This Day in Civil War History (Birth of P. G. T. Beauregard, ‘Napoleon in Gray’)

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.

Photo of the Day: Statue, Jefferson Memorial

The other night, while watching the first episode of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, The Roosevelts, I noticed, in the background of a 1930s newsreel of Franklin Roosevelt at the dedication of Mount Rushmore, that the face of Thomas Jefferson was coming into view on the great rock in South Dakota. It reminded me of how the most important President of the 20^th century elevated a predecessor that he regarded as a crucial forerunner of his own advocacy of the common man. 

With each passing decade, that apotheosis of American’s third President has become more and more hotly debated, particularly in light of his views on the great American predicament: race. So, although I wrote briefly about the Jefferson Memorial in a prior post, that does not begin to exist what must be said about him. 

It may have been a trick of the early afternoon light that caused Rudulph Evans' bronze statue of Jefferson to appear dark when I photographed it on a visit to Washington in November 2013. But it is not an accident that Jefferson’s legacy itself looks darker than anyone could have predicted when Roosevelt helped mold the midcentury consensus surrounding the author of perhaps the most famous line in American history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

That quote is among several ones carved into the walls of the chamber surrounding the statue. Among those others are this one: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” That latter sentence is part of the reason why millions the world over, in the nearly two centuries since Jefferson’s death (on the 50^th anniversary of American independence, no less), have looked to American democracy as a beacon in a dark world of legal and mental shacklement.

But the two sentences that immediately follow it, in Jefferson’s Autobiography, say just as much about why this country came to the agony of Charleston last month: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."

If your ideal is of an American government that values education as the key to an informed citizenry, that looks suspiciously on a standing army as a fiscal sinkhole and a threat to freedom of expression, that distrusts concentrated wealth, that constantly hails science over religion, then Jefferson is your man.

But Jefferson is also the man who lived off the fruit of others' labor, the first theorist of secession, and the forefather of segregation. Thomas Jefferson’s America, for better and worse, remains ours. 

For all those who, rather glibly, urge a cliched "national conversation" about race, the inevitable place to start is with Jefferson. Expect that conversation to be nothing less than ambivalent and painful.

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Siege of Charleston Ends in Patriot Disaster)

May 12, 1780—Nearly 200 engagements were fought in South Carolina throughout the American Revolution, but the most disastrous for the patriots was surely the Siege of Charleston, a nearly six-week battle that ended with the largest loss of troops by the Continental Army through the entire conflict.

The numbers alone tell the appallingly one-sided loss suffered when Major General Benjamin Lincoln at last surrendered to British forces on this afternoon. While royal forces under Commander in Chief Henry Clinton counted 76 killed, 189 wounded and 70 missing or captured, the Americans suffered 92 killed, 148 wounded, and 4,650 missing and captured. At one stroke, virtually alll 5,000 American troops defending the fourth-largest—and most prosperous—American city were taken out of commission.

Unlike other battles then and now, the American defeat was less about a commander’s folly than a state government’s failure to recognize the danger it faced until it was too late. A well-regarded New England veteran of the Saratoga campaign, Lincoln had been appointed by George Washington to head the Continental Army’s Southern Department, now the prey of the major British effort in the war.

To no avail, Lincoln had urged the South Carolina Assembly to permit the enlistment of African-Americans, as well as to use militia to fill out Continental battalions. Nothing doing: Southern slaveowners were so intent on preserving their property that they refused to allow their slaves to build the fortifications necessary for defense of the city, and Governor John Rutledge did little to help either.

Clinton began moving slowly toward Charleston in February, and by the beginning of April was ready to tighten his chokehold on the city. Lincoln, having hoped that the Carolinians would spring to his army’s defense, found himself trapped. His response to a second Clinton demand for surrender—evacuation, if given 10 days to withdraw his troops—met the expected no not just from Clinton but from a city delegation who told him that if he tried this and left them to the tender mercies of the British, they would destroy his boats and open the city gates.

British forces knew well, if the South Carolina Assembly didn’t, how important this victory was. Hessian Captain Johann Hinrichs wrote in his diary: “It was the only fortified harbor of two provinces which, because of the quality of their products, could to some extent hold a balance against the French and Dutch imports….It is, lastly, a harbor which England can defend with a few ships against the strongest French force, since a sandbank which at high tide is seventeen to nineteen and three-quarters feet under water surrounds the entire inlet.”

For the next two years, under British occupation, South Carolinians would know the smell of fear, as a vicious war of vengeance and reprisals took place on both sides. Lincoln and a number of his officers would end up exchanged for British POWs, but others weren’t so lucky. Ann Hart told her husband that because of his patriot activities, she worried that she was “liable to Banishment…for actions not her own.”

What saved South Carolina in the end were the fissures already developing in the British high command. Clinton and second-in-command Lord Cornwallis had come to feel mutual disdain during the Charleston siege. As a result, Cornwallis ignored Clinton’s warnings about venturing into North Carolina. The following year, Clinton’s initial success would abruptly end as Cornwallis was continually harassed by the newly appointed American commander Nathaniel Greene and saw his forces ebbing in strength with each day.

