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:For James Longstreet the UIC student, see James
Longstreet (security)|James Longstreet.



James Longstreet (January 8, 1821 – January
2, 1904) was one of the foremost generals of the
American Civil War, and later enjoyed a successful
post-war career working for the government of his
former enemies, as a diplomat and administrator.

==Early Life==

Longstreet was born in Edgefield County, South
Carolina | Edgefield District, South Carolina, but
grew up in Augusta, Georgia, until age 12 when his
father died and the family moved to Somerville,
Alabama. He was appointed to the U.S. Military
Academy by the state of Alabama in 1838. He
graduated from West Point in 1842, in time to
serve with distinction in the Mexican-American
War|Mexican War and rise to the rank of major. He
resigned from the U.S. Army in June of 1861 to
cast his lot with the Confederate States of
America|Confederacy in the Civil War.

==Career as Confederate General==

Longstreet was already highly regarded as an
officer, and he was almost immediately appointed
as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. He
fought well at the First Battle of Bull Run, and
earned a promotion to major general. Longstreet's
career took off in the summer of 1862 when Gen.
Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern
Virginia. During the Seven Days Battles,
Longstreet had operational command of nearly half
of Lee's army.

As a general, Longstreet showed a talent for
defensive fighting, preferring to position his
troops in strong defensive positions and compel
the enemy to attack him. Once the enemy had worn
itself down, then and only then would Longstreet
contemplate an attack of his own. In fact, troops
under his command never lost a defensive position
during the war. Lee referred to Longstreet
affectionately as his Old War Horse. (Longstreet's
friends generally called him Pete.) His record as
an offensive tactician was mixed, however, and he
often clashed with the highly aggressive Lee on
the subject of the proper tactics to employ in
battle.

Ironically, one of his finest hours came in August
1862, when he commanded what had become known as
the First Corps at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
Here, he and his counterpart in command of the
Second Corps, Lieut. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson,
switched their normal roles, with Jackson fighting
defensively on the Confederate left, and
Longstreet delivering a devastating flank attack
on the right that crushed the slightly larger
Union Army of Virginia. The next month, at the
Battle of Antietam, Longstreet held his part of
the Confederate line against Union forces twice as
numerous. On October 9, a few weeks after
Antietam, Longstreet was promoted to lieutenant
general, the senior Confederate officer of that
rank.

He only enhanced his reputation that December,
when his First Corps played the decisive role in
the Battle of Fredericksburg. There, Longstreet
positioned his men behind a stone wall and held
off fourteen assaults by Union forces. About
10,000 Union soldiers fell; Longstreet's men lost
but 500.

In the winter and early spring of 1863, Longstreet
bottled up Union forces in the city of Suffolk,
Virginia, a minor operation but one that was very
important to Lee's army, still stationed in
devastated central Virginia. By conducting a siege
of Suffolk, Longstreet enabled Confederate
authorities to collect huge amounts of
food—food that had been under Union
control—and send it to feed Lee's hungry
soldiers. However, this operation caused
Longstreet and 15,000 men of the First Corps to be
absent from the Battle of Chancellorsville in May.

Longstreet rejoined Lee's army after
Chancellorsville and took part in Lee's Battle of
Gettysburg|Gettysburg campaign, where he clashed
with Lee about the tactics Lee was using. This
campaign marked a fundamental change in the way
Longstreet was employed by Lee. In the past, Lee
had preferred to use Longstreet in defensive
roles, which were his strength, and use Jackson
and the Second Corps to spearhead his attacks. But
Jackson had been killed at Chancellorsville, and
now Lee wanted Longstreet—his best remaining
lieutenant—to fill that role.

Longstreet was willing and capable of doing so,
but he argued with Lee a number of times during
the battle of Gettysburg, essentially telling Lee
that his tactics were going to lead to defeat.
Longstreet advocated disengagement from the enemy
after the first day's battle, embarking on a
strategic flanking movement to place themselves on
the Union line of communication, and inviting a
Union attack. He argued that Lee had agreed before
the campaign that this "strategic offensive,
tactical defensive" would be the proper course.
But Lee had settled on the tactical offensive. On
July 2, the second day of the battle, Longstreet's
assault on the Union left nearly succeeded, but on
July 3, when Lee ordered Longstreet, against his
wishes, to attack the Union center in what became
known as "Pickett's Charge", the Confederates lost
7,000 men in an hour. Longstreet was right, and
Lee was wrong and immediately admitted as much,
but to many of Lee's admirers, such as Jubal
Anderson Early|Jubal Early and the Lost Cause of
the Confederacy|Lost Cause advocates after the
war, the lost battle was Longstreet's fault.

