The Least Irredeemable Confederate General Is Finally Getting His Day in the Sun

It’s hard to see Elizabeth Varon’s new biography of James Longstreet becoming a runaway bestseller, and that’s a shame, because her study of the Confederate general—one of Robert E. Lee’s closest confidants, yet an outcast in the post–Civil War South for his embrace of Black emancipation and civil rights—is insightful, well-executed, and sorely needed. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies with its dry subtitle. The addition of a single word, though admittedly anachronistic, might have livened things up and drawn in a whole new cohort of readers. Varon describes her famously mercurial subject as “gloomy” and “in a funk,” struggling to “fight his way out of his slough of despond,” harboring “a fatalistic despair.” Tell me, who wouldn’t read Longstreet: The Emo Confederate General Who Defied the South? Just as the work of rappers Eminem and Mos Def inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s approach to composing Hamilton, it’s easy to imagine a musical based on Longstreet’s life channeling the soaring, aching strains and overwrought lyricism of Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday.

To be sure, Longstreet had a lot to be mopey about. Most crucially, as depicted in Ronald Maxwell’s 1993 film Gettysburg, Longstreet advised Lee, on the second day of the 1863 battle, that a planned assault by Confederates on the Union-held high ground at Cemetery Ridge the following morning would be a disastrous mistake. Tom Berenger, who plays Longstreet in the film, brilliantly emphasizes his character’s brooding, deep-eyed pensiveness. “George, can you take that ridge?” his ridiculously faux-bearded Longstreet solemnly asks General George Pickett, who, already saddled up for battle, responds only with a delusional, overconfident grin. Longstreet turns away, hunched over with foreboding, nearly in tears, as the soundtrack cuts in, heralding slaughter and doom.

Offering an updated analysis rather than significant archival finds, Varon’s narrative bears out this familiar portrait of a worrying, wounded commander, even if she rejects previous scholars’ contention that this attitude impacted his performance in the field. For the rest of his long post-Gettysburg life—born during James Monroe’s presidency, he died under Theodore Roosevelt—Longstreet would fend off accusations that, frustrated by Lee overruling his advice, he executed his marching orders that climactic third day at Gettysburg only reluctantly and lackadaisically, leading to the Confederates’ devastating, perhaps all-determining defeat.

Those accusations were largely fueled by ex-Confederates’ anger that Longstreet had even more inexcusably betrayed the Southern cause once the war ended. As the victorious North took up the work of managing slavery’s demise and reuniting the country—most boldly by passing constitutional amendments enshrining racial equality in the nation’s foundational law—Longstreet did something that remains startling and difficult to explain: He embraced Reconstruction and joined the Republican Party. While Varon’s biography sags somewhat in detailing Longstreet’s maneuvering during the war and in recounting the various political offices he held in the decades long after it, the book comes to life narrating Longstreet’s activities during Reconstruction and analyzing his possible motives for accepting the outcome of the war. Alone among leading Confederates, he bowed to the North’s right to dictate the terms of peace.

Within five years of Appomattox, Robert E. Lee’s former lieutenant was leading Black militiamen into battle against white insurrectionists—his own onetime comrades in arms.

Varon, a distinguished historian at the University of Virginia and the author of previous works focused on white Southern dissenters, is careful to emphasize how all of this would have been anathema to Longstreet before the war—indeed, right up until Appomattox. Born in South Carolina in 1821, Longstreet spent a formative decade of his youth under the tutelage of an uncle in Georgia, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a leading Southern intellectual and prominent supporter of both slavery and secession who once gifted his 11-year-old nephew the ownership of eight enslaved people, at least one of whom would remain under Longstreet’s dominion through the Civil War. When the Southern states seceded, Longstreet aggressively lobbied for and received a commission in the Confederate army. He was known for giving pep talks to his men that were so fearsome and grisly they were said to have “the ring of true metal.” In one, he urged his soldiers to target the Northerners with especial vigor, for they had “attempted to make the negro your equal by declaring his freedom.”

All the more startling, then, was Longstreet’s post-war conversion to the view that the formerly enslaved deserved not only freedom but equal rights in the reconstructed South. Varon sees this transformation as based in part on his understanding of the terms of the surrender he helped negotiate at Appomattox Courthouse with Ulysses S. Grant, an old West Point chum who was also married to Longstreet’s distant cousin. Most Confederates saw the South’s defeat as merely reflecting the North’s “overwhelming numbers and resources,” as Lee put it in a letter to his soldiers. As Varon writes, “The Lost Cause take on defeat was designed to preempt social change: by denigrating Northern victory as a mere show of force, Southerners hoped to deny Northerners a political mandate for Reconstruction.”

Longstreet, by contrast, recognized “that the Union had won a moral as well as a military victory.” He appreciated Grant’s warm embrace of him at Appomattox, where a Northern reporter described Longstreet as otherwise “very morose and taciturn.” (As I say, the musical writes itself.) Longstreet took seriously the terms of Grant’s parole to Confederate soldiers, which allowed them to go home so long as they obeyed “the laws in force where they may reside.” And those laws, he understood, were about to change. The North had won the war, so had every right to see that the political ideals for which it fought were achieved—even if that meant emancipation of 4 million enslaved Black people, even if that meant granting the men among them the right to vote. By 1867, Longstreet was arguing that white Southerners should disavow the states’ rights philosophy and white-supremacist principles that had led them to secede. “There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors,” he contended. “Nor is there any occasion for a feeling of humiliation. … Let us come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle.”

