Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth Varon

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth Varon published by Simon & Schuster (2023)

Back in the 1960s when I first started reading about the Civil War the popular histories of the military conflict, while not entirely in the hands of the purveyors of the Lost Cause, were heavily influenced by the image of James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s “Old Warhorse,” that had been created by Confederate generals long after the war had ended. Men like Jubal Early and Moxley Sorrel used the period after Lee’s death in 1870 to both deify Lee and demonize Longstreet.

Having read Civil War primary sources even as a high school student, I knew that the Confederate official reports did not back up this vilification and I was interested when a new look at Longstreet that began with the novel Killer Angels by Michael Sharra and the call for a reexamination of Lee’s life by Thomas Connelly The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society. Since then I have read most new works on James Longstreet. These include studies by William Garrett Piston, Jeffrey Wert, Cory Pfarr and a number of modern retellings of Longstreet’s leadership at different battles. All questioned the ossified views of those who tried to place full responsibility for the Confederate failure on Longstreet.

I also began reading about the particular focus of the originators of the Lost Cause explanation of the course of the Civil War and why they focused on James Longstreet. While I understood the goals of the Southern Historical Society and the United Confederate Veterans in assigning blame to someone other than General Lee for Confederate defeat, I was not quite sure why it had to be Longstreet. Sure, I knew that Longstreet had been a Republican after the war, and he had married a Catholic, but this was not a full explanation of the hatred that I saw in most Lost Cause histories which were common until the 1950s, and got a second life in the works of Shelby Foote. There were other post-war Southern Republicans that did not get so much fury and Longstreet’s marriage was in his old age, long after he was an object of vilification.

Elizabeth Varon’s new book, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, is an excellent examination of Longstreet’s passing into the historiography of the Lost Cause as a villain so vile that he pretended to devotion to Lee while at the same time betraying Lee’s cause.

While this book is sometimes reviewed elsewhere as a new biography of the man’s life, be warned that this is not a full retelling of his story. For example, in this 480 page tome, Longstreet’s life before the Civil War is dealt with in only fifteen pages. This includes his boyhood, his teen years growing up in a slave-holding family, his West Point years and his time in the Mexican War and on the frontier. I was disappointed that Longstreet’s uncle Augustus got just a few mentions, even though he was the leading academic defender of slavery pre-war and he was the president of what are now called the University of Mississippi, Emory University, and the University of South Carolina. Varon says that Augustus was important but does not tell us why.

People hoping to find a dispassionate in-depth discussion of Longstreet’s Civil War career will be disappointed. While Varon tells us about the battles and conflicts Longstreet engages in from 1861 to 1865, the examination of the general’s Civil War career is only 110 pages long. Varon tells us what happened in broad strokes, but for the most part she let’s Lost Cause historians tell Longstreet’s tale and then responds with modern historians replies.

What Varon does do so well is to tell us how the former Confederate hierarchy turned tail on Longstreet. Having researched Longstreet during the Reconstruction period, I have documented how Longstreet’s endorsement of Black Civil Rights and his leading of Black militia in New Orleans had prompted Southern white newspaper editors to say that while they did not believe that Longstreet had been a traitor to the Confederacy until he took the side of Blacks, they now  (in 1874) believed that he had misdirected Pickett’s Charge on July 3, 1863 because of his endorsement of Black voting.

Longstreet had fought back against the Confederate surrender in April of 1865 every time the question had presented itself, yet when he went to meet with Union leaders at Appomattox he was relieved to see his on-time friend Ulysses S. Grant’s  willingness to welcome Confederates back into the American people. Over the next two years Longstreet, who had fought to contain the Black freedom struggle throughout the Civil War, went through a long reconsideration of how the South could stop refighting the war and make progress that would match the North.

The time after the surrender left Longstreet exposed. He was one of thirty-seven former Confederate leaders who were not eligible for the amnesty offered by President Johnson. Longstreet did try to intervene on behalf of some of his colleagues with Grant, but he was exposed himself.

In March 1867, Longstreet drew criticism when he wrote to the New Orleans Times explaining his thoughts for the future of the South:

“There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors. Nor is there any occasion for a feeling of humiliation. We have made an honest, and I hope that I may say, a creditable fight, but we have lost. Let us come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle…. Let us accept the terms, as we are in duty bound to do.”

In April, he wrote:

“The surrender of the Confederates armies in 1865 involved, 1. The surrender of the claim to the right of secession. 2. The surrender of the former political relations of the negro. 3. The surrender of the Southern Confederacy.”