As for Lincoln, his day of ignominy would turn to triumph only a year and a half later, at Yorktown. During the surrender ceremony, Cornwallis, pleading illness, had attempted to have his second-in-command, General Charles O'Hara, surrender his sword not to George Washington but to the French general Rochambeau. The latter demurred. When O'Hara presented the sword to the American commander, Washington motioned for his second-in-command, General Lincoln, to accept, thereby reversing the disaster the latter had experienced at Charleston.

This Day in Civil War History

February 17, 1865 – Columbia, South Carolina became engulfed in flames as Union troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied the capital of the first Southern state to secede from the Union.

During the same 24 hours, the Confederate flag was lowered on Fort Sumter for the last time, as Charleston, which regarded itself as the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” awaited its fate. General P.G.T. Beauregard, a commander with strong engineering and logistical instincts if an overly high regard for his offensive capabilities, had created defenses for fort and city that held out against Federal forces possessing not just superior manpower but also an ironclad fleet. But after 22 months, the Union was lifting the siege.

Charleston fully expected to meet the fate of everything along the way of Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah--absolute destruction. The Northern general now had the means to guarantee the South that it would finally meet the desolate fate he had warned his Confederate-leaning military friends about in the months leading up to the war.

Yet amazingly, Charleston was to escape relatively unscathed when it was occupied by Federal troops on the 18th. What happened?

Some people, with a bent for the romantic, believe that Charleston was spared Sherman’s rage because of tender feelings he still felt for a woman while a young soldier at nearby Fort Moultrie. Take a look at any picture of this hard-eyed modern man of war, though. Does this strike you as very likely? I didn’t think so.

More likely, what happened, as hard to believe as it was to Charlestonians, was that the city was just not as important to the defense of the South as Columbia. Not only a major munitions center, the state capital also possessed major stores of food.

Moreover, Charleston’s location in the Low Country made it a mess for marching. “We must all turn amphibious,” Sherman wrote, for the country is half under weather.”

Nothing could distract him from his first priority—Richmond, where he would join forces with boss and friend General Ulysses S. Grant, and preventing Robert E. from slipping away to the West and conducting a guerrilla war. That meant Sherman turned inland, toward Columbia.

By that night, while lying down to rest in a home he was occupying, Sherman “became conscious that a bright light was shining on the walls,” he later wrote in his memoirs. The high wind he had noticed in the morning was spreading burning cotton.

Responsibility for what happened next has been debated ever since. Before long, Columbia met the fate of Atlanta: utter ruination by fire.

A bitter South castigated Sherman for the conflagration, while he claimed neither motive nor responsibility for the act—though he did not help his credibility by admitting in his memoirs that his official report blamed Confederate General Wade Hampton, “for he was in my opinion boastful, and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”

Southerners sought any possibility means to avoid the wrath of the now-infamous Northern general, with one of the more unusual—and, probably, mistaken—avenues being an appeal to his religion—or what they thought was his religion.

At the death of his father, when he was nine years old, Sherman had been adopted by a prominent, politically connected lawyer, Thomas Ewing, who had converted to Roman Catholicism at the behest of his wife. The Ewings, having raised all their own children in their faith, also had their foster son baptized in the faith.

Since the baptism took place on the feast day of St. William of Montevergine, the boy was given the first name of William. However, Sherman’s deceased parents had been nominally Episcopalian. In adult life he not only was not a churchgoer in any faith but would not answer to his given first name, preferring instead the nickname “Cump,” a shortened version of “Tecumseh.”

Differences over religion, however, did not prevent Sherman from marrying the Ewings’ daughter, Eleanor. The general permitted their children to be raised Catholic, and in later years one son, much to his father’s annoyance, became a Catholic priest.

Somehow all of this tangled family history became submerged, and all that people in the Protestant-dominated South could seem to recall was that he had some association and perhaps sympathy with Catholicism. A southern-born co-worker related to me, not too long ago that, according to legend, an Episcopalian church in her home city (Savannah, I believe), to forestall any chance of pillage at the hands of Sherman, put up a sign reading, “Roman Catholic.”

Sherman’s memoir related a more direct and truthful entreaty. On the morning of his entry into Columbia, while sitting on a log watching his engineers complete a pontoon bridge, he received a penciled note from the head of an Ursuline convent in Columbia. She “claimed to have been a teacher in a convent in Brown County, Ohio, at the time my daughter Minnie was a pupil there, and asking my special protection.”

I can just picture the scene—the general sitting there, in a hurry to get his men across that bridge and stop Lee and this infernal war—and now this. Sherman’s reaction? He passed the note along to brother-in-law Charles, an inspector-general on his staff, with orders to see the nun and let her know personally “that we contemplated no destruction of any private property in Columbia at all.”

Two cities and two different fates at the hands of one conqueror. Quite a day.