 50.

For LaSalle Pickett - a woman of Southern Culture – her life went from bad to worse. In 1884 David Pickett died to which his mother lamented: "The light of my life has gone out!" Alone, LaSalle Pickett moved to Washington, DC, and became a government clerk in the Federal Pensions Office. She then undertook her greatest task - remolding herself, with determination and skill, into a popular writer and speaker. In the summer of 1899 she published her first book “Pickett and His Men.” It was claimed by some that she plagiarized Walter Harrison's book, Pickett's Men. Others say that her real goal was to introduce her "mythical" husband, to mold an independent spirit out of a flamboyant drunken glory seeker. She would present him as an affectionate, caring and admirable person, a man of classical tastes, simple and pure of heart. He was a man who, above all, loved peace, nature and his wife, Sally. The book became a success, and had few ditractors, many praises and immitators. Between 1899 and 1931 she toured America many times; wrote for Cosmopolitan, McClures' and other popular magazines; and published more than a half dozen books. She had risen above poverty and was able to independently support her family, and even ventured into the Vaudeville stage.

LaSalle Corbell Pickett outlived all the notables of the Civil War. In her books and lectures she helped a new America understand those trying years of conflict between brothers and mold a new national identity. Although some challenged her memory, few were out to destroy her. To the world she represented the soldier's wife - heroic and self-sacrificing - perhaps more than their husbands. She endured and prospered in it all. In 1911, her son, George Edward Pickett II, and officer in the United States Army, contracted yellow fever and died on the way home from the Philippine War. This threw her into a depression from which she did not fully recover. Although she made a great deal of money for those days she did not manage it well. In 1926, when Arthur Inman and his wife visited her in Washington, DC, they describe a frail, white-haired lady swallowed by a large chair amidst a disorderly array of boxes, faded photographs and documents, a house where velvet and silk cloth appeared to be thrown about carelessly. Other friends said that she lived too much in the past - A past that kept her alive.

When she died, she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery's Abbey Mausoleum, due to the fact that women weren't allowed to be buried in the Confederate section of Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. In 1998 she was re-interred in front of her husband. (bio by: K M)

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https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Pickett_LaSalle_Corbell_1843-1931

LaSalle Corbell Pickett was a prolific author and lecturer, and the third wife of George E. Pickett, the Confederate general best known for his participation in the doomed frontal assault known as Pickett's Charge during the American Civil War (1861–1865). After her husband's death in 1875, she traveled the country to promote a highly romanticized version of his life and military career that was generally at odds with the historical record. George Pickett emerged from the war with a strained relationship with Robert E. Lee—whom he partly blamed for the destruction of his division at Gettysburg (1863)—and accused of war crimes. But in his wife's history, Pickett and His Men (1899), this not-always-competent soldier was transformed into the ideal Lost Cause hero, "gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to a tournament." This image largely stuck in the American consciousness, leaving historians to spend much of the next century attempting to separate Pickett from his myth.

Early Years

Corbell was born Sallie Ann Corbell on May 16, 1843, in Nansemond County, the eldest of nine children. Her parents, David John Corbell and Elizabeth Phillips Corbell, were slaveholders and owned a plantation near Suffolk. Corbell attended the Lynchburg Female Seminary in Lynchburg. She claimed to have met Pickett sometime during the antebellum years, although her account that they became engaged when she was a young girl seems highly unlikely. As an army officer, Pickett spent most of this time stationed on the western frontier. He was even married briefly to an Indian woman in Washington Territory.

Once the war started, however, a passionate romance blossomed between Corbell and the famously long-locked general. For a time, Pickett slipped away nightly from his command to see her, behavior that did not always sit well with his fellow Confederate officers and soldiers. To Corbell, however, it was proof of his chivalric love and devotion to her. The two married on September 15, 1863, at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Petersburg, just a few months after the disastrous Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, and Corbell claimed that she often joined her husband near the front lines while he served with the Army of Northern Virginia. Their son George was born in 1864.

The end of the war brought with it disgrace and disillusionment. George Pickett never recovered from the bitter loss of his division on the third day at Gettysburg, and he was briefly under investigation for war crimes stemming from the execution in 1864 of twenty-two captured Union prisoners at Kinston, North Carolina. The Picketts fled to Montreal for a few months, where she taught Latin and sold her jewelry, before returning to Virginia. Their youngest son, Corbell, died in 1874, at the age of eight. The former general, long plagued by an explosive temper and ill health, died the following year, at the age of fifty.

