This Day in Civil War History (Death of James Longstreet, Lee’s ‘Old War Horse’—and a Scapegoat for Rebel Defeat)

Jan. 2, 1904— Lieutenant General James Longstreet died six days short of his 83^rd birthday in Gainesville, GA.  Acclaimed as one of the South’s best and bravest commanders during the Civil War, he ended up ostracized afterward by many comrades-in-arms for non-military reasons like joining the Republican Party, supporting the rights of freed slaves, and writing a defensive memoir in the postwar period.

So strong was the animus against him that the Daughters of the Confederacy voted not to send flowers to his funeral, and it was not until 2005 that he was honored with a statue at Gettysburg—and even then, its organizers stated, it was for his actions during the battle rather than his postwar conduct.

As Nikki Haley’s controversial comments last week about the cause of the Civil War indicate, Americans remain deeply divided about the conflict. And in the last century and a half, few figures have sparked as much division as Longstreet.

Advocates for “The Lost Cause”—the argument that the Confederacy’s role in the war was just and heroic—may have tried to plant disbelief that the conflict resulted from slavery, but they had no doubt that Longstreet had played a crucial role in the South’s eventual loss by carrying out Robert E. Lee’s orders on the third day at Gettysburg with insufficient vigor.

Yet the negative comments about Longstreet emerged overwhelmingly after the guns fell silent rather than before—indeed, Robert E. Lee referred to him affectionately as “my old war horse.”

From First Manassas to Appomattox, Longstreet served in all but one (Chancellorsville) of the major campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia.

While not as aggressive as Lee’s other corps commander in the first two years of the war, Stonewall Jackson, the bluff, broad-shouldered Longstreet was arguably steadier and more consistent. 

Reflecting his preference for defensive warfare, his network of trenches, fieldworks, and artillery at the Battle of Fredericksburg, for instance, produced so many Federal casualties that it led to Lee’s famous remark, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

In May 1864, Longstreet was mistakenly fired on by his own men near the start of the Battle of the Wilderness. Had he died from his wound, as Jackson had done in a similar incident near the same spot the year before, he would have joined Stonewall in the Valhalla of Confederate martyrs.  

Instead, while he could not assist Lee for five months in this critical campaign, he survived, albeit with a right arm paralyzed for life. 

To his own surprise as much as anyone else’s, this diehard who had strongly urged his commander not to surrender at Appomattox started to soften towards the North when he saw Ulysses Grant’s generous peace terms.

Subsequently, in advocating that Southerners should cooperate with the victorious North in rebuilding the region, defending former slaves from threats to their lives and rights, and questioning the ongoing deification of Lee and Jackson, Longstreet was reviled as a traitor—or, in the parlance of the time, a Southern “scalawag” who collaborated with Northern “carpetbaggers” in inflicting a vengeful peace and African-American leaders on whites.

Several factors led to the disaffection that so many Southerners began to feel for Longstreet:

*A June 1867 letter to the New Orleans Times, in which Longstreet advocated obedience to recent Reconstruction legislation—and even join the Republican Party—as a Union victory meant the issues that had divided the country previously were now settled. (See Patrick Young’s Nov. 2019 post from “The Reconstruction Era” blog for the text of the letter, as well as contemporary responses to it.)

*His nomination by his old friend Grant, whom he supported for President in 1868, to be the Surveyor of Customs for the Port of New Orleans, a political appointment seen as being to his advantage.

*His leadership of the biracial Louisiana militia and the New Orleans Metropolitan Police—service that came to an end when these forces were overwhelmed in a September 1874 insurrection by thousands of white supremacists at the “Battle of Liberty Place,” requiring federal troop intervention.

* General Jubal Early and William Pendleton, Lee’s artillery chief, castigated Longstreet in the 1870s for not launching a dawn attack on the Union at Gettysburg on the second day of battle. With Lee dead and no other proof available, the charge shouldn’t have stuck (particularly since Early and Pendleton had their own reasons for deflecting attention from their failures during the battle). But with his two critics not letting go—and with Longstreet himself increasingly resentful of how the reputations of Lee and Jackson were being exalted at his expense—the “old war horse” responded in a flurry of charges and countercharges, first in periodicals, then when he was 75 in an 800-page memoir that his enemies mined for inaccuracies and self-serving charges of his own.

