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: Lafayette McLaws Bust, Forsyth Park, Savannah, GA

If you want to experience the urban South at its most beautiful, you will want to take at least a stroll—and probably more—in Forsyth Park in Savannah. If you want to understand not merely the fierce persistence of the Civil War in the South, but its centrality in the region’s memories and myths, you’ll want to stop at Forsyth Park, too.

Along the park’s north-south axis towers the Confederate Monument to the city’s war dead. On one side of the monument is a bust dedicated to the memory of Col. Francis Bartow, who lost his life at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861. On the other is a similar bust paying tribute to Major Gen. Lafayette McLaws, a divisional commander of mixed achievement during the war—and one who, after Appomattox, found as much esteem as he would ever achieve by contributing to the South’s ongoing narrative of sacrifice. I took the photo seen here in November 2014, when I visited the park.

Graduating in the West Point class of 1842 at 48th out of 56, McLaws—born on this date in 1821—confirmed during the Civil War that he was a soldier of limited ability, best used when he could be carefully monitored. Robert E. Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, described McLaws as a “professional soldier, careful of details and not lacking in soldierly qualities, but there was nothing daring, brilliant or aggressive in his character.”

Acquitting himself reasonably well in the Battle of the Seven Days and Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, he proved more dilatory at Chancellorsville and, out west, at James Longstreet’s Knoxville campaign. His performance in the latter role led Longstreet, a classmate years before, to remove him from command, resulting in a court martial for McLaws. (Although McLaws came to Longstreet’s defense when the corps commander became a scapegoat for Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, McLaws understandably still appears not to have completely forgiven his former chief for his treatment of him during the war.)

In the postwar period, McLaws served as an insurance agent, internal revenue collector, and postmaster. But his military service remained closest to his heart, so he became involved with the Confederate Veterans Association of Savannah. He died in Savannah in 1897 and was buried in Laurel Grove Cemetery. 

It is hard to imagine this bust being anywhere else but where it is now. But it, along with the Barstow sculpture, had originally been placed in Chippewa Square.   

The busts, unveiled in 1902, were created by George Julian Zolnay (1863-1949), who had developed a reputation as “the Sculptor of the Confederacy” with monuments to Confederate spy Sam Davis and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Eight years later,  when the Savannah city council decided to make room in Chippewa Square for a memorial to the founder of the colony of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, they voted to move the McLaws and Barstow busts to Forsyth Park, where they have remained since.

These are the facts, in brief, of McLaws' life and his bust in Forsyth Park. But that cannot begin to summon the emotions that swirled around his life and his cause, even up to the present day. How much those emotions can be roiled was seen over the weekend,in the controversy over Lee-Jackson Day in another lovely, if smaller, Southern town, Lexington, VA. 

For the past decade, Lexington had been the site of a parade on Lee-Jackson Day celebrating Confederate heritage. This year, however, a group called the Community Anti-racism Education Initiative reserved a permit first. Hard feelings have developed. I am afraid we are going to see more of this kind of thing beginning January 20.

Flashback, August 1862: Lee Thrashes Gen. Pope at 2nd Bull Run

If John Pope wasn’t the most arrogant Union commander facing Robert E. Lee, he came close—and he seems to be the only one that got under the skin of the Virginian. That made all the sweeter the thrashing given by the Rebel forces to Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run from August 28-20, 1862. Only 13 months after overconfident Federals fled the battlefield in confusion, they narrowly escaped annihilation on the same ground.

(A short but necessary digression about nomenclature: Though this post is keeping the manner in which the Union referred to the battle, it has been called Second Manassas in the South. This conforms to the frequent differences in names that the two sides used. The North, many of whose soldiers came from urban areas, were impressed with some point of natural geography—in this case, the creek known as Bull Run. The South’s soldiers were more struck by a nearby community or railroad—in this instance, Manassas Junction. The same distinctions can be seen in Antietam vs. Sharpsburg, or Stones River vs. Murfreesboro.)

The Confederate victory, marking a distinct advance on Lee’s assumption of command at the Seven Days Campaign two months earlier, went so remarkably well, in fact, that one of the Virginian’s two principal lieutenants, General James Longstreet, would later observe that it was his greatest triumph of the Civil War.

For many, the Union defeat couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate guy than Pope. Having made a name for himself with a minor victory on the Mississippi, he had been called East by the Lincoln administration to command the Army of Virginia, a unit recently restructured from the forces of General Irwin McDowell, Nathaniel Banks and John C. Fremont—all his superiors in rank. Fremont, annoyed, resigned his command. It wasn’t an auspicious start for a campaign that would be marked by military politics.

