Posted on 07/04/2019 7:04:21 AM PDT by Antoninus
One of the advantages of the present media-driven furor to remove or demolish monuments to the Confederacy is that it is forcing numerous Americans, myself included, to dig deep into the history of the Civil War. And what a strange, convoluted period of history it is! The primary sources are plentiful, rich and deep which makes for endlessly fascinating reading. If the aim of the iconoclasts was to push this period of history even further from the national consciousness, or gloss over it with cherry-picked anecdotes allowing for knee-jerk verdicts, they have failed miserably.
For my own part, I have started looking into the lives and characters of the generals of the Confederacyand a more intriguing group of characters is seldom to be found. Having done some research into the Cherokee Confederate general, Stand Watie, I next moved on to another atypical rebel officer, General James Longstreet. As I was doing so, CNN published an article asking the question: Where are the monuments to Confederate Gen. James Longstreet? It's an interesting question. In truth, there are two that I was able to find. One at Gettysburg, and another in Gainesville, Georgia. Given his bio, however, the man deserves more recognition.
Most peoples familiarity with Longstreet stems from his role as Lees second-in-command at Gettysburg, and thus his prominent place in popular historical entertainment such as the movie Gettysburg and Michael Shaaras novel, The Killer Angels upon which the movie was based. Longstreets virtues and flaws as a military leader have long been the subject of spirited debate. But his career on the battlefield is not primarily what interests me here. Longstreets life after the war is, if possible, even more interesting than his deeds as Lees lieutenant.
During Reconstruction, Longstreet became a pariah to his southern compatriots. In the election of 1868, Longstreet endorsed his old friend from West Point, Ulysses S. Grant, and became a Republican. After winning the election, Grant appointed Longstreet to a customs position in New Orleans, and he was subsequently made a general in charge of the Louisiana state militia. As a result, he was ostracized by many in the South, who considered him a scalawag and a collaborator with carpet-bagging Union profiteers.
It was in his role as head of the Louisiana militia that Longstreet participated in an action that caused his name to be blackened even further within former-Confederate circles. Following a contested election in 1874, a Democrat mob known as the White League attempted to remove the Republican administration from New Orleans by force. Descending on the city in numbers greater than 5,000, they were confronted by a smaller number of largely Black police and militia headed by General Longstreet. As the two sides lined up for battle, Longstreet rode out to meet the rioters in an attempt to quell the matter before the sides came to blows. One White League leader later claimed that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he restrained his men from shooting Longstreet dead on the spot. Instead, they pulled him from his horse and took him prisoner. In the resulting fight, known to history as the Battle of Liberty Place, the White League caused Longstreets men to retreat, with about 100 dead and injured on both sides.
Federal troops were later called in to suppress the White League, free Longstreet and restore order. But Longstreets days as a military officer were now over, and his role in the affair attracted even more vituperation from those still attached to the Lost Cause. This rancor from his countrymen wounded him. In 1877, he had a religious awakening, as recorded in the book, Lee and Longstreet at High Tide (1904), by his wife, Helen Dortch Longstreet:
General Longstreet was a most devout churchman. In early life he was an Episcopalian, and he regularly attended that church in New Orleans until the political differences developed between himself and his friends. After that he noticed that even his church associates avoided him. They would not sit in the same pew with him. Cut to the quick by such treatment, he began to wonder if there was any church broad enough to withstand the differences caused by political and sectional feeling. He discovered that the Roman Catholic priests extended him the treatment he longed for. He began to attend that church, and has said that its atmosphere from the first appealed to him as the church of the sorrow-laden of earth. He was converted under the ministration of Father Ryan. After accepting the faith of the Catholic Church he followed it with beautiful devotion. He regarded it as the compensation sent him by the Almighty for doing his duty as he saw it. He clung to it as the best consolation there was in life. He went to his duties as devoutly as any priest of the church, and was on his knees night and morning, with the simple, loving faith of a little child. [Lee and Longstreet at High Tide, page 118]
Longstreet passed away of cancer in 1904 at the age of 82. He was buried in Gainesville, Georgia where the impressive statue shown above may be found today. By the time of his death, any animosity his Confederate comrades had felt for him was gone. Newspaper reports of the funeral service mentioned vast throngs of mourners arriving to pay their last respects. Lavish tributes to Longstreet poured in from all corners of the country. Following the funeral Mass, an oration was given by Bishop Joseph Keily of Savannah, Georgia who had fought under Longstreet during the Civil War. In that eulogy, Bishop Keily gave the man a fitting tribute, saying:
Having passed the span which Providence ordinarily allots as the term of human life, General James Longstreet has answered the roll-call of the great God. What a brilliant page in history is filled with his grand career .When the Southern States withdrew from the Union by reason of attacks on their reserved rights which were guaranteed by the Constitution, and were forced into the war between the States, James Longstreet offered his services and sword to the cause of self-government. No history of the war may be written which does not bear emblazoned on every page the story of his deedsIt is my duty as a priest of God to call your attention to the obvious lesson of this occasionthe vanity of mere earthly greatness and the certainty of death and the necessity of preparation for it. James Longstreet was a brave soldier, a gallant gentleman, but better stilla consistent Christian. After the war between the States, he became a member of the Catholic Church, and to his dying day remained faithful to her teaching and loyal to her creed [Lee and Longstreet at High Tide, page 219]
This seemed to sum up Longstreet in a nutshell. He was a man disappointed by political creeds offered to ephemeral temporal powers, who found fulfillment in loyalty to an eternal creed professed to an everlasting power.