For years, the Early-Pendleton side was supported by the likes of Douglas Southall Freeman in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lee. Only in the 1950s and 1960s did revisionist historians begin to look more critically at Early, Pendleton, and to a lesser extent, Lee.

In the last 40 years, biographers such as William Garrett Piston, Jeffrey Wert, and Cory Pfarr have offered more balanced appraisals of Longstreet’s military record, absolving him of charges of incompetence at Gettysburg and accepting that he was right in strongly urging Lee not to make the last disastrous assault on Day 3. 

This past fall, Univ. of Virginia historian Elizabeth Varon rendered an additional service to scholarship with Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, which concentrates more on his postwar career than his service with the Army of Northern Virginia. In the process, it explains how prior misjudgments of Longstreet were based more on politics than on documentation or the context of events.  

But in the court of public opinion, Longstreet may have received significant support less from academic studies than from a 1974 novel. Michael Shaara’s account of the turning point of the war, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was adapted into the 1993 film Gettysburg, and inspired Shaara’s son Jeff to write other novels about the war in which Longstreet figured.

The Killer Angels and Gettysburg have led many readers to reevaluate conclusions about Longstreet that had seemed settled for nearly a century. They argued more convincingly for the general than he was able to do for the last three decades of his life.

Photo of the Day: ‘Hancock the Superb,’ War Hero—and Presidential Also-Ran

In thinking of an image for today, Election Day, I thought of sites in Washington, DC, that might represent the stakes this country has faced and its best values. The usual buildings—the Capitol Dome, the Supreme Court, the Washington Monument—didn’t quite do it for me.

Then, in sorting through photos I took in November 2015 while on vacation, I was struck by this bronze equestrian statue at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 7th St., N.W. From everything I’ve read, sculptor Henry Jackson Ellicott captured the inspirational presence of General Winfield Scott Hancock on the battlefield.

It has been over 30 years since I visited Gettysburg, so I don’t recall the statue in his honor there. And I have never seen the bust of him in New York’s Hancock Park, at St. Nicholas Avenue, Manhattan Avenue, and West 123rd Street. But it’s hard for me to imagine a more uplifting tribute than the one I saw in DC.

Have you ever heard of a more laudatory nickname than “Hancock the Superb”? In Civil War battlefields stretching from the Peninsula Campaign to the Siege of Petersburg, this career U.S. Army officer lived up to his reputation. Brave but not rash, confident but not egocentric, he gave heart to men with the deafening din of cannons and crack of rifles in their ears.

If you’ve seen the epic 1993 movie Gettysburg or read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel it was based on, The Killer Angels, you might know of his part in that pivotal battle of the war: how he scouted out the terrain, prepared the “fishhook” defense of the Union Army, and rallied his II Corps to make its crucial stand against Pickett’s Charge.

As that furious assault took place, Hancock was wounded—badly enough that he had to recuperate for six months afterward—but he remained on the field until victory was secured.

Cool-headed in victory, Hancock displayed equanimity in defeat. In 1880, he was beaten decisively by another former Union general, James Abram Garfield, in the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote by only 7,000—the slimmest margin ever for an also-ran.

At least one candidate today might regard Hancock as a “loser,” but he was unfazed by what others would perceive as heartbreaking. “It has been a complete Waterloo for you,” his wife said the next morning in waking him with the bad news. “That is all right,” he responded. “I can stand it.”

Hancock died five years later. In 1889, the appropriation for the proposed DC statue in his honor—$50,000—was considered steep for the time. But a grateful Congress thought the tribute worth it, and allocated the sum.

Ulysses S. Grant gave a characteristically concise but astute assessment of his corps commander in his Personal Memoirs:

“His name was never mentioned as having committed in battle a blunder for which he was responsible. He was a man of very conspicuous personal appearance. Tall, well-formed and, at the time of which I now write, young and fresh-looking, he presented an appearance that would attract the attention of an army as he passed. His genial disposition made him friends, and his personal courage and his presence with his command in the thickest of the fight won for him the confidence of troops serving under him. No matter how hard the fight, the 2d corps always felt that their commander was looking after them.”

Throughout most of American history, losing candidates are often forgotten. This is one who should not be. It was because of him and service personnel of similar fiber that you and I still have a country.

