War Horse

JAMES LONGSTREET: LEE'S WAR HORSE--H. J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad--University of North Carolina Press ($3.50).

On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, with the echoes of the greatest cannonade in U. S. history just dying away among the Gettysburg hills, a burly bearded officer nodded his head, sent Pickett and some 7,000 men across the open fields to their hopeless assault. That charge, whose last thin waves lapped up through the Union centre, was the high-water mark of the Confederacy. The officer whose nod sent Pickett's column to its doom was General James Longstreet. Around his burly figure the battle-smoke of partisan controversy has hung thick ever since. Did Longstreet lose the battle that lost the South the Civil War? Many a Southerner, many a Northerner, has answered yes. Biographers Eckenrode and Conrad, in what is the first life of Longstreet ever written, grant him a cold acquittal.

A South Carolinian of Dutch ancestry, James Longstreet went through most of the paces of a good professional soldier. At West Point he was always near the bottom of his class, graduated not much higher than his friend Ulysses S. Grant. Like his contemporaries in the service, Longstreet served in the Mexican War. By the time the Civil War started he had settled down in the paymaster department. His experience and his massive self-confidence started him off in the Confederate Army as a brigadier-general. "Six feet tall, broad as a door, hairy as a goat," Longstreet was compact of ambition and stubbornness. The first summer's campaign showed that he was a first-rate defensive fighter but unaggressive and slow on the attack.

Lee understood Longstreet, and once called him affectionately "my old war horse." Longstreet did not understand Lee, and never considered him a first-rate soldier. After the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), where he disagreed with Lee's generalship, he became outspokenly critical of his commander. He also thought little of Stonewall Jackson. Itching for an independent command, Longstreet seized the opportunity, when he was given the Department of Southern Virginia and North Carolina, to augment his army at the expense of Lee's. Ordered to rejoin Lee before the Battle of Chancellorsville, he moved so slowly that he missed the fighting by days.

At Gettysburg Longstreet, as usual, disagreed with Lee's plan: he was against attacking, wanted to outflank Meade, get between him and Washington and let Meade do the attacking. Overruled, he turned sulkily defeatist. Critics have claimed he lost the battle by disregarding Lee's orders to attack early in the morning of the second day. By afternoon, when he finally moved, the Union left had been reinforced and it was too late. Biographers Eckenrode and Conrad reluctantly absolve Longstreet, reluctantly admit that over-polite Lee did not order an early attack, simply suggested it. When it was reported to Longstreet that a slight shift in direction would flank the enemy, which was Lee's intention, Longstreet stubbornly refused, insisted on carrying out Lee's obviously mistaken orders.

Detached from Lee's army for service in Tennessee, Longstreet had a brief hour of glory when he arrived in time's nick on the second day of Chickamauga and swept the field with an unexpected charge. But he got along badly with his chief, the dyspeptic Braxton Bragg, and was not sorry to be ordered back to Lee again. At the Wilderness he was late as usual, but when his tardy veterans did arrive they saved the day. And there he almost met Stonewall Jackson's fate, when in the tangled melee he was wounded by a volley from his own troops. As he was being carried to the rear, with his hat over his face, he raised it to show his anxious men he was still alive. Longstreet recovered in time to fight in the last hopeless battles around Richmond, was still covering the rear of Lee's ragged army when the end came at Appomattox.

Longstreet was popular with his veterans. They called him "Old Pete," liked to know that he smoked, drank and swore with the best of them. But after the war his popularity sank to zero. He ruined himself with every patriotic Southerner when in 1867 a newspaper published his signed letter counseling submission to the North. And the South never forgave him for taking a U. S. Government job, and turning Republican. He made a living at the price of ostracism. By 1896 his "Black Republican" stigma was so far forgotten that he was cheered at the Confederate Reunion in Richmond. But when Death came for him at last, though it was a new century and he was 83, not every Confederate organization sent flowers.

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