HOW LEE’S “OLD WAR-HORSE” GAINED A NEW FOLLOWING

Two dramatic scenes stand out in James Longstreet’s Confederate career. The first occurred on the evening of September 17, 1862, after a day of ghastly combat at Antietam that almost shattered the Army of Northern Virginia. Upon seeing Longstreet, R. E. Lee, who earlier had described his senior lieutenant as “the staff in my right hand,” extended a warm greeting. “Ah! here is Longstreet,” he said with evident relief that “Old Pete” appeared unhurt after the day’s carnage, “here’s my old war-horse.”32

That affectionate nickname stuck to Longstreet, who on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, found himself in the second of the two scenes. As Confederate infantrymen arrayed along Seminary Ridge awaited orders to advance, he met with Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, who oversaw Rebel batteries that had been firing at Federals along Cemetery Ridge. Manifestly upset, Longstreet spoke to his talented young artillerist, with slight pauses between each statement: “I don’t want to make this attack—I believe it will fail—I do not see how it can succeed—I would not make it even now, but that Gen. Lee has ordered & expects it.”33 Soon the Confederate brigades advanced in what became the most famous assault in American history.

Longstreet ended the war as a widely admired general who deserved a position alongside Stonewall Jackson as one of the two best Confederate corps commanders. That reputation soon underwent a drastic change. Unlike most former Confederates, Longstreet criticized Lee publicly, embraced reconciliation quickly and wholeheartedly, and became a Republican. Reaction across much of the South, swift and furious, cast him as a traitor to his old chief and to all who had fought for the short-lived slaveholding republic. Jubal A. Early led the way among the first wave of detractors, establishing a tradition followed by John B. Gordon and several generations of later critics. Longstreet had failed Lee at Gettysburg, these writers argued, proved a balky subordinate on other fields, and lied about events and comrades in his memoirs, titled From Manassas to Appomattox and published in 1896, and in other postwar publications.

Longstreet defended himself but proved no match for his tormentors. Although he remained popular among veterans of his First Corps, he finished his life as a pariah in the South. Hundreds of monuments soon sprouted across the southern landscape, many of them honoring soldiers far less important and accomplished than Longstreet, but none honored Lee’s “old war-horse.”

That changed in the summer of 1998, when supporters dedicated an equestrian statue on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg. Far from an artistic success in the minds of many, the statue nonetheless announced Longstreet’s official rescue from perdition within the world of Civil War memory.

Favorable treatment in Ron Maxwell’s film Gettysburg undoubtedly boosted support for the General Longstreet Memorial Fund, which raised money through the 1990s to commission this statue by artist Gary Casteel. Located on Seminary Ridge and dedicated in July 1998, the statue features a larger-than-life Longstreet on a somewhat oddly proportioned “Hero,” the general’s horse. Some visitors treat the statue as a shrine to Longstreet, placing coins in Hero’s upturned left-front hoof and small Confederate flags at the base. (Copyright Chris Heisey, reproduced with permission.)

Several forces came together to bring this turnaround. Longstreet’s admirers, some of whom rallied in support of the statue under the slogan “It’s About Time,” had long faced a difficult task. Biographers such as Hamilton J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad, whose James Longstreet: Lee’s War Horse (1936) remained the standard work for many years, had been very harsh. No historian had hurt Longstreet more than Douglas Southall Freeman. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning R. E. Lee: A Biography, Freeman presented a devastating portrait of Longstreet as a sulking, minimally gifted soldier. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, four biographies helped to rehabilitate Longstreet. Donald B. Sanger and Thomas Robson Hay’s James Longstreet: I. Soldier; II. Politician, Officeholder, and Writer (1952) offered a positive treatment based largely on published materials, while Wilbur Thomas’s General James “Pete” Longstreet: Lee’s “Old War Horse,” Scapegoat for Gettysburg (1979) mounted a no-holds-barred defense of its subject. William Garrett Piston’s Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in History (1987) dealt at length with the Lost Cause assault on Longstreet’s reputation, setting the stage for Jeffry D. Wert’s General James Longstreet, The Confederacy’s Most Controversial Soldier: A Biography (1993), a well-researched, carefully argued study that portrayed a gifted officer who did his best for the Confederacy.

The greatest impetus for Longstreet’s popular rehabilitation came from Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired director Ron Maxwell’s cinematic treatment titled Gettysburg (1993). Both the novel and the film depict Longstreet as a modern soldier who understood the killing power of Civil War weapons, preferred the tactical defensive, and sought to avoid useless effusions of blood such as the Pickett-Pettigrew assault. Juxtaposed against a tired and impatient Lee, whose aggressive instincts set up the climactic horror of the attack, Longstreet functions as the most perceptive and attractive character on the Confederate side. Indeed, the novel and film align very well with Longstreet’s own accounts of Gettysburg.

Longstreet surely deserves to be defended against critics influenced by the Lost Cause warriors, but modern readers should not get carried away with notions of him as a farseeing modern officer. A solid subordinate who reached his level of competence at the corps level and functioned best under Lee’s sure leadership, he had his share of bad days. Few generals mounted less-effective assaults than Longstreet’s against Fort Sanders at Knoxville on November 29, 1863, and his performance at Seven Pines in 1862 was equally dismal. In terms of tactical understanding, he fit comfortably within the framework of mid-nineteenth-century thinking. His operational and strategic imagination was far inferior to Lee’s in every way.

At his best on the tactical offensive while in Lee’s army, he delivered powerful blows at the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, and on May 6, 1864, at the Wilderness. He marched his men efficiently (Lost Cause writers shamelessly claimed otherwise), looked after them in camp, habitually brought units to the battlefield in excellent condition, and handled them impressively once fighting commenced. His courage was unquestioned, and Lee’s reliance on him was such that news of Longstreet’s wounding at the Wilderness proved deeply troubling. “I grieve to announce that Lieut Genl Longstreet was severely wounded,” he wrote with evident feeling to Secretary of War James A. Seddon a few hours after fighting ceased in the Wilderness.34 Lee’s continuing high opinion through the rest of the war best counters those who would diminish Longstreet’s well-earned stature.