A Political Convert in the Long Shadow of the Civil War

LONGSTREET: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, by Elizabeth R. Varon

“Bad as was being shot,” the former Confederate general James Longstreet said years after he took a bullet in the neck from a fellow soldier in 1864, “being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.” In the decades after being hit by friendly fire at the Battle of the Wilderness, Longstreet was pilloried and hounded by unreconstructed white Southerners who said it was a shame the wound he received during the war hadn’t been mortal.

Shockingly, this indefatigable fighter, Robert E. Lee’s second-in-command — Lee called Longstreet his “old war horse” — had accepted the Confederacy’s defeat; after Appomattox the war was essentially over, the South lost, there was no longer a Confederacy. Longstreet celebrated the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote and helped form a multiracial Louisiana State Militia.

In word and deed, then, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet refused to perpetuate the romantic myth of the “Lost Cause,” the idea that the way of life the South was fighting to preserve, a way of life that included chattel slavery, was genteel, humane and noble and would someday be vindicated.

All this seemed an incredible turnaround for the soldier who once warned his troops that the Yankees were hellbent on making “the negro your equal.” Such a man could only be a traitor — a “Confederate Judas” — as the historian Elizabeth R. Varon points out in “Longstreet,” her impassioned biography, arguing that the arc of Longstreet’s life embodies “American culture’s unfolding contest over the Civil War’s legacies.”

Truly, his is a fascinating, but not altogether explicable, life. Born in 1821 in South Carolina to slave-owning planters, Longstreet was sent to Augusta, Ga., as a young boy to live with his uncle Augustus, a prominent jurist and ferocious disunionist who implored fellow Southerners to ban “polluted” Northern books, avoid Northern schools and cultivate their own pro-slavery books and institutions that would “elevate and purify the education of the South.”

Augustus also made sure that young Longstreet would attend West Point, where he distinguished himself by finishing near the bottom of his class. He also met the fellow cadet Ulysses S. Grant, a lifelong friend who married Longstreet’s distant cousin and whom Longstreet later called “the man who was to eclipse all.”

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.