James Longstreet

James Longstreet (January 8, 1821 – January 2, 1904) was one of the foremost Confederate generals of the American Civil War, and later enjoyed a successful post-war career working for the government of his former enemies, as a diplomat and administrator.

Early life

Longstreet was born in Edgefield District, South Carolina, but grew up in Augusta, Georgia, until age 12 when his father died and the family moved to Somerville, Alabama. He graduated from West Point in 1842, ranking 54 out of 62, in time to serve with distinction in the Mexican War and rise to the rank of major. He resigned from the U.S. Army in June 1861 to cast his lot with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Career as Confederate general

Longstreet was highly regarded as an officer and immediately secured appointment as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. He fought well at the First Battle of Bull Run, and earned a promotion to major general. Longstreet's career took off in the summer of 1862 when Gen. Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia. During the Seven Days Battles, Longstreet had operational command of nearly half of Lee's army.

As a general, Longstreet showed a talent for defensive fighting, preferring to position his troops in strong defensive positions and compel the enemy to attack him. Once the enemy had worn itself down, then and only then would Longstreet contemplate an attack of his own. In fact, troops under his command never lost a defensive position during the war. Lee referred to Longstreet affectionately as his Old War Horse. (Longstreet's friends generally called him Pete.) His record as an offensive tactician was mixed, however, and he often clashed with the highly aggressive Lee on the subject of the proper tactics to employ in battle.

Ironically, one of his finest hours came in August 1862, when he commanded the Right Wing (later to become known as the First Corps) at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Here, he and his counterpart in command of the Left Wing, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, switched their normal roles, with Jackson fighting defensively on the Confederate left, and Longstreet delivering a devastating flank attack on the right that crushed the slightly larger Union Army of Virginia. The next month, at the Battle of Antietam, Longstreet held his part of the Confederate line against Union forces twice as numerous. On October 9, a few weeks after Antietam, Longstreet was promoted to lieutenant general, the senior Confederate officer of that rank.

He only enhanced his reputation that December, when his First Corps played the decisive role in the Battle of Fredericksburg. There, Longstreet positioned his men behind a stone wall on Marye's Heights and held off fourteen assaults by Union forces. About 10,000 Union soldiers fell; Longstreet lost but 500.

In the winter and early spring of 1863, Longstreet bottled up Union forces in the city of Suffolk, Virginia, a minor operation, but one that was very important to Lee's army, still stationed in war-devastated central Virginia. By conducting a siege of Suffolk, Longstreet enabled Confederate authorities to collect huge amounts of provisions that had been under Union control. However, this operation caused Longstreet and 15,000 men of the First Corps to be absent from the Battle of Chancellorsville in May.

Longstreet rejoined Lee's army after Chancellorsville and took part in Lee's Gettysburg Campaign, where he dissented with Lee about the tactics Lee was using. This campaign marked a fundamental change in the way Longstreet was employed by Lee. In the past, Lee had preferred to use Longstreet in defensive roles, which were his strength, and use Jackson and the Second Corps to spearhead his attacks. But Jackson had been mortally wounded at Chancellorsville, and now Lee wanted Longstreet to take over Jackson's role.

During the Battle of Gettysburg, Longstreet advocated disengagement from the enemy after the first day's battle, embarking on a strategic flanking movement to place themselves on the Union line of communication, and inviting a Union attack. He argued that Lee had agreed before the campaign that this "strategic offensive, tactical defensive" would be the proper course. But Lee had settled on the tactical offensive, fearing perhaps a redeployment as advocated by Longstreet would result in a loss of morale within the ranks. On July 2, the second day of the battle, Longstreet's assault on the Union left nearly succeeded, but at great cost. On July 3, when Lee ordered Longstreet, against his wishes, to attack the Union center in what became known as "Pickett's Charge", the Confederates lost 7,000 men in an hour. Lee blamed himself for the defeat at Gettysburg, but some, such as General Jubal Early and the Lost Cause advocates (especially people from Virginia who tended to look down on those from the Deep South), insisted Longstreet's hesitancy to follow through on Lee's plan was the cause of the defeat.