Lee never blamed anyone but himself for the
defeat, and in fact dispatched Longstreet to
Georgia (state)|Georgia that fall in response to a
desperate appeal for help from the Confederate
Army of Tennessee. That resulted in Longstreet and
14,000 of his First Corps veterans taking part in
the Battle of Chickamauga that September.
Longstreet led an attack of his men and some of
the Army of Tennessee men that routed the Union
Army of the Cumberland and won the greatest
Confederate victory ever in the western theatre.

Longstreet soon clashed with the much maligned
Army of Tennessee commander, Gen. Braxton Bragg,
when Bragg failed to capitalize on the victory by
finishing off the Union army and recapturing the
city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Longstreet became
leader of a group of senior commanders of the army
who conspired to have Bragg removed. The situation
became so grave that Jefferson Davis, President of
the Confederacy, was forced to intercede in
person. What followed was one of the most bizarre
scenes of the war, with Bragg sitting red faced as
a procession of his commanders declared him
incompetent. Amazingly, Davis sided with Bragg and
did nothing to resolve the conflict. Bragg not
only stayed in command, he sent Longstreet and his
men on a disastrous campaign into east Tennessee,
where in December, they were defeated in an
attempt to recapture the city of Knoxville. After
Bragg was driven back into Georgia, Longstreet and
his men returned to Lee.

Longstreet helped save the Confederate Army from
defeat in his first battle back with Lee's army,
the Battle of the Wilderness in May, 1864, where
he launched a powerful flanking attack against the
Union II Corps (ACW)|II Corps and nearly drove it
from the field. But he was wounded in the
process—accidentally shot by his own men not
a mile away from the place where Jackson befell
the same fate a year earlier—and missed the
rest of the 1864 spring campaign, where Lee sorely
missed his skill in handling the army. He rejoined
Lee from October, 1864, to March, 1865, during the
Siege of Petersburg, commanding the defenses in
front of the capital of Richmond. He surrendered
with Lee at Appomattox Court House on April 9,
1865.


==After the War==

After the war, Longstreet renewed his friendship
with his old friend and adversary, Lieut. Gen. and
future President of the United States|President
Ulysses S. Grant, and became the only major
Confederate officer to join the postwar United
States Republican Party|Republican party. For
this, he lost favor with many Southerners, but
nevertheless enjoyed a successful second career.
He also converted to Catholicism when he married
his second wife which also made him less popular
in the more Protestant South. President Rutherford
B. Hayes appointed Longstreet as his ambassador to
the Ottoman Empire, and later on, he served from
1897 to 1904, under Presidents William McKinley
and Theodore Roosevelt, as U.S. Commissioner of
Railroads.

Late in life, after bearing criticism of his war
record from other Confederates for decades, he
refuted most of their arguments in his memoirs
entitled From Manassas to Appomattox. He outlived
most of his detractors, and died in Gainesville,
Georgia, where he is buried in Alta Vista
Cemetery.

Because of criticism from authors in the Lost
Cause of the Confederacy|Lost Cause movement
(Jubal Anderson Early|Jubal Early in particular),
Longstreet's war career was disparaged for many
years after his death. The publication of Michael
Shaara's novel The Killer Angels in 1974, based in
part on Longstreet's memoirs, as well as the 1993
film Gettysburg_(movie)|Gettysburg, have been
credited with helping to restore Longstreet's
reputation as an outstanding and diligent
commander. In 1998, one of the last monuments
erected at Gettysburg Battlefield|Gettysburg
National Military Park is a belated tribute to
Longstreet. He is depicted on his horse at ground
level in a grove of trees in Pitzer Woods, unlike
most generals, who are elevated on tall bases
overlooking the battlefield. This is indicative of
the continuing controversies over the career of
James Longstreet.

==External Links==

* http://www.tennessee-scv.org/longstreet/ The
Longstreet Chronicles
* http://www.longstreet.org/ The Longstreet
Society