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.

Video of the Day: Orleans’ ‘Love Takes Time,’ Live, 2013

Others may prefer “Dance With Me” or “Still the One,” but my favorite among the pop band Orleans’ trio of mid-Seventies hits was "Love Takes Time." A fine concert 1991 version in Japan, with keyboardist Larry Hoppen on lead vocal, exists on YouTube. 

But I’ve come around to thinking that this 2013 performance by the group at the Perkins School for the Blind’s “Possibilities Gala” is particularly special. The suicide of Hoppen the year before had, by the time of this appearance, deprived the group of its soaring tenor voice. 

But John Castillo, a powerful sight-impaired alum from the Perkins School, who comes in toward the end of the first verse, fills in admirably; the Perkins Secondary Chorus blends their harmonies smoothly with the group; and the violinist supplies textures that even the original single did not possess. 

I do not know how long it took for Orleans and the Perkins School musicians to rehearse, but the final performance is one of wonder and exhilaration.

Katrina and the 2nd ‘Great Migration’: An African-American Tragedy

I never thought, as I heard author Isabel Wilkerson lecture on “The Great Migration” of 6 million African-Americans from the rural Jim Crow South to comparatively freer urban Northern communities from the First World War to around 1970, that much of her talk this summer in Chautauqua in upstate New York would relate so much to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans a decade ago this past week.

Much of Wilkerson’s address, in fact, touched on matters even more recent than Katrina: the “metronome of names” of African-Americans dead in police shootings this past year, for instance, or the controversy over the Confederate flag in South Carolina. 

I didn’t think back on how it might pertain to New Orleans until I thought of her discussion of the lingering and interrelated effects of racial and economic inequality. She took her comparison of America to “a house, hundreds of years old” and extended it to what happens when you don’t look too closely at a home.

“When you have a storm, you might not want to go into the basement because you don’t know what you might find,” Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns, told the packed audience at Chautauqua’s Amphitheater in the first week of August. “But if you ignore it, you ignore it at your own peril. Whatever rises up will come back to haunt you. Whatever we have ignored will not go away until we face up to it, examine it, address it and resolve it.”

You would think, given all the retrospectives on Hurricane Katrina in print, on TV and the blogosphere, that Americans are doing anything but “ignoring” the crisis that made us look like a powerless Third World country a decade ago. 

But a startling fact, with even more astonishing implications, seems to be getting lost amid all the words on the hurricane. I’m afraid we are doomed to repeat the Katrina experience unless, as Wilkerson puts it, we “face up to it, examine it, address it and resolve it.”

What I am thinking of is this: 100,000 fewer African-Americans reside in New Orleans now than before the flood, and a deeper social and economic gulf has opened between them and whites than existed before.

African-Americans are only a portion of the hundreds of thousands displaced by Katrina, not only in the Crescent City but in the larger Gulf Coast. But because of geographic concentration, they had left their imprint on New Orleans. That impact, cultural at first, had become increasingly political since the civil-rights movement—until the storm, that is.

Then, in one fell swoop, the African-American equivalent of a mid-sized city was disenfranchised. It would be like all the residents of South Bend, Ind., Flint, Mich., or Elizabeth, N.J., being swept up in a tornado and dropped willy-nilly all over the map.

Moreover, this forced migration affected not just city but also state electoral contests, since an estimated 20,000 voters ended up in Houston.

For those African-Americans still in New Orleans, poverty has worsened, with annual median household incomes 54 percent lower than those of white families — and 20 percent lower than black households nationally. Not surprisingly, black neighborhoods have been much slower than white ones to rebuild.

African-American members of the New Orleans community not only found themselves politically and economically disenfranchised, but also left to contend with unsafe, unhealthy conditions. “The environmental problems caused by Katrina and the ways in which those impacts were disproportionately felt across the city could be seen in where floodwaters released toxic substances into the air and water; where damage to previously contaminated sites as well as water and sewage treatment facilities occurred; and where the debris and waste was placed and how it was disposed of,” charged California Rep. Barbara Lee in a piece for the Huffington Post five years ago.

The disparity in conditions between black and white that predated the storm, in other words, has not only lingered but has become entrenched.

Remarkably, though, a certain amount of self-congratulation has actually set in concerning the rebuilding effort. It is a different New Orleans that residents and tourists see today following the infusion of $120 billion in Katrina federal relief, we are told: safer, more prosperous.

What goes unsaid all too often is that it is the white sections of the city that have rebounded more quickly. From the beginning, many of the African-American sections were often regarded as unsalvageable. Thus began an experiment in social engineering best typified by former Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, who, only a few days after the storm, before a real assessment could be made of how much could be saved, voiced the dominant sentiment of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill: “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s article in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago celebrated “the courage of those who…decided to make a fresh start” by moving away from neighborhoods where African-Americans had lived for generations. The forced relocation, he noted, may have inadvertently helped many blacks break free of neighborhoods that perpetuated poverty across generations.