Photo of the Day: ‘Gettysburg Gun,’ Rhode Island State House

Two years ago this fall, on a short visit to Providence, R.I., I came upon one of the neatest little jewels in New England: the Rhode Island State House. I didn’t expect to find such a grand, stylish capitol in the smallest state in the Union—though I would have if I’d known beforehand that it was designed by the prestigious New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White in 1891-94.

But the surprises started coming at me as soon as I entered the building. On my left, in the North Portico of a structure meant for the peaceful debate and management of opposing ideas, was an imposing representation of what could happen when civility and compromise are no longer the order of the day: a brass cannon taken from the turning point of America’s bloodiest, most fratricidal war.

The cannon, known as "The Napoleon" during its lifetime, was last fired 154 years ago today, at the Battle of Gettysburg, and consequently is better remembered today as the "Gettysburg Gun." You can better understand why it was never used again when you notice the large cannonball stuck in its muzzle. 

The cannon went out of service at the worst possible time: early in the afternoon, Rhode Island’s Battery B unit was gearing ready for its midday meal when Robert E. Lee ordered the largest artillery bombardment witnessed in the Western Hemisphere to that time, meant to weaken and confuse Union lines prior to “Pickett’s Charge.”

The fourth gun of Battery B had sustained minor damage from two prior hits when another shell exploded. Two soldiers tending to the gun were killed, and a dent to the muzzle from the explosion necessitated that the gun be moved to the rear.

Early on, Gettysburg assumed such legendary proportions that anything associated with the battle became objects of curiosity, even reverence. So it proved to be with Battery B’s cannon, which remained on exhibit in Washington for around a decade after the battle, when it was finally moved back to Rhode Island. 

To my knowledge, it has left the State House on two occasions since then: in August 1962, when it was taken away for 24 hours to remove two and a half pounds of aging, highly dangerous black gunpowder that had been discovered, and in 1988, when it was brought back to the battlefield for the 125^th anniversary of its last use.

The sight of the “Gettysburg Gun” filled me with wonder when I saw it. Since then, this relic has only accrued a meaning I could never have imagined at the time.

Like the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg, the turmoil surrounding Rhode Island’s Gettyburg Gun was the product of confusion, error, and a system that unexpectedly underperformed. Its outcome demonstrated that a democratic republic is also a near-run thing, a fragile point to be defended even when matters seem most hopeless, dependent on multiple people of judgment and heroism ready to rush to contain the damage from a breach.

Quote of the Day (Michael Shaara, With an Irish Soldier’s View of the Civil War)

“ ‘The truth is, Colonel, that there's no divine spark, bless you. There's many a man alive no more value than a dead dog. Believe me, when you've seen them hang each other...Equality? Christ in Heaven. What I'm fighting for is the right to prove I'm a better man than many. Where have you seen this divine spark in operation, Colonel? Where have you noted this magnificent equality? The Great White Joker in the Sky dooms us all to stupidity or poverty from birth. No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There's many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don't think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. 'Tis why I'm here. I'll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I'm Kilrain, and I God damn all gentlemen. I don't know who me father was and I don't give a damn. There's only one aristocracy, and that's right here’—he tapped his white skull with a thick finger –‘and YOU, Colonel laddie, are a member of it and don't even know it. You are damned good at everything I've seen you do, a lovely soldier, an honest man, and you got a good heart on you too, which is rare in clever men. Strange thing. I'm not a clever man meself, but I know it when I run across it. The strange and marvelous thing about you, Colonel darlin', is that you believe in mankind, even preachers, whereas when you've got my great experience of the world you will have learned that good men are rare, much rarer than you think.’”— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974)

Forty years ago today, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to one of the classic works of historical fiction published in this country, on the turning point in the conflict that redefined America: The Killer Angels, on the Battle of Gettysburg.

The manuscript by Michael Shaara had been rejected by 15 different publishers before finally being accepted by a small house. Even after winning the Pulitzer, it would take nearly another two decades before it gained the mass readership it deserved, after  release of the epic film adapted from it, Gettysburg, in theaters and on TNT (whose head, Ted Turner, was a Civil War buff) and after such historians as James McPherson hailed it for its accuracy.