Despite initial claims of cooperation by both men, Pope and General George McClellan, recently forced by Lee to abandon the Seven Days campaign against Richmond, were soon at each other’s throats. Pope wanted McClellan to withdraw from the Peninsula leading to Richmond in order to reinforce him. McClellan wanted to maintain his forces as a whole at Harrison Landing for a future campaign (which his detractors increasingly wondered would ever come).

McClellan could not have failed to notice the warm reception given Pope by the Radical Republicans in Congress. They were so grateful to find a commander who shared their vision of tearing up slavery root and branch that they didn't look terribly closely at his skills. They despised McClellan, who, in addition to being a Democrat with his own political ambitions and a badly concealed contempt for President Lincoln, was in no hurry to dismantle Southern property.

Sulking over his plight, McClellan was slow in sending reinforcements to Pope. This would have major consequences for the coming campaign. 

Pope made matters worse by simultaneously irking both his new force and the Confederates. Upon assuming command, in an address to his troops that would become notorious, he informed that he had come “from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.''

His men, many of whom had already fought bravely at the Seven Days and, in many cases, earlier, at the first Battle of Bull Run, chafed at the implications about their performance. Lee’s soldiers took careful note of this boasting, along with a later claim by Pope that his headquarters were “in my saddle.” (The joke about the latter was that for most people, their hindquarters were in the saddle.)

The Confederates were positively incensed, though, by Pope’s General Orders No. 7, which warned that the people of the Shenandoah would be “held responsible for any injury done to the track, line, or road, or for any attacks upon trains or straggling soldiers by bands of guerrillas in their neighborhood.” Anybody caught firing at soldiers from a home would be shot, “without awaiting civil process."

This would be an early example of the total-war tactics that would later be used by Grant, Sherman and Sheridan. Lee, not liking it a bit, would use one of his prized lieutenants to “suppress Pope.’

In the midst of organizing his army, sending memos out right and left, Pope had the misfortune of having Confederate cavalry leader J.E.B. Stuart raid his headquarters. (Luckily for the Union general, he wasn’t there.) The item that brought the most joy to the Rebels was Pope’s cloak, but the infinitely more valuable prize were his papers—including correspondence indicating that a portion of McClellan’s force would be joining Pope’s.

Lee had a choice: retreat in the face of what was likely to be overwhelming Union strength, or strike fast at Pope before he had a chance to concentrate his forces and McClellan’s against him. In another indication of his aggressiveness as a leader, Lee chose to strike.

In what would be his major organizational structure for the next year, Lee divided his army between corps commanders James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson. The latter, whose lethargic performance in the Seven Days campaign had lifted eyebrows, used this campaign to rebuild his reputation, with a more characteristic, lightning-fast march north and east to threaten Pope’s supply depot at Manassas Junction. Withdrawing west, Jackson moved to Stony Ride on August 28, attacking a Union column.

Results were indecisive that day, and after another day’s bloody fighting, Pope was convinced he could overwhelm Jackson at last. Little did he realize the trap he had fallen into: Longstreet had reached Jackson’s right flank and was ready to pounce.

On August 30, Longstreet raked Pope's forces with artillery fire and flung five divisions, or 25,000 of his men--the largest mass assault Lee would launch during the war--against Pope. It worked like a charm. The only disappointment was that Lee's soldiers were not able to pursue the battle of annihilation he desired: fierce resistance from a few regiments allowed the Federals to withdraw, and oncoming darkness and rain presented the terrible possibility that the Confederates would have been firing into their own ranks.

As it was, there was much to be pleased about the results: Union losses of 13,830, versus only 8,350 for the Confederates. The Federals were not only pushed farther away from Richmond, but even back toward Washington. 

Douglass Southall Freeman, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Lee, aptly summarized the all-around gains in achieved by his subject after the Seven Days campaign: “Like his tactics, Lee's strategy was better at Second Manassas than around Richmond. It was better because it was somewhat simpler, and, still more, because it placed responsibility in the hands of fewer men. This concentration of authority was one reason for success. Another reason was the excellent logistics. Lee's troop movements had been prompt and rapid. Lee's strategic plan succeeded, thirdly, because at nearly every stage of the campaign his reasoning from his evidence was sounder than his adversary's. He had drawn the right conclusion concerning the movement and destination of McClellan's army, and had been correct to the very day in his calculation of when Pope received his first substantial reinforcements from the Army of the Potomac.”

With the Federals thrust back farther away from Richmond, the momentum of the war—and the strategic initiative—lay with Lee, who now determined on a more daring thrust into the North, into Maryland—leading to Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history.