May 28, 1818— Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, perhaps the most multi-faceted, colorful, and
ubiquitous senior commander in the Confederate Army, was born in St. Bernard Parish,
La., 45 miles from the New Orleans that would be his base for much of his civilian life.
Although he won the South’s first
two military encounters at Fort Sumter and Bull Run and directed sterling
defenses of Charleston and Petersburg in the late stages of the Civil War, he saw his hopes for greater
glory dashed because of his conspicuous vanity, a troubled relationship with President Jefferson Davis, and an
inability to produce results equal to his schemes.
Three decades ago, a co-worker of mine told me she
had a cat, Beauregard. I don’t know the reason that my colleague and her husband
called their pet that, let alone their Civil War interests. But the name conjures
up something exotic, intent on its prerogatives and full of self-regard—not unlike
how detractors (and even some defenders) might view “The Little Creole.”
That latter nickname did more than indicate an
ancestry; it pointed to a Continental appearance and cast of mind for this Zelig
of the Civil War who seemingly popped up everywhere, from the first shot at
Fort Sumter that he directed at his old artillery instructor and friend, Major
Robert Anderson, to final surrender in the Carolinas four years later. Not for
nothing did T. Harry Williams subtitle his biography “Napoleon in Gray.”
This scion of the Louisiana plantocracy was
practically silky, with smooth olive skin, half-lidded eyes, and a moustache
that, according to Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, was waxed
daily by a faithful attendant. He grew up with French as his primary language,
not even learning English till the age of 12, when he was in private school.
Even as an adult, wrote John Sergeant Wise, a VMI cadet, “his voice was
pleasant and insinuating, with a foreign accent.”
It was a voice made for seduction—not merely of
women (his post-Appomattox possessions, scoured by Union forces for evidence of
treason, largely comprised “mash notes from the general's female admirers,”
wrote biographer Williams), but of men he sought to convince that he was just
the person to serve in office, lead an army, or head up a commercial
enterprise.
It was all facilitated by undoubted energy and
intelligence. Familiarity with French gave Beauregard an affinity for the
writings of Antoine Henry Jomini, a member of Napoleon’s staff, and the little
Louisianan graduated second from his West Point class of 1838.
“On casual meeting the Louisiana soldier could be
impressive: his flamboyant martial air, his hauteur, his infectious zest for
war combined to give him stature greater than his five foot seven inches,” observed Frank
E. Vandiver in Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy. “In moments
of public enthusiasm his rhetoric rang Demosthenic periods and his self-confidence
ran beyond decency. At such times he bordered on self-caricature. But never
quite sure of what he wanted, he could never quite win against himself.”
What began as a clash of cultural and temperamental
opposites between Beauregard and Davis ended as a nasty multi-decade public
feud over strategy, honor, responsibility and recrimination. The Protestant, humorless, ascetic,
Confederate President could only have cringed at the sight and sound of his
Catholic, bon vivant general opposing his policy of dispersing troops rather
than concentrating them at a strategic point—then of Beauregard urging that his
self-aggrandizing proposals should be implemented “at once.”
Annoyance turned to apoplexy when Davis read
Beauregard’s official report on the Confederate victory at the First Battle of
Manassas (Bull Run, to Northerners) in 1861. The account, printed in an
anti-Davis newspaper, implied that Davis almost lost the battle by tardily
reinforcing Beauregard with the troops of Joseph Johnston, and gave further fuel
to a controversy over whether Davis was responsible for the failure to pursue
the fleeing Union troops. Understandably, Davis scolded his general for “an
attempt to exalt yourself at my expense.”
The following year, a failure to pull out a victory
seemingly within his grasp at the end of the first day of battle at Shiloh,
Tenn., followed by Beauregard’s taking of medical leave without asking prior
permission, gave Davis the excuse he needed to relieve Beauregard of command in
the West.Their quarrel continued with self-serving memoirs that each wrote in the 1880s.
For years, because of the loss at Shiloh, I believed
Beauregard was not a particularly good commander. But when I voiced that view
on a trip to Charleston some years, my tour guide strongly contended that was
not the case.
Even my sense that the guide may have held at least
some residual sympathy for the South could not argue against his central point:
At a time when the rest of the Confederacy was reeling from the blows of the
Union Army, and Charleston was facing vastly superior Northern naval and land
forces, Beauregard masterminded defenses that enabled the men in gray to hold
out for two years.
He performed equally capably by helping Robert E. Lee hold
off Ulysses S. Grant for the second half of 1864 in the siege of Petersburg,
preventing the immediate collapse of Richmond and the end of the Confederacy.
One other Beauregard contribution to the Confederate
cause was devising the Confederate flag now most recognized by posterity. Though the flags initially used by the rebels
in the Eastern theater already incorporated “stars and bars,” they still looked
enough like the Stars and Stripes to cause confusion on the battlefield.
Beauregard’s solution—inserting the St. Andrews’ cross—solved
the problem. But, though created for largely utilitarian reasons, the “Southern
Cross” ended up creating a longer-lasting symbolic problem, with military
sacrifice merging into the original religious martyrdom signified by the Cross.
Descendants of these soldiers did not want to hear that their symbol of
ancestral heroism could signify inherited hatred to African-Americans.
In the postwar era, Beauregard sought to integrate
back into larger national life and move beyond the agricultural economy
envisioned by the Confederate States. For a short period, he rented rooms on
New Orleans’ Chartres Street, and today the Beauregard-Keyes House functions as
a museum that offers insight into the general and a later occupant,
Frances Parkinson Keyes, who wrote a fictionalized biography of the “Little
Creole,” Madame Castel's Lodger.
But his principal activity was business, as he
promoted the Louisiana Lottery and became president of the Jackson and Great
Northern Railroad as well as the New Orleans and Carrollton Street Railway,
for which he invented a system of cable-powered streetcars.
The Confederate statue-removal movement that spread
nationwide after nine worshippers were shot at an African-American church three
years ago in Charleston has now ensnared Beauregard. Last year, the equestrian
statue at the entrance to New Orleans’ City Park was removed and carted off in
the middle of the night.
The problem with this move was that a blatant
attempt to whitewash history by honoring a cadre of traitors who led their
people into a war that devastated their way of life and destroyed their young
sons was followed by a more recent trend toward making these leaders
Soviet-style “non-persons” removed from history. My own preference is for
signage that establishes a fuller understanding of the motives and consequences of
these soldiers’ and statesmen’s actions.
Such a context would not turn General Beauregard
into a saint or sinner, but it would establish him as a recognizable human
being rather than a bronze figure lacking his considerable conceit and charm.