There are many reasons, historical and literary, to embrace this novel: for its insistence on slavery as the ultimate cause of the Civil War; for its penetration into the minds of commanders; for its realism about the awful price of war; for redeeming the reputation of a brave Confederate general, James Longstreet, unjustly maligned by Southern historians and postwar advocates of the “Lost Cause” for not vigorously pursuing an assault on the Federal lines that he had correctly warned Robert E. Lee would be suicidal; and for spotlighting the colonel addressed in this passage, Joshua Chamberlain of Maine, responsible for holding the critical Little Round Top against a furious Confederate assault.

But I especially like its depiction of the warmth between Chamberlain and the sergeant addressing him here, Buster Kilrain, a stand-in for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants (very much including, as this passage indicates, Irish ones) who fought for the Union. Shaara rendered him so vividly that tourists to Gettysburg  have left disappointed to discover that he was a fictional character. They shouldn't be: Kilrain lives as surely as another person with Ireland in the veins, Scarlett O'Hara. 

Kilrain doesn’t have the soaring ideals that animate Chamberlain, but his motive for fighting is noble enough: the determination to show that he is not only as good as any other man, but can even be better.

Aging, out of shape, Kilrain is walking cannon fodder, and his hand-to-mouth existence in his native land has left him utterly without illusions about human nature. But his experience with the unfair advantages of a landed gentry in Ireland (he comes from the west of that country, County Clare, from where my father and his ancestors hailed) have led him to realize that the other side in this fight will perpetuate a system of encrusted privilege very much like it, and he will fight it in favor of “justice” and an aristocracy based on natural decency in its stead. By the battle’s end, Kilrain will prove that he belongs to the elite group of “good men” that he believes is rare.

Evidently, I’m not the only reader and viewer enthralled by the story of Kilrain within the larger canvass of The Killer Angels. So is musician Steve Earle, according to this post by Chris Mackowski on the blog “Emerging Civil War.” Earle has gone as far, in “Dixieland,” as to sing from the point of view of Kilrain: “I damn all gentlemen/Whose only worth is their father’s name and the sweat of a workin’ man.”

(The image accompanying this post is from the stirring film Gettysburg, faithfully adapted from Shaara’s novel, with Jeff Daniels, on the left, playing Col. Chamberlain and the marvelous character actor Kevin Conway, on the right, embodying unillusioned, decent, heroic Kilrain.)

This Day in Civil War History (Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg)

July 3, 1863—Stymied after two days of repelled attacks on the Union Army at Gettysburg, Penn., General Robert E. Lee ordered a massive cannonade fire, followed by a 12,000-man infantry charge under a hot, midday July sun, toward what he believed to be a perilously weak Federal center at Cemetery Ridge. But Pickett’s Charge ended disastrously for the proud Army of Northern Virginia, which never again pushed so far north nor enjoyed a string of major successes.

In comparison with Antietam Battlefield, Gettysburg suffers more from development and honty-tonk exploitation in town. But for the immense struggle that took place here, it deserves its pride of place in the annals of American military history. Over 20 years ago, I spent a full day visiting the battlefield, looking out over such storied place names as Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, The Devil’s Den, and, of course, “The Angle,” marking the so-called “Highwater Mark of the Confederacy.”

Location, Location, Location

In the real estate business, the mantra is “location, location, location.” The look I had from the high points on the battlefield in this small Pennsylvania farm community proved that this motto applies just as strongly in the military.

By late morning of the 3rd, the Army of the Potomac had consolidated a line resembling a fishhook from Big Round Top to Culp’s Hill. Dislodging them at this point was well-nigh impossible. Lee’s strong right arm, General James Longstreet, surely thought so, and he would have known all about strong defensive positions, having defended from one against a charge of hopelessly brave Irish soldiers in the Union Army on Marye’s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

So why did Lee give the order to advance? For a long time, historians didn’t even get to this part of the question, really: They were more interested in trying and convicting Longstreet of being so dilatory in following his chief’s orders that he essentially lost the battle for the South. Nowadays, they are more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

This brings us back to Lee’s inexplicable decision. And here, I’m afraid, we are less in the realm of cold military strategy and tactics and more into the thickets of human psychology. As the fine Civil War historian Stephen W. Sears noted in an adept summary of the battle in the Summer 2003 issue of MHQ Magazine, Lee had just experienced two days in which trusted subordinates had either disobeyed orders or seriously let him down:

* Maj. General Henry Heth precipitated the battle in the first place by disobeying Lee’s order not to engage any part of the Union Army until the entire Confederate Army was together.