Varon is scrupulous and discerning in sifting through the various explanations that have been offered over the years for Longstreet’s break with his fellow white Southerners, particularly the claim that he was seeking to gain financially from federal patronage. In the short term, however, his new allegiance cost him his job at a cotton brokerage he had helped found. It also ruined his once close relationship with Robert E. Lee, who spurned Longstreet’s request for an expression of public support.

A more intriguing possibility Varon floats is that Longstreet had lost so much personally during the war that he had grown accustomed to saying goodbye to once beloved things, whether they be people or ideas. In just one week in January 1862, he and his wife lost three of their four living children to a scarlet fever epidemic raging through the Confederate capital of Richmond. (They had previously lost two infants in the years before the war.) Longstreet took a brief leave to console his wife, then returned to the front “a changed man,” his closest aide recorded. In one of his letters announcing his position on Reconstruction, Longstreet wrote, “If the last funeral rites of the Southern Confederacy have not been performed, let us, with due solemnity, proceed to the discharge of that painful duty, and let us deposit in the same grave the agony of our grief, that we may the better prepare ourselves for a return to the duties of this life.” After having buried five children, perhaps burying his allegiance to the Confederacy was nothing.

Unsurprisingly, most white Southerners bitterly rejected Longstreet’s entreaties and condemned him as a traitor on par with Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold. Several critics said it would have been better for the general had he died of his wartime wounds. “Demonizing Longstreet,” Varon notes, became an essential element of the Lost Cause project to regain white power in the South. Longstreet’s prominence made his apostasy an especially dangerous threat.

Longstreet devoted his life after the war to building up the multiracial Republican Party in the war-torn South. He enthusiastically endorsed Grant’s bid for presidency in 1868. (In Varon’s canny assessment, “Grant provided Longstreet the very approval that Lee withheld.”) He took a patronage job as surveyor of ports in New Orleans—there, he was widely criticized by fellow whites for hiring Black employees—then agreed to serve as the general in charge of state militia and police forces in the city, where white Democrats were organizing, as elsewhere in the South, to violently overthrow the popularly elected government. In the liveliest and most distressing pages of Varon’s book, we follow Longstreet into vicious street battles with these rebels as they launch a briefly successful coup against the state government, one which, though reversed with the arrival of federal reinforcements, sounded the death knell for Reconstruction in Louisiana.

Reminded of these showdowns and massacres—such as the murder of hundreds of Black activists in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873—one is forced to the recognition that there was indeed a second American civil war. It came only a few years after the first one. It was scattered and dispersed, bloodcurdlingly violent at the local level, yet never quite congealed into a nationwide struggle. Still, it determined the country’s political future: Reconstruction ended; the Confederates won.

For the only prominent Confederate who switched sides for that second fight—thus earning himself not one, but two, lost causes to mourn—the reversal of Reconstruction was almost too much to bear. Ousted from office, Longstreet took refuge in relitigating his Civil War record, contending in interviews, essays, and eventually a mammoth-sized memoir, against uncontrite ex-rebels who wanted to pin the blame for the South’s military defeat on the man who had also brashly disavowed its essential ideas. As it is today, arguing over the Civil War was then another way of doing politics: Longstreet hoped that emphasizing the military aspects of the conflict would eventually cool the sectional animosity that had brought all the bloodshed in the first place.

Amid the drive in recent years to remove monuments to unapologetic Confederates, several commentators have suggested that memorials to Longstreet should be raised in their place. Varon rejects these suggestions, noting that “Longstreet has never fit the profile of a marble man”; he was far “too complex and contradictory.” Had Longstreet got his way during the war, “slavery would have persisted,” she notes. Even his later career reflected a less-than-wholehearted commitment to racial equality. Longstreet seems to have favored Black people’s involvement in politics only so long as they remained compliant with the directives of white leaders. He opposed a civil rights bill before Congress in 1874 because it might “exasperate the Southern people” and “endanger the lives of the blacks.” In the mid-1880s, Longstreet even briefly advocated the creation of a “white man’s party” in the South—a ham-handed, quickly aborted attempt to deny the Democrats’ contention that the GOP was simply a vehicle for “negro rule.” Offended by the proposal, one Black paper dismissed Longstreet as a “whitewashed relic of the confederacy.” Another, the still-extant Christian Recorder, official outlet of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, dryly commented, “Old dogs cannot be learned new tricks.”

Varon’s refusal to force Longstreet into “the mold of either hero or villain” is a refreshing counterpoint to the impulse that seems to drive so much history writing today—as well as, far more influentially, popular representations of the past on screen and on stage. Her book reminds us that the point of reexamining the past is not to find new people to chastise or commemorate but to deepen and complicate our understanding of ideas, institutions, incidents, and individuals, to make us newly alive to the messiness and contingency of the past and present alike. Here’s hoping some gifted librettist with access to funding picks it up at the airport and reads it on the beach.