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.

This Day in Civil War History (Jubal Early Ends Md. Invasion, DC Feint)

July 14, 1864—As he wrote his after-battle report to Robert E. Lee, Lt. General Jubal Early felt entitled to crow about the month-long campaign that ended the day before—a period in which he had roughed up the Federal army in the Shenandoah Valley, diluted the relentless pressure of Union troops against the Confederate capital in Richmond, and reached closer to Washington than any other rebel commander was able to do throughout the war.

Early the morning before, Early had slipped back into Virginia with his army. But, though his campaign had ended, questions about its purposes and results had only just begun.

Both Early’s contemporaries and later historians have proven ambivalent about his performance. But whatever triumphs he couldn’t win on the battle, he was always ready to claim victory on the written page.

A perpetually dyspeptic mouth, likely to erupt in a colorful torrent of curses at any given moment, when coupled with the large bald expanse on his scalp, accentuated “Ol’ Jube’s” image as the snapping turtle of the Confederate high command.

Early was constantly rolling cigars in his mouth, perhaps to get rid of the bad taste he felt because of widespread distrust of his loyalty and ability. He’d opposed secession all the way till the last minute and had only given his reluctant support when his home state of Virginia supported it.

Even service in the thickest fighting of the war—at Antietam, Gettysburg and the Wilderness—failed to overcome a reputation for being as fractious with fellow officers as with the Yankee enemy. Some in the army still blamed him for inaction on the first day of Gettysburg that contributed to the catastrophic Southern loss.

Now, Robert E. Lee—with his daring instincts coming to the fore again—proposed to give Early the same kind of opportunities he had once provided his trusted subordinate, the late Stonewall Jackson. Early’s mission: relieve Federal pressure off the critical railroad junction of Lynchburg, dash up the Shenandoah Valley, invade Maryland—and, if he judged the path open to him, attack the biggest prize of all: the Northern capital in Washington.

The first part of the plan worked like a dream, as Early pummeled Union General David Hunter at Lynchburg, then drove north into Maryland. By early July, he was heading toward Monocacy Junction, in the heart of what Abraham Lincoln’s War Department called its “Middle Department”—a theater of the war (Maryland, Delaware, and the eastern shore of Virginia) deemed uneventful enough so that a disgraced general could be safely consigned to it.

The only thing General Lew Wallace hated more than his assignment to this post was the lack of resources at his disposal to combat a force of Early’s size. Union Army Chief of State Henry Halleck had tried to pin the blame for the carnage at the Battle of Shiloh on Ulysses S. Grant, who in turn made Wallace his scapegoat. Now the former lawyer-politician found himself facing 30,000 Confederates around the Potomac.

Wallace got on a train that took him to Monocacy Junction in Maryland—positioned almost exactly between Baltimore and Washington—and over two days scraped together a makeshift force. In a four-hour battle beginning at noon, Wallace got the worst of it, with 1,880 casualties to only approximately 700 for the Confederates. But he had bought valuable time for the Union.

On July 11, Early was giving serious thought to an attack on Washington, which lay before him, virtually undefended—until he caught sight of the troops of Union General Horace Wright, who’d been ordered to DC on the double.

Early was dubious about his prospects: he no longer had the element of surprise, and, as he explained it in a postwar reminiscence published two decades later, his troops—who had been traveling 12-20 miles per day in the sultry summer weather—were succumbing to the heat. Under the circumstances, any plans for an attack on Washington were put in abeyance, along with any ideas about liberating Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout.

Early decided on a demonstration of force against Fort Stevens. Little did he know that on the Union side, a lanky fellow with a beard and a large dark stovepipe hat was observing the proceedings, serving as an easy target for Confederate sharpshooters. The salty Confederate would have chuckled at the advice given by a young Union officer –later Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—to Abraham Lincoln—“Get down, you damn fool!”

The South generally hailed Early’s raid, while the North was divided about how much good it did Lee and Jefferson Davis.

Within a few months, most of the Confederacy turned dramatically against Early. The failures of lackluster generals David Hunter and Franz Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley convinced Grant that he needed to eliminate it as a corridor for Confederate movements, as well as to deprive the Confederate government of its “breadbasket.” This time, he sent one of his most trusted subordinates, Philip Sheridan, against Early.

In three consecutive battles in the fall, Sheridan gave Early a drubbing. Public opinion turned sharply from Jubalation to violently angry. Thanking the general for his service, Lee still felt obliged to relieve him of command.

Worried that the North would treat harshly with him for burning Chambersburg, Penn., during a raid, Early scrambled to Canada after Appomattox. With lots of free time on his hands and the necessity of making ends meet, he was the first major military figure to come out with his memoirs. For the remaining three decades of his life, he found it fruitful to make people forget about his mistakes by making others—notably James Longstreet—look worse in comparison.

General Lew Wallace used his pen, too, but posterity has been kinder to him than to Early. Monocacy allowed him to achieve a measure of vindication with Grant. In the postwar period, he would serve on tribunals that would judge the Andersonville and Lincoln conspiracy defenders. A decade later, bored by his stint as territorial governor of New Mexico, he came to write in his spare time the classic best-seller Ben-Hur.