But African-Americans shouldn’t have been forced to make that choice in the first place. And they wouldn’t have if the United States Army Corps of Engineers had adequately strengthened the levees that served as the only thing standing between African-American neighborhoods and catastrophe; if the American public had not been so slow in coming to grips with the dire impact of global climate change (the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a report on “Hurricanes and Climate Change,” noted that the storm “significantly intensified when it hit the deep pools of warm water in the Gulf of Mexico”); or if the Bush Administration had only appointed an experienced disaster hand to head FEMA instead of political hack Michael Brown (recipient of a brief but notorious “heck of a job, Brownie” endorsement from President Bush).

Gladwell’s piece strikes me as more than a little reminiscent of histories that, for years, pedaled the notion that emigrants came to America simply to achieve a better life. It took Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted to depict the extent the anguish and alienation experienced by emigrants who had been forced out of lands they never wanted to leave to come to a country whose citizens often beheld them with hostility.

Gladwell writes of “the resilience and the spirit of those who chose to rebuild the neighborhoods they had lost,” but at the end of a long piece spelling out the frequent dysfunction of the older, poorer sections of New Orleans and the better life they embraced outside, that statement feels like so much lip service. 

It also downplays something crucial about what confronted these areas, post-Katrina: How can individuals make carefully considered intellectual decisions—how to deal with insurers, how to navigate a federal bureaucracy, or, even, less primally, how to participate in electoral life again—when they have just experienced severe emotional trauma? The African-Americans of the city’s Ninth Ward and other sections had just endured or witnessed death, injury, hunger, and property loss on a massive scale. How could they react with anything besides psychological immobilization?

The consequences of this occurred in City Hall as well as in the streets. Predictably, white neighborhoods gained in political clout at the expense of black ones, largely because of differences in turnout triggered by the displaced refugees. (For instance, in the 2006 mayoral race, turnout in the French Quarter and Garden District were barely affected, but in the largely black and middle class New Orleans East, turnout fell by 23% and in the less affluent Lower Ninth Ward it dropped by nearly 40%.)

Mayor Ray Negin managed to win re-election in the 2006 mayoral race, largely because of absentee ballots made available to the displaced. But, reflecting the chasm opening up between the black and white portions of the electorate, he won with a much less racially diverse base of voters than he had four years before. 

The fact that he did so well among African-Americans, despite performing abysmally during the crisis, also probably reflected the resentment many of those voters felt at white politicians who had not come close to addressing their needs. (Certainly he was a most unworthy beneficiary of their trust, as attested to by his subsequent conviction on 20 counts involving bribery, money laundering, fraud and tax violations during his two terms in City Hall.) Moreover, going forward, a large portion of the displaced absentee voters will not return to their lost neighborhoods.

As an Irish-American, I hear powerful reverberations of the Great Famine of the 1840s that propelled an earlier mass wave of human flotsam. A potato flight in those years started the trouble for the Irish peasants of that time, but it was the society produced by centuries of British misrule—and British mismanagement of the crisis in the mid-to-late 1840s—that produced the famine, disease, and the mass exodus to the U.S.

I could not help but agree, then, when I read President Obama’s words during his visit to the Lower Ninth Ward last week: "What the storm laid bare was another tragedy, a deeper tragedy that had been brewing for decades. We came to realize that what started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster, a failure of government to look after its own citizens."

The 20^th century Great Migration that Ms. Wilkerson discussed a month ago was partially initiated by environmental traumas similar in kind, if not degree, to Katrina (e.g., floods that destroyed the homes of sharecroppers, a widespread boll weevil infestation that wrecked their livelihoods). But it was also inspired by more hopeful developments, including greater opportunities for employment and voting rights in the North,

I wish I could hope that the mass migration this time in the Gulf Coast will produce the equivalent of children of the Great Migration who contributed enormously to American culture, such as Richard Wright, Miles Davis and Jesse Owens. But I fear that it will more likely yield up the feral products of a Darwinian struggle for existence, not unlike the social ills –poverty and crime—that led 19^th-century nativists already prejudiced to assail the Irish refugees from the Great Famine.

“How blind we were to think that Nature could be controlled by a lot of poured concrete, on swishy sand and peat soil, that wasn’t properly maintained,” historian and city resident Douglas Brinkley wrote in a retrospective on the hurricane for Smithsonian Magazine. It is a real question, going forward, if post-Katrina America will repeat the mistakes made earlier, particularly as they relate to the African-American victims of the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history.

(The image accompanying this post is of American Red Cross personnel attending to the largely African-American refugees in the Reliant Astrodome.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Kuralt, on New Orleans Names)

“After you get over the disappointment of the few numbered blocks, it slowly dawns on you that New Orleans rejoices in the most lyrical street names in the world. Where else can you take a walk down Narcissus Street, or Venus, Adonis, or Bacchus? Not only are the gods so honored, but also all the best human impulses, Community, Concord, and Compromise. On my way to the Pontchartrain lakefront one day, riding with a cab driver who blessed himself with the sign of the cross as we passed each Catholic church (but not the other churches), I took note of the names of the streets we crossed: Abundance, Treasure, Pleasure, Benefit, and Humanity. Then I remembered the name of the wide thoroughfare on which we were traveling, a boulevard so familiar that nobody thinks any more about the meaning of its name — Elysian Fields! The paradisiacal home of the blessed after death is best known, in temporal New Orleans, as the fastest way to get from the river to the lake.”--Charles Kuralt, Charles Kuralt’s America (1996)