An Elegant and Honorable Man Lebbeus Aaron Pindall: A Southern Soldier, Attorney, Legislator, and Valued Arkansas Citizen

Lebbeus Aaron Pindall is best known today as a Confederate Civil War hero for his command of the 9th Missouri Battalion Pindall Sharpshooters. It is a well-deserved descriptor as he departed the conflict’s battlefields in June 1865 with military accolades, an officer’s rank, and successes secured during frontline engagements. His post-war colleagues and friends, however, described him not simply as a confederacy hero, but most often as a “typical southerner in every respect, frank, open-hearted, gallant, hospitable, and a natural born soldier. He was an elegant and honorable man.” The former CSA leader built that portrait over twenty years as he worked hard during Reconstruction in shaping a robust future for Arkansas. His intense labor among his peers and fellow citizens as a constitutional lawyer and a champion for levees and railroads garnered respect and the merited characterization.An Elegant and Honorable Man chronicles his life from boyhood in western Virginia to a place of leadership within Arkansas’ Democratic-Conservative Party and its House of Representatives. As Pindall had done during the Civil War, the former soldier immersed himself in Arkansas’ battle to rise from the confusion and ash of a nation’s conflict into a progressive state within the Trans-Mississippi expanse.An untold and forgotten story is herein revealed about a man who was more than the commander of a Confederate sharpshooter battalion. Pindall’s victories across his life helped a former CSA southern state navigate its way into the 1900s. His legacy of resolve for bettering Arkansas ultimately came through his son Xenophon Overton Pindall, the state’s 1907 governor. Read more