* Lieutenant General Richard Ewell, the replacement for Lee’s beloved Stonewall Jackson—a man who knew how to intuit exactly what his boss wanted—had failed to follow up a good day of fighting on July 1 by seizing Cemetery Hill.

* Major General J.E.B. Stuart had ridden off on a wild ride completely around the Federal Army, depriving Lee of important military intelligence on where and in what numbers the enemy were vulnerable.

* Ewell—him again!—protested twice when Lee wanted to shift the Second Corps from the army’s left flank to its right. Each time, Lee gave in.

Now here was “Old Pete” Longstreet, following the same script as the other generals. By now, it may not have mattered how valid or even unassailable his logic was. Lee was not to be messed with, particularly when his blood was up. He was not only one of the most aggressive commanders on either side of the war, but at this point he might have felt, despite his professed humility, the most messianic.

Especially after the stunning blow his men had delivered to the Union at Chancellorsville, he felt that the Army of Northern Virginia was capable of anything he asked it to do. Moreover, He might not have enough time to be around for the special destiny God had prepared for him: He was starting to feel the first hints of the heart disease that would kill him in seven years. For all these reasons, Longstreet could tell his chief would brook no further delays.

No "Shiny Penny," He!

In visits to historic sites, you’re not only likely to receive some geography lessons mixed in with your history, but also a bit of psychology. So it proved with a battlefield tour guide who told me, my brother, and my sister-in-law about one particular soldier in the battle: Alexander Schimmelfennig, one of the so-called “political generals” on both sides who occupied positions of powers higher than their talents deserved.

At one point in the battle, our guide explained, Schimmelfennig avoided the whir of fire by jumping into the first area where he could see a hole. That hole, the guide said, proved to be counterproductive, because it was still a functioning pigsty. In German, “Schimmelfennig” might mean “shiny penny,” our guide indicated, but he sure wasn’t a shiny penny after that!

Two Other Sites Providing Insight into Gettysburg

Two other sites, hundreds of miles removed from the battlefield, also provide fascinating sidelights on Gettysburg. Richmond features Hollywood Cemetery, the final resting place not only for former U.S. President John Tyler (the only one, incidentally, who died no longer a citizen of his country, as he had thrown in his lot with the Virginia secessionists), but also Confederate President Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, and, most of all, General George E. Pickett.

The name of the military action that immortalized the latter is a bit of a misnomer. Pickett himself was not at the head of his army—he stayed back, the way generals are supposed to do, so they can see what is happening on the field. A good thing he did, though, because, of all his field-officers in the three brigades, only one major emerged unhurt; two of his three brigadier generals died, and the third was grievously wounded.

Pickett, who ended up his days 10 years after the war in a somewhat less glorious profession—insurance salesman—lies buried in Hollywood Cemetery facing the men he led. Many of them had been buried on the field where they fell, but in 1872 they were reinterred and placed here. The plot was originally reserved for soldiers, but eventually the general’s widow, LaSalle Corbell Pickett—his third wife, a woman who played an indelible part in shaping his postwar legend—came to be buried alongside her husband.

The second site that evokes Gettysburg is in a much more urban environment—the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia. Its Website calls it “the oldest chartered Civil War institution in the United States created to preserve the history of that conflict.” Though there are some Confederate items here, the strength of its holdings, I found when I visited a few years ago, lies in its Union holdings.

On the way to the third floor, for instance, is a copy of a large painting of “Pickett’s Charge” by Peter Rothermel. The first floor contains a room dedicated to Major General George Gordon Meade, the Union commander at Gettysburg, including his war horse, “Old Baldy,” stuffed and mounted in a display case.

Immediately after the battle, Meade disappointed many observers (including Abraham Lincoln) by not destroying the remnants of Lee’s army as they straggled back to Virginia. Dealing with 22,000 casualties of his own, however, Meade was not in a position to engage in another fight to the death so soon after the first one. Moreover, his actions during the battle itself really cannot be faulted.

In fact, if there was one major reason why Robert E. Lee finally lost here after his remarkable string of victories, it was because he was finally facing, in General Meade, a competent commander—someone with a keen appreciation of positioning forces and the ability to follow up to ensure that his subordinates were where he needed them to be—and if they weren’t, that he could find someone, fast, who soon would be.