Longstreet National Review

There will probably come a time when every Civil War general officer will have received a full-dress biography of his own, irrespective of whether he accomplished much of real note. So it may be with a certain weariness of heart that we welcome the arrival of yet another heavy-duty Civil War general’s biography, Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. If so, however, it is an unrighteous weariness, for Varon is fully aware that most of the books about Civil War generals are weighed down by the dreary business of litigating battlefield performances. Varon’s Longstreet is instead about a general’s post-war life and a “political conversion” of the most dramatic sort, and her purpose is to explore why a Confederate leader as prominent as James Longstreet could execute so complete a post-war political reversal — and survive.

If Grant and Sherman occupy the No. 1 and No. 2 spots for the Union side of the Civil War, as Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson do for the Confederacy, “Old Pete” Longstreet may be said to occupy a spot at two and a half on the Confederate side. He rose to the notice of Robert E. Lee at the same time in the spring of 1862 that Lee discovered the eccentric talents of Jackson, and for a year thereafter, Jackson and Longstreet functioned in tandem as Lee’s irresistible pair of military sluggers. After Jackson’s death following the battle at Chancellorsville, Longstreet remained Lee’s favorite lieutenant — “my old war horse,” as Lee said after the battle of Antietam — until Longstreet himself was nearly killed in action at the Wilderness in 1864. He survived, but only sufficiently to limp along with Lee to the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.

Longstreet could have spent the rest of his long life (he died in 1904) soaking up the daft admiration of the Lost Cause. What makes him remarkable is that, within two years of the war’s end, he renounced his loyalty to the Confederacy, turned Republican, urged Southerners to submit to Reconstruction, condemned lynching, and endorsed voting rights for the freed slaves. This was enough to enflame Southern opinion against Lee’s quondam “war horse.” But Longstreet did them one better by criticizing the military judgment of Lee himself at Gettysburg, first in comments he made for William Swinton’s history of the Army of the Potomac in 1866, and then in two articles he wrote for Alexander McClure’s Philadelphia Weekly Times in 1877.

It was one thing to turn his back on the Confederate cause; it was exponentially worse to criticize Robert E. Lee, and Longstreet was denounced in a cyclone of Southern vituperation. “All the Confederates here have been much distressed at the course pursued by ,” snorted one of Longstreet’s old comrades-in-gray, Jubal Early, an architect of the Lost Cause’s Lee cult. “He has very much obscured the fame won by him during the war, and his letters are calculated to throw discredit on our course.”

Which means that, as with judgments of Grant, almost any estimate of James Longstreet is liable to be bound to the complexities of Reconstruction, in which neither Grant nor Longstreet fared well. It did not help, either, in untangling Longstreet’s allegiances that he had never been as wedded to the figure of Lee as Stonewall Jackson had. Thomas Jonathan Jackson presents us with a man who frequently seemed to function as an automaton for executing Lee’s wishes, without Lee even having to say anything. Not Longstreet. Unlike Jackson (and Lee), Longstreet was not a Virginian and stood on the margins of the circle of Virginians who ran the show in Lee’s army. Unlike Jackson again, Longstreet nursed a high degree of amour propre and imagined as early as the spring of 1863 that he deserved an independent command. In his Philadelphia Times articles, Longstreet insisted that he had disagreed with Lee’s plans at Gettysburg, and he claimed that Lee had promised not to launch a headlong attack and then waved the promise away. (Lee denied ever making such a promise.) After Lee’s debacle at Gettysburg, Longstreet finally got his opportunity, departing for the war’s western theater in Tennessee. But Longstreet never had quite the command talents he fancied himself possessing. His one independent campaign, against Knoxville in the fall of 1863, was a fizzle, and he returned, chastened, to Lee’s command the following spring.

