Pelham had a good reputation among his subordinates and superiors, but it was his actions at the Battle of Fredericksburg on Decemthat propelled him to celebrity status. He resigned his commission, returned to the Alabama, and took a commission in the Confederate Army. However, after the Confederate assault on Fort Sumter, West Point cadets were called upon to uphold their oaths to the army and the United States. In March of 1861 he was appointed to be a First Lieutenant for the Confederacy, an appointment he initially turned down. For Pelham, leaving before a war was a certainty would risk his future career within the United States Army were the tensions to blow over. He wrote letters to family and friends asking for advice, writing, "Alabama seems determined to leave the Union…It seems pretty hard that I should toil for four and half years for a diploma and then have to leave without it." In those early months no one knew for certain whether the secession crisis would result in an armed conflict.
However, Pelham was set to graduate in 1861 and did not want his time spent at the academy to be wasted.
Pelham considered leaving West Point in the months immediately after Alabama’s secession. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, who ran on a platform of keeping slavery out of new states, a wave of Southern states, including Pelham’s Alabama, seceded from the United States. Pelham’s time at West Point overlapped with a period of intensely increasing sectional tensions. With support from Abram Walker, a local judge, and Congressman Sampson Harris, Pelham secured a spot at West Point in 1856. John Pelham was born in Alabama in 1838 to a wealthy planter family. Shortly after, he left to fight for the Confederacy. John Pelham had this portrait taken at the Matthew Brady Studio while a cadet at West Point.