By way of a postscript, I will mention the two extraordinary women in General Longstreets life. His first wife, Maria Louisa Garland Longstreet, passed away in 1890 after 40 years of marriage and 10 children. Surprisingly, he married again in 1897 at the age of 76 to Helen Dortch Longstreet. It was Helen who recorded many anecdotes about the general in the abovementioned book, Lee and Longstreet at High Tide. Interestingly, Helen lived to be nearly 100 years old, surviving until 1962 a full century after her husbands famous exploits during the Civil War.
These are truly amazing people worthy of remembrance.
Not duly elected by them. They lawfully seceded and were a separate country that was then attacked by the Lincoln administration without constitutional authority to do so.
Corruption in government and selling of influence? Yes, Modern Democrats, Civil War era Republicans.
Which taxed them at 12 times the rate of the North, and created laws to enrich New York at their expense.
And it was elected with absolutely zero support from any of the states that wanted to be disassociated from it.
Once again, big city Liberals imposed their Liberal candidate (Like Hitlery Clinton) on other people who did not want him, in an effort to further tax and spend the money produced by others for their own benefit.
The Founders left over much less.
Jmausa need remember the United States in 1860 were more like these united states - only 75 yrs old to the South, whos families sometimes go back double that. And, were not interested in their farms simply a dot on a map in some war room in DC; where some criminal Senator (I repeat myself) wanted to steal the land to give to his brother in law in MA because he wanted a summer place or horse farm. Ridiculous? They were exactly right as thats what the North did, as aptly put by Diogenes
Yeah. Splitting the nation in two and causing the deaths of some 600,000 Americans. Nice run.
More like 1861.
No they didn’t lawfully secede , they opened fire on Ft. Sumter.
Stop your lying. Slavery was already preserved, and Lincoln urged that it be even further preserved. This thing you just repeated is the biggest lie of the war.
Nobody in the North sent troops into the South to stop slavery. The South didn't have to do anything to preserve slavery other than remain in the Union, which in fact did keep slavery for 8 months longer than the South did.
This is propaganda to justify the murder and destruction from Big City Liberal Northerners who launched that nasty war against the South, not to free men, but to instead enslave men who defied their control.
They wanted control of that money stream, and virtually none of them gave a f*** about he slaves.
The North invaded them because they were an economic threat to the Robber Baron class that ran New York and Washington DC, and which still runs New York and Washington DC today.
Our enemies, the enemies of all conservatives are the big city tax and spend liberal who want us to pay the bills for their excessive government which does not benefit we taxpayers very much at all.
The South was fighting the same enemy then that we are fighting today, and it just took me many years to realize this.
Our nation is controlled by New York and Washington DC, and the news is liberal because this elects Liberal politicians which make sure all that big spending money funnels through all the right hands in New York City and Washington DC.
They are our rulers, and they fancy themselves our aristocrats, and they have fooled people like you.
Im 61 and raised in the Deep South and was avid in history since third grade and coincidentally my grandfathers horse farm lay where Grant and Pemberton and Johnston and Sherman all dallied their Corps back and forth mostly over the Vicksburg campaign
Grant was never underestimated by the general culture where I lived and not was Shreman though Sherman certainly wasnt popular
We all knew Grant and Sherman soldiered circles around Yankee born Pemberton and that Johnston had been indecisive and that Van Dorn was underutilized and Forrest none at all.