In June, he wrote two public letters asking for Southern whites to “abandon ideas that are obsolete.” The General called for Southerners to accept the Civil Rights Act making Blacks citizens and he called for the North also to extend these rights to Blacks living in the former Union states. After these four letters, The nascent Lost Cause avatars began to focus their hatred on the First Corps commander. When Longstreet turned to his uncle Augustus and Robert E. Lee for support, they refused to help him.

In 1868, Longstreet said that a biracial democracy could be possible in the South if Southern whites responded to the challenge. White newspapers responded with a broad condemnation of Longstreet’s integrationist program. Varon says that Lost Cause advocates saw several former-Confederates loosen on restrictions on African Americans and they intended to stop the defections. She writes that “Demonizing Longstreet was an essential element of that project, as he was the most prominent former Confederate to join the Republican ranks and was setting a potentially dangerous example.”

As Reconstruction proceeded, Longstreet moved to New Orleans where he played a role in Republican politics and Louisiana government. The new Metropolitan Police Force was integrated, with 243 white and 130 Black policemen in 1868. Varon notes that this “mirrored the city’s own social composition: 62 percent white and 38 percent Black.” Longstreet’s involvement with the integrated police force led to further charges that he had abandoned his race. Instead, Longstreet urged “universal suffrage” and “universal amnesty.”Longstreet ran the Federal Customs House in New Orleans and he integrated it.

In 1870, Longstreet assumed a role in command of the Louisiana State Militia, a new biracial body of soldiers. About half of the soldiers were former white Confederates and the other half were African Americans and officers came from both the Union and Confederate sides of the Civil War. At least one Black man, Alexander E. Barber, was a brigadier general. Longstreet used his  position as adjutant of the Louisiana State Militia to promote Black military service, often personally reviewing the training of African American soldiers.

Longstreet could form alliances with Black leaders in New Orleans. For instance, he told a journalist that Black elected official Pinkney Pinchback “possesse[d] the coolest brains and the shrewdest faculties of any public man in the State.”

As anyone familiar with Louisiana history know, by 1874 the militia was regularly being challenged by terrorist groups and paramilitary organizations in thrall to white supremacist ideologies and allied with the reinvigorated Democratic Party. The situation was made worse by divisions within the Republican Party that made its resistance weaken in the mid-1870s. In September, the explosion of white supremacist irregular militias mobilized to overthrow the state government and defeat Longstreet’s integrated Louisiana State Militia. Only the arrival of Federal troops put down the coup.

The coup led Longstreet to acquire a farm in Gainesville, Georgia where he seemed as if he would retire to  a place of pastoral life. In March of 1877, Longstreet converted to Catholicism. His wife said that local Protestant denominations had made him an outcast at white churches and he sought membership in a church that could embrace former Confederates and their former slaves. The general needed whatever help he could get from his religious convictions.

In January 19, 1872, Jubal Early made a speech in Lexington, Virginia accusing Longstreet of losing the Battle of Gettysburg. This was the first of several presentations where he laid out the case against the Georgian. The next year, William Pendleton, Lee’s old artillery commander, amplified the charge by saying that Lee had ordered Longstreet to make an attack on the Union lines at dawn on July 2, 1863 at Gettysburg. The Southern Historical Society Papers began publishing critiques of Longstreet’s military performance and tactics. Newspapers that had treated Longstreet in 1866 as a fitting comrade of Lee and Jackson now looked back at his career as a Confederate commander and saw him as incompetent, a self-seeker, and traitorous.

On the other hand, people like Frederick Douglass spoke in appreciation of Longstreet as did some New South writers like Henry Grady and other writers for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

When he was in his seventies, Longstreet married Helen Dortch Longstreet. She was a vibrant career woman, half the age of her new husband. She was a Catholic and an advocate for women’s rights, but she was woefully behind her husband’s thinking on the “race question.” However, after James’s death, she began to take up the cause of Black equality. During World War II, she became a Southern Rosie the Riveter and she saw the work of African Americans in support of the war effort. She said that Black men  “fought as bravely and died as gallantly as white men fought and died.”  When Helen spoke out against Jim Crow laws keeping Blacks from voting, she said “Small caliber politicians, who, for the purpose of holding power and office for themselves, glibly prate of white supremacy, should be told that long before Columbus sailed the seas… “Darkest Africa” was holding aloft the torch of culture, while the boastful Nordic race was struggling…”

Elizabeth Varon does a tremendous job tying the life of Longstreet together with the vilification by the Lost Cause paladins of the last third of the 19th Century and their descendants. Interestingly, in the last couple of decades, after Confederate “heritage” groups had blocked memorializing Longstreet at Gettysburg, the Sons of Confederate Veterans finally put up a statue to the general but said it was only to memorialize what he did during the war, not for the contemptible things he did after it. Varon’s book opens the way for a study of how one remarkable man’s life illustrates the cancel culture of Confederate negative hagiography.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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