Booknotes: Longstreet

New Arrival:

• Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth R. Varon (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's storied Civil War career has received a great deal of positive attention during the past few years. Over that brief interval, a pair of books from Cory Pfarr (here and here) defend the general's Gettysburg record and another pair of book-length studies from Harold Knudsen and F. Gregory Toretta argue for a renewed appreciation of the ways they feel Longstreet exceeded his Civil War peers in forward military thinking. Elizabeth Varon's Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South is of an entire different vein, concentrating its efforts on another major aspect of the general's controversial life path.

Longstreet's Civil War activities are duly addressed in Varon's book, but those sections fill just over a quarter of the narrative. Instead, as the title suggests, her study more closely focuses on the ex-Confederate general's postwar actions.

In Varon's estimation, Longstreet's decision to join the Republican party after the war and support many of its Reconstruction policies "was the most remarkable political about-face in American history." From the description: "After the war Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South’s defeat in the Civil War."

Longstreet has been the subject of several biographies (most notably the modern ones from Jeffry Wert and William Garrett Piston), but this new study is promoted as "the first to give proper attention to Longstreet’s long post-Civil War career."