Lee lost the high ground end of the first day and was not on his game and lost the battle there....he should have moved his army then and looked for better ground but given their ability to overcome he I think grew overconfident maybe ...some say his angina pectoris was up
Who knows.....Longstreet was right but his actions after the war may have endeared him to the radical republicans and south bashers on this forum but it didnt help him much down here
The movie Gettysburg and the rise of the Macpherson school and leftism in civil war history today has also bumped Pete.
Ive got nothing against him...he was certainly able
Hood really got the worst of all of it....mangled despite his protestations at Gettysburg and then like Lee he too missed his chance at Spring Hill when Schofield got past him in the dark and then Hood in desperation slaughtered his forces within rifle shot of where I now type
Are you seeing a pattern here....we live surrounded by it....something you cant explain to folks ata distance or newer immigrants
Such is war isnt it...
why didnt Napoleon keep Blucher from returning to Waterloo or why didnt he stop Ney from committing troops and more importantly cavalry to action before he Napoleon was ready?
Why didnt Beauregard stream into Washington after McDowell after the first Bull Run?
Why did Hitler sleep through the morning of D Day and why didnt Von Rundstedt have him woken?
I tend to think Lee losing Jackson was damage beyond repair and Stuarts error hurt....Jackson unlike Longstreet maybe could have had more impact on Lee regarding choice of ground etc
Oh shut up. For crying out loud, the war ended 154 freakin’ years ago. Your side lost. Get over it.
Yes they did lawfully secede. Lincoln invaded their territory with a heavily armed flotilla of warships.
Lincoln was supplying a federal installation in peacetime. Hey , let me ask you something Reb. Why are you still fighting the Civil War? It’s been over for 154 years and your side lost. You think by arguing over it is going to change anything? Do you not like living in The United States Of America? Do you want to see the country split in two again?
Lincoln sent a heavily armed fleet with a possible landing force of up to 500 troops into South Carolina's sovereign territory. Let me ask you something, why are you towing the PC Revisionist line here? I'm accurately reporting what happened. I can accept that there are two different views. That was the consensus from about 1900 until the 1980s when the PC Revisionists in Academia - hardcore Leftist products of the 60s ers came along and decided to push the "it was all about slavery" line and to demonize Southerners in order to further their Leftist agenda. ie the same exact thing they're starting on now with the Founding Fathers, the original stars and stripes flag, etc. We Southerners told everybody else this was coming since the early 90s. We told everybody this was never going to stop at Confederate/Southern leaders and symbols. But to Northerners, Midwesterners and Westerners - even those who are otherwise Conservative, it did not matter because hey, those were the South's symbols and leaders being run through the mud, not theirs. Well, now we're here. Now it is national symbols and leaders they're starting on just as we said. I prefer a much more decentralized system of government with much more limited power, smaller budgets, lower taxes and a non interventionist foreign policy that we had prior to the 1860s than what we have now. As for secession today, I'm in favor of it because as was entirely predictable, with all power centralized in Washington DC there is no scope for California to be California and for Alabama to be Alabama. So everything becomes a very nasty fight to see who gets to impose their worldview on the other side. The chance of another conflict is real. I'd rather see the Left Coast and the Northeast go their own way and leave the rest of us alone.
Longstreet’s view of Lee’s order to assault Cemetery Ridge
“General,(Lee) I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.”
I just recognize this war undermined many very important principles that were the bedrock foundation of the Government which the founders left us.
This current Federal monster is a direct consequence of that war.
I said "Nobody in the North sent troops into the South to stop slavery."
Whether abolitionists joined the Army because they thought this would end slavery is immaterial to the point that the LEADERSHIP of the Union forces did not send the armies into the South (at the beginning of the war) to free any slaves.
As a matter of fact, the Maximum Leader, Abraham Lincoln had earlier tried to get an amendment passed that further protected slavery in the South.
It not rational to believe that a government offering even stronger protection to the institution of slavery, is going to war to stamp out that very thing they had previously attempted to guarantee. They clearly went to war for some other reason.
The claim that the war was over slavery is clever propaganda, but it isn't even close to the truth. Unfortunately people have had that drilled into their heads, and it's difficult to get them to even look at facts that disprove this claim.
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