If the turns in Longstreet’s career during the war were always mottled by his eye for the main chance, this was even more so in his post-war career. His decision to make his peace with Reconstruction and Republicanism was hailed by Unionists as the setting of a new course for the Southern future. But people were never entirely sure whether he was once again simply angling to pick the most likely political winners. “My politics,” he explained, “is to save the little that is left to us, and to go to work to improve the little as best we may.” Black voting rights had to be yielded to, but in yielding, white Southerners had their best hope of exercising “such influence over that vote” as to prevent it being “injurious to us.”

Longstreet’s embrace of Reconstruction policies from 1867 to 1875 earned him abuse that he braved with soldierly steadfastness, and it even involved commanding a multi-race Louisiana militia in a pitched battle against the White League in the Canal Street coup of 1874. But it also earned him state and federal patronage appointments, and there were wide suspicions that patronage, not principle, was his guiding star. When Reconstruction in Louisiana was overthrown, Longstreet relocated to northern Georgia, but he still fished energetically for Republican favors. Rutherford Hayes appointed him U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire in 1880, Garfield named him U.S. marshal for northern Georgia, and McKinley reserved a seat for him as a U.S. railroad commissioner.

Much though we praise repentant sinners, we never entirely trust them. During the war, Longstreet yielded to no one in his condemnation of emancipation, and when Republican president Benjamin Harrison offered him no patronage rewards in the 1880s, Longstreet irritably denounced Harrison’s administration as a “carpetbagger and negro combination.” Black Southerners regarded him warily, and many were irked at how Longstreet and other white Republicans “generally monopolized the best posts” that Republican administrations had to offer.

Yet, as a U.S. marshal, Longstreet aggressively went after the race murderers of the Yarbrough gang, who were prosecuted in one of the rare post-Reconstruction federal pursuits of voting-rights violations. Black Georgians would, in the end, applaud him as “an ardent, true, and unselfish Republican.”

Varon’s focus on Longstreet the Reconstructor rather than Longstreet the general will disappoint the aficionados of Civil War military history. Of her 363 pages of text, just 28 get him to the Civil War; he surrenders with Lee at Appomattox on page 126. On the other hand, she is much gentler on Longstreet than the cadre of his haters (the prime example of whom is Robert K. Krick) who believe to this day that he was an unalloyed dissimulator, “often straying,” as Krick wrote, “from the demonstrable truth and regularly contradicting his own accounts from one article to the next.” She is also more sympathetic than many of Longstreet’s military admirers, who often praise his battlefield skills but dismiss his political maneuvering as amateurish. And those sympathies are not misplaced when one takes into account the preposterous rage that the Lost Causers visited on Longstreet for his stubborn refusal to sanction their demands to erect slavery by another name in the post-war South.

Nevertheless, it may be overreaching to describe Longstreet as “the most embattled military figure from America’s Civil War” or “one of the most enduringly relevant voices in American history.” If Longstreet is no demon, he is also no angel. “His stubborn efforts to reconcile his Confederate and Republican identities,” admits Varon, “meant that he never fully secured the full trust of either conservatives or progressives.” Unhappily, that was not without reason, for Longstreet had an uncanny propensity for provoking uncertainty about his motives, and even Varon concedes that he was not “a true racial egalitarian.” Even worse, his ham-handed attempts at defending his military record from the Lost Causers usually did little more than provoke further attacks.

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In more recent times, Longstreet’s reputation has made a remarkable comeback. His standing soared on the wings of Michael Shaara’s fictional recasting of Gettysburg in The Killer Angels in 1974 (and Ron Maxwell’s subsequent movie version, Gettysburg), and in 1998 Longstreet finally acquired an equestrian statue on the Gettysburg battlefield. Still, Shaara’s Longstreet was more of a character foil to Lee than a serious repristination of Longstreet, and the statue makes Longstreet look oddly like a Tolkien dwarf. It is not clear to this day whether the doubts Longstreet expressed about Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg were simply after-action attempts to distance himself from failure. That kind of distance was, after all, what much of James Longstreet’s life was dedicated to fashioning.