Lee later dispatched Longstreet to Tennessee that fall in response to a desperate appeal for help from the Army of Tennessee. That resulted in Longstreet and 14,000 of his First Corps veterans taking part in the Battle of Chickamauga in northern Georgia that September. Longstreet led an attack that broke through the Federal lines and forced Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, the last Union commander on the battlefield, to retreat, resulting in the greatest Confederate victory in the Western Theater.

Longstreet soon clashed with the much maligned Army of Tennessee commander, Gen. Braxton Bragg, when Bragg failed to capitalize on the victory by finishing off the Union army and recapturing the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Longstreet became leader of a group of senior commanders of the army who conspired to have Bragg removed. The situation became so grave that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was forced to intercede in person. What followed was one of the most bizarre scenes of the war, with Bragg sitting red faced as a procession of his commanders declared him incompetent. Davis sided with his old friend Bragg and did nothing to resolve the conflict. Bragg not only stayed in command, he sent Longstreet and his men on a disastrous campaign into east Tennessee, where in December, they were defeated in an attempt to recapture the city of Knoxville. After Bragg was driven back into Georgia, Longstreet and his men returned to Lee.

Longstreet helped save the Confederate Army from defeat in his first battle back with Lee's army, the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, where he launched a powerful flanking attack against the Union II Corps and nearly drove it from the field. But he was wounded in the process—accidentally shot by his own men not a mile away from the place where Jackson suffered the same fate a year earlier—and missed the rest of the 1864 spring campaign, where Lee sorely missed his skill in handling the army. He rejoined Lee from October 1864, to March 1865, during the Siege of Petersburg, commanding the defenses in front of the capital of Richmond. He surrendered with Lee at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

Postbellum career

After the war, Longstreet renewed his friendship with his old friend from West Point, Ulysses S. Grant. Before the war Longstreet had introduced Grant to his cousin Julia Dent, whom Grant married. He became the only senior Confederate officer to become a scalawag and join the Republican party. For this, he lost favor with many Southerners, but nevertheless enjoyed a successful second career as surveyor of Customs in New Orleans. He converted to Catholicism when he married his second wife, which also made him less popular in the more Protestant South. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Longstreet as his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and later, he served from 1897 to 1904, under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, as U.S. Commissioner of Railroads.

Late in life, after bearing criticism of his war record from other Confederates for decades, he refuted most of their arguments in his memoirs entitled From Manassas to Appomattox. He outlived most of his detractors, and died in Gainesville, Georgia, where he is buried in Alta Vista Cemetery. He was one of only a few general officers from the Civil War to live into the 20th century.

Legacy

Because of criticism from authors in the Lost Cause movement (Jubal Early in particular), Longstreet's war career was disparaged for many years after his death. His great nephew, the newspaper man Henry Augustine Minor, author of a The Story of the Democratic Party (The Macmillan Company, 1928) was writing a defense of the general when his manuscript and irreplaceable records burned in Macon, Mississippi, in 1928.

The publication of Michael Shaara's novel The Killer Angels in 1974, based in part on Longstreet's memoirs, as well as the 1993 film Gettysburg, have been credited with helping to restore Longstreet's reputation as an outstanding and diligent commander. In 1998, one of the last monuments erected at Gettysburg National Military Park was dedicated as a belated tribute to Longstreet, an equestrian statue by sculptor Gary Casteel. He is depicted on his horse at ground level in a grove of trees in Pitzer Woods, unlike most generals, who are elevated on tall bases overlooking the battlefield, indicative of the continuing controversy surrounding Longstreet.

More than a century after his death, and with the blessings of Longstreet's descendants, a Confederate Iron Cross was dedicated at his grave on the morning of June 18, 2006, by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Georgia Division. While the U.S. flag still flies proudly over the final resting place of the man who served both the United and Confederate States of America with honor and distinction, at long last Longstreet's rightful place in the annals of Southern history has begun to be appreciated.

In popular media

Longstreet is a character in Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel, How Few Remain.

References

Longstreet, James. From Manassas to Appomattox, 2nd ed., Lippincott, 1912.
Piston, William G., Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History, University of Georgia Press, 1990, ISBN 0820309079.
Wert, Jeffry D., General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1993, ISBN 0671709216.

External links