Author and Speaker

Sallie Pickett lived for fifty-six more years, raising their surviving son, finding much-needed work in the U.S. Pensions office in Washington, D.C., and in the 1880s becoming an author and public speaker. Rather than address her authentic experience as the wife of a famous but troubled and controversial general, she invented a new self: LaSalle Corbell Pickett, "Child-bride of the Confederacy." She subtracted years from her age (sometimes five, sometimes even more) and told stories from the perspective of a child, smoothing the complexities of the antebellum South and slavery into a self-justifying myth soaked in the "fragrance of the snowy magnolias."

This new Pickett was always the loyal and dependent Southern wife and her husband the glorious hero of Gettysburg. In Pickett and His Men, she described the general as possessing "the greatest capacity for happiness and such dauntless courage and self-control that, to all appearances, he could as cheerfully and buoyantly steer his way over the angry, menacing, tumultuous surges of life as over the waves that glide in tranquil smoothness and sparkle in the sunlight of a calm, clear sky." Meanwhile, Pickett regaled her audiences with stories of happy and obedient slaves, and famously performed what she insisted to be a "phonetically genuine" slave dialect. In Kunnoo Sperits (1900), she explained that, for her, the language was "part of the sunlight of childhood."

Many of her published writings blurred the lines between fact and fiction. Historian Gary W. Gallagher has convincingly argued that she plagiarized large portions of Pickett and His Men and, apparently, fabricated an entire wartime correspondence from her husband. (The Heart of a Soldier, As Revealed in the Intimate Letters of Gen'l George E. Pickett, C.S.A. was published in 1913, and Soldier of the South: General Pickett's War Letters to His Wife, edited by Arthur Crew Inman, appeared in 1928.) Those letters, meanwhile, have insinuated themselves into American memory. They have been cited by historians, used in Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Killer Angels (1974), and quoted by Ken Burns in his documentary The Civil War (1990).

Lost Cause Writer

Pickett's writing is an example of Lost Cause literature, which was popular late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century. The Lost Cause view of the Civil War was developed by former Confederate generals, such as Jubal A. Early, who were attempting to explain and justify Confederate defeat. According to Lost Cause writers, the Civil War did not start because of slavery, secession was a constitutional right, Confederate generals were knightly heroes, and the South only lost because it was outmanned and outgunned.

By idealizing her husband as the hero of the Civil War's most famous battle, Pickett positioned herself to be at the center of American efforts to memorialize the conflict. At the 1887 Gettysburg reunion, for instance, she signed autographs and shook hands with veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies. In fact, because her writing, and Lost Cause writing in general, was accepted across sectional boundaries, it became an important part of the country's reconciliation. "Enthusiasm over Mrs. Pickett's lecture on Gettysburg surpasses anything ever known here," one Bostonian wrote in 1910. It was the "first time in history, [that] more than 2,000 Bostonians ever stood up when the band played 'Dixie.'"

LaSalle Corbell Pickett died on March 22, 1931, having achieved a good deal of personal autonomy celebrating a man and helping to create a myth.

Major Works

Pickett and His Men (1899)

Kunnoo Sperits and Others (1900)

Yule Log (1900)

Ebil Eye (1901)

Jinny (1901)

Digging Through to Manila (1905)

Literary Hearthstones of Dixie (1912)

The Bugles of Gettysburg (1913)

The Heart of a Soldier, As Revealed in the Intimate Letters of Gen'l George E. Pickett, C.S.A. (1913)

Across My Path: Memories of People I Have Known (1916)

What Happened to Me … (1917)

Soldier of the South: General Pickett's War Letters to His Wife (edited by Arthur Crew Inman, 1928)

Time Line

May 16, 1843 - Sallie Ann Corbell is born in Nansemond County, the eldest of nine children.

September 15, 1863 - George E. Pickett and LaSalle Corbell marry at Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, in Petersburg.

1864 - Sallie Ann Corbell, wife of Confederate general George E. Pickett, gives birth to the couple's first child, George.

1874 - Corbell Pickett, the youngest son of former Confederate general George E. Pickett and his wife, Sallie Ann Corbell, dies.

July 30, 1875 - George E. Pickett, who after the Civil War farmed, sold insurance, and battled declining health, dies at the age of fifty. He is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

March 22, 1931 - LaSalle Corbell Pickett dies.