All internet images removed from this post, sorry.
The Lost Cause was pretty much
created by Confederate General Jubal Early. The basics of it were that General Robert
E. Lee was just about a saint and a military genius, the martyred Stonewall
Jackson was indeed a saint, the war was about defending the Southern way of
life rather than slavery, and Longstreet was a prime reason that the war was
lost. The Lost Cause made the case that the defeated Confederates had fought
for honorable reasons. It bolstered the white southern reaction against
Reconstruction, Black suffrage and any whites who went along with it. Northern
whites who moved south and backed Reconstruction were termed carpetbaggers. Even
worse were southern whites who backed the new system and were termed scalawags.
Longstreet was the most prominent scalawag of all. Herein lies the root of his
fall from Confederate grace.
Longstreet was a South
Carolinian. In Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, officers from
Virginia were first among equals, and more equal than the others. These
officers were proud and prone to quarrel. Lee early on decided to
divide his army into two corps, one led by Stonewall Jackson, the eccentric and
highly aggressive soldier-professor from Virginia Military Institute. The larger one
was led by Longstreet, a life-long soldier in the US Army who had resigned his
commission after Fort Sumter and joined the Confederacy. Lee called Longstreet
his old war horse.
At the 1862 Battle of Second Bull
Run Longstreet’s corps made a powerful attack that broke the Union flank. Longstreet was methodical and slow, but he hit
like a mule once ready.
At the Battle of Antietam, Longstreet and his staff had to man two abandoned Confederate cannons to fool tired Union soldiers into thinking there was still resistance at that part of the line. The Confederates hung on by the skin of their teeth before retreating back to Virginia.
That winter Ambrose Burnside (whose
facial hair gives us sideburns) made a bone-headed frontal attack at
Fredericksburg against Longstreet’s meticulously entrenched position. Multiple attacks
failed with great loss.
In the Spring of 1863 Longstreet
was sent with part of his corps in a undecisive campaign in coastal North
Carolina. Meanwhile, Lee and Jackson had their most famous victory at
Chancellorsville. Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops. He lost an
arm, infection set in and he ascended into the pantheon of Confederate martyrs.
With Jackson gone, Lee decided to
divide his army into three corps, one led by the methodical, dependable Longstreet.
He promoted two others, Ewell who was nearly as eccentric as Jackson but cautious
and a bit over his head, and Ambrose Powell (AP) Hill. Hill had been a
brilliant if difficult and argumentative division commander, but would find
corps command a promotion too far. He also suffered from increasing bouts of
the venereal disease he’d contracted from a New York City prostitute back when
he was a West Point cadet. Hill and Ewell were no replacements for Jackson.
The unplanned battle of
Gettysburg started when Hill sent some troops into the town “looking for
shoes”. This was unlikely since other Confederate troops had been already been
there days before and could be guaranteed to have cleaned out any shoes on
hand. Hill was looking for a fight against Lee’s orders and he got one. Hill
and Ewell managed to beat the Union troops on the first day, pushing them back
through the town with heavy losses on both sides. Ewell cautiously decided
against a late day attack on the new Union position. The Yankees used this
breathing space to dig in; reinforcements streamed in during the night.
Longstreet arrived early the next
day with two of his three divisions. Lee wanted him to attack the Union left.
Longstreet wanted to go deep around the Union left and set up behind them,
forcing them to attack him. Lee vetoed this and ordered an attack. Longstreet,
sulking, went ahead. His attack was delayed when his first approach route was
found to be under Union observation. Finding an unseen route took some time.
When the attack finally went in, the Union left was in serious trouble. Hill
and Ewell failed to coordinate, allowing many Union troops to move to the
threatened sector and finally hold off the attack.
On the third day Lee reasoned
that both Union flanks had been pushed hard; their center must be thin. But by this time many of the troops sent to the embattled left flank had returned to their original positions. Longstreet was ordered to attack with his third division led by George Pickett,
along with some of Hill’s troops who had taken serious losses on the first
day of the battle. Longstreet said it was hopeless. Unable to change Lee’s
mind, he made the attack under protest. Pickett’s division of Virginians
managed to briefly break into the Union line but the attack was a massive
failure, with nearly half of the attackers killed, wounded or captured. What had
been a bloody stalemate was now definitely a Union victory. Longstreet was
furious at the loss of his troops and angry with Lee.
The Lost Cause blames the loss of
the battle on Longstreet on the second day. Hill and Ewell are absolved. AP
Hill was shot dead near the end of the war, getting him onto the Confederate
martyr list and likely freeing him from a horrific, lingering death from his
disease.
Longstreet went on to go west and
break the Union center at Chickamauga. At the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness, he
saved the Confederate right from utter defeat, then flanked and drove the Union
troops back. He was accidentally shot by his own troops, a few miles from where
Jackson had been hit the year before. Badly wounded, he was out of action for
nearly a year, returning to the army just before the end of the war.
After the war he joined Grant’s
administration. He had been the best man at Grant’s wedding before the war.
Longstreet and a few other Confederate officers supported Reconstruction and
Black suffrage. Longstreet was the highest ranking one. He criticized Lee for
Gettysburg, breaking a serious taboo. And he said he recollected much of the
talk before the war had been about protecting slavery. All of this ensured that
he was the target of much abuse. He was in charge of the Louisiana police and
militia, many of them Black, when the White League stormed New Orleans in 1874.
Longstreet tried to reason with the armed League. He was hit by a spent bullet,
dragged from his horse and captured. The 8,000+ strong White League charged and
routed the 3,600 police and militia, with over 100 killed or wounded. Later, Federal troops were called in and the White League backed down. After
Reconstruction was terminated and the Black vote suppressed, the White League erected a monument to the
rising with a plaque explicitly praising white supremacy. It was replaced by a bland,
anodyne plaque during the later 20th century. The monument was
removed in 2017 along with 3 other Confederate monuments by Mayor Mitch
Landrieu.
Longstreet continued to defend
his military decisions and his post-war politics until his death in 1904,
having outlived most of his Confederate peers. I submit that had Longstreet
joined in with the Lost Cause crew he would not be blamed for losing that
battle, or the butt of much of the other rancor he received.
I will leave the final comment on who lost Gettysburg to the marble man of the Lost Cause, Robert E. Lee. Upon meeting the shattered survivors of Pickett’s Charge, he told them over and again, “This is all my fault”.
