07/30/2025
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After graduating last in his class at West Point, George Pickett earned two citations for gallantry as a young officer in the Mexican War. In January 1851 he married Sallie Minge, who died in childbirth ten months later, along with the baby. Five years later he married a Haida Indian woman named Morning Mist, who died a few months after the birth of their son Jimmy.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Pickett resigned his commission and sided with the Confederacy, rising eventually to the rank of major general. He is best remembered for his part in the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, where he led his division of Virginians in the attack on Cemetery Ridge on the third and final day of the battle. Although Pickett did not plan, order, or command the assault, and although his division was only one of three that participated in it, the attack has gone down in history as “Pickett’s Charge,” a disastrous failure in which nearly of half of his men were killed, wounded, or captured.
Pickett’s misfortunes did not end in Gettysburg. On April 1, 1865, he abandoned his command at Five Forks to attend a shad bake, without bothering to inform his subordinate officers. When a surprise Federal assault struck late that day, Pickett could not be located and his men were routed, leading directly to the evacuation of Petersburg and, eight days later, the surrender at Appomattox.
Just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg, Pickett married 20-year-old Sallie Corbell and the couple had two sons, George, Jr., born in 1864, and David, born a year later. At the end of the war, Pickett fled with his family to Canada, fearful that he might be prosecuted for war crimes, having controversially ordered the ex*****on of 21 Union prisoners in the winter of 1864 after discovering that they were Confederate deserters. After President Grant announced that no charges would be brought against him, Pickett and his family returned to Virginia, where he avoided the spotlight and made his living selling insurance. He died in July 1875, at age 50.
It was only after his death that Pickett became an icon of the Lost Cause, thanks to the efforts of his widow, who outlived him by over 50 years and never remarried. Financially distressed after her husband’s death, Sallie Pickett took a job as a federal office clerk in order to support herself and her son. Devoted to her husband and determined to redeem his reputation, in 1899 she published Pickett and His Men, a sentimental account of the Pickett’s Civil War service. The book was a great success, launching her career as a writer and public speaker. Over the rest of her life, she became a sought-after celebrity public speaker and published eleven more books, as well as writing for several New York magazines.
George Edward Pickett died on July 30, 1875, one hundred fifty years ago today. His son Jimmy became an illustrator for West Coast newspapers and died of typhoid fever at age 31, never having been accepted by his stepmother. George and Sallie’s son David died of measles at age 8. George Pickett, Jr. attended VMI and rose to the rank of major in the U.S. Army, before dying at sea at age 46, while on the way back to the States after serving in the Philippines War. General Pickett’s widow LaSalle Corbell “Sallie” Pickett, died in 1931 at age 87.
