★★★★☆ Courage and principle, betrayed by history

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

Elizabeth R Varon

My first knowledge of Confederate general James Longstreet came as a result of reading Michael Shaara's splendid historical novel The Killer Angels, which Elizabeth Varon, in Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South describes thus

A finely grained fictional account of the Gettysburg campaign, the book conjured the strained relationship of Longstreet and Lee, casting Longstreet as a prescient pragmatist oriented toward the future, who symbolized modern warfare, and Lee as the prideful romantic, backward-looking and resigned to fate.

Why had I never heard of Longstreet? Because the USA doesn't want to remember him.

At the end of the Civil War, Longstreet, unlike the huge majority of Confederate officers, accepted defeat. Longstreet was a great friend of Union general Ulysses S Grant, and he was inspired by Grant's generosity in victory to behave in such a way as to deserve it. (There is much more to say than this, and Varon of course says it, but that's a good place to start.) Most Confederate officers did not. They believed that they had been defeated by "might, not right" -- that they fought in a good cause (white supremacy, not to put too fine a point on it), that they deserved to win, and in a just world would have won. This ideology is called the Lost Cause, and it is far from dead in the USA even today, 22-Nov-2023.

Longstreet became a staunch Republican. (The Republicans, remember, were the party of Lincoln, those who fought for the abolition of slavery.) He went into politics in New Orleans, where he committed such unforgivable sins as building a mixed-race police force. For these reasons he was reviled by almost the entire Southern USA as a traitor. Lost Cause Confederate military officers sought to retroactively blame him for the defeat at Gettysburg, and thus the loss of the Civil War.

When in the late 19th and early twentieth century, Southerners sought to revive the Lost Cause ideology, they put up statues of Confederate generals all over the South. (I lived in Richmond, Virginia for five years, and I saw them.) But Longstreet, as valiant a soldier as any in the Confederate ranks, didn't get any statues.

That's why I had never heard of Longstreet.

Varon's new biography seeks to be fair to Longstreet. It is by no means a whitewash -- like all the Confederate officers, he was a traitor. And even after the war, his attitudes were hardly ones we would celebrate today. But he fought for the rights of black folks to be safe in their homes, to vote, to seek and hold office, and to be welcome at public accommodations. Varon sums him up thus

We like to bestow praise on historical figures who had the courage of their convictions. Longstreet’s story is a reminder that the arc of history is sometimes bent by those who had the courage to change their convictions. He accepted defeat with a measure of grace and tried to learn, and then to teach, the past’s lessons. And for that, he commands our attention as one of the most enduringly relevant voices in American history.

This is an excellent, even-handed biography of a man who deserves attention and justice.

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