Alfred Pleasonton - Postbellum Career

Postbellum Career

After the war, although Pleasonton had achieved the honorary rank of brevet major general in the regular army, he was mustered out of the volunteer service with the permanent rank of major of cavalry. Because he did not want to leave the cavalry, Pleasonton turned down a lieutenant colonelcy in the infantry, and soon became dissatisfied with his command relationship to officers he once outranked. Pleasonton resigned his commission in 1868, and was placed on the Army's retired list as a major in 1888. As a civilian, he worked as United States Collector of Internal Revenue and as Commissioner of Internal Revenue under President Ulysses S. Grant, but he was asked to resign from the Bureau of Internal Revenue (now the Internal Revenue Service) after he lobbied Congress for the repeal of the income tax and quarreled with his superiors at the Treasury Department. Refusing to resign, he was dismissed. He served briefly as the president of the Terre Haute and Cincinnati Railroad.

In an 1895 interview with sculptor James Edward Kelly, Pleasonton claimed he had been offered command of the Army of the Potomac. (A subsequent interview with Gen. James F. Wade indicated that this offer came in a meeting in Washington some time after Gettysburg.) Pleasonton told Kelly that he "wasn't like Grant. I refused to pay the price." He claimed that the terms offered were: "The war must not be ended until the South was crushed; slavery abolished; and the President reelected." Pleasonton, always more of a bureaucrat than an ideologue or strong leader, only wanted to defeat the South's military capabilities so that they could not threaten the rest of the states, but was not convinced that "crushing" the rebels, ending slavery, or reelecting Lincoln was worth the cost.

Alfred Pleasonton died in his sleep in Washington, D.C., and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery there, alongside his father. Before his death, Pleasonton requested that his funeral be devoid of all military honors and even refused to be buried in his old uniform because he felt the Army passed him over after the war. The town of Pleasanton, California, was named for Alfred in the 1870s; a typographical error by a U.S. Postal Service employee apparently led to the spelling difference. The city of Pleasanton, Kansas, despite its different spelling, has begun an annual festival named for Pleasonton. On the huge Pennsylvania Memorial at the Gettysburg Battlefield stands a statue of General Pleasonton. However, it is possible that this represents Alfred's brother, Augustus, a native of Pennsylvania, who was a general in the Pennsylvania militia at the time of the battle.