A lesson learned from “LONGSTREET, by Elizabeth Varon”

Change your mind if you’re wrong, and push back against your community if you know they are wrong. 

One of the first major Civil War epics I ever watched was Ronald Maxwell’s 1993 glorified Civil War battle recreation Gettysburg. At the time, I thought it was one of the greatest war movies I ever saw, even if I was weirded out at all the longing, epic-music-background shots of the Confederate battle flag, and the suggestions that the Confederates were tragic, sympathetic characters. Suffice to say, in 2024 Gettysburg comes off as an embarrassing Confederate apologia, a warm-up to Maxwell’s disastrous 2003 sequel Gods and Generals where he openly proclaimed himself a believer in the Lost Cause [the long-lasting myth that the South had been largely right in the Civil War, which now for well over a century has had a disastrously corrosive effect on how Americans view their own history]. 

However, as bad as Gettysburg is today, one of its most interesting and compelling characters is Tom Berenger’s portrayal of the Confederate general James Longstreet. Maxwell presents Longstreet as a principled Southerner, who knows that slavery is wrong, and who watches in sadness as the mistakes of Robert E. Lee and his associates lead his noble Confederate army to its destruction. As I became more of a student of history—and more of a skeptic of Hollywood fancies such as Gettysburg—I was surprised to learn there was an element of truth to this view of Longstreet, as after the Civil War ended he did indeed come out in favor of racial equality, and tried to enforce the equal laws of Reconstruction in his adopted state of Louisiana, before those Republican-led governments were defeated and overthrown by resurgent racist Democrats, who were largely led by Confederate veterans and their ambitious sons. In my teaching years, I attempted to read up more on Longstreet, but most of the available biographies of him were either hopelessly biased against him (unsurprising given his heresy amongst Confederates) or were sympathetic but heavily focused on his military career (unsurprising, famous Civil War general and all that). Now, historian Elizabeth Varon has done an in-depth study of Longstreet in an excellent biography, and I found him to be a far more fascinating and complex figure than I ever gave him credit for. Longstreet was a far bigger racist miscreant than I realized, yet he was also a man who genuinely changed as he aged and pushed back against the historical currents when they turned in a more negative direction. In our age of intense polarization, I think people can learn good life lessons from Longstreet in coping with and learning from failures. 

Far from the idealized vision of Longstreet presented in Gettysburg, he lived a good portion of his life as a die-hard rebel and slave-owner. His uncle was one of the most ardent secessionists in Georgia, and Longstreet himself spent the years prior to the Civil War demanding the American empire expand so that more territories could be opened up for slave-owners and their systems of exploitation. When the Civil War broke out, Longstreet almost immediately broke his oath to the United States in order to join the new Southern Confederacy, and he forced his enslaved African Americans into service with him. One notable aspect of Varon’s book is she spends a surprisingly small portion of it diving into the details of Longstreet’s Civil War record, as she is far more interested in Longstreet’s philosophy throughout the war. In some ways, he remained an unrepentant rebel for most of the war, going out of his way to kidnap freed black people and sell them back into slavery, and brutally punishing black people who were caught aiding the Union (he saw these policies as revenge for the increasingly egalitarian policies of Lincoln). However, he also was profoundly affected by what he saw during the war, notably the disastrous leadership of the Confederate government, and he developed a grudging respect for the far more effective leadership of Lincoln and Grant for the Union. 

Then came Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, and Longstreet expected the victorious Union to take a gleeful revenge against the South—only to be stunned by the generous terms offered up by Lincoln and Grant. This is where Longstreet’s story gets truly interesting to Varon, because these superior leadership examples appeared to provoke a profound transformation within Longstreet. In subsequent years, most Confederate veterans either quietly seethed at and resented the civil rights laws of Reconstruction (such as Lee), or they organized violent resistance against them and supported the terrorist activities of the KKK (such as Longstreet’s bitter comrade Jubal Early). However, Longstreet not only told his Confederate colleagues they had lost the war and needed to accept the results of it; he also openly declared his support for racial equality and said that the South lost the war because its entire cause had been morally wrong. This made Longstreet an exile amongst many of the Southern friends and family he had grown up with, and he lamented that white Southerners would rather die poor and racist than to accept the modernization the region desperately needed. 

Had Longstreet been a craven opportunist—which I had suspected based on his earlier record—he could have all too easily retreated from these positions once Reconstruction collapsed and joined his Confederate veterans in embracing the Lost Cause. However, to his dying day he declared his allegiance to the Republican Party (an utterly hopeless position in the South in the early 1900’s), and he worked with black leaders in Georgia to try to help them economically advance in whatever way they could under the new brutal Jim Crow system. He always remained a complex figure full of contradictions, appearing at events in his old Confederate uniform and tearfully saluting his fallen comrades, even as he continued to chastise the white South for the post-war path it had chosen to take. Pro-Confederate historians wrote out his successes in the war (of which he had some) and played up his failures to portray him as the man who sabotaged the legendary Lee. Meanwhile, Longstreet’s much younger wife Helen—who, like him grew up in a life of Southern racism until experiencing a conversion to the cause of equality—spent her life defending his record, until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s caused historians to re-evaluate Longstreet in a completely different light. 

I walked away from Longstreet both with a disgust at the crimes he committed as a younger man, and with a newfound respect for how it is never too late for people to admit error and attempt to begin life on a new path. We live in a culture today that rewards people for clinging to the most ridiculous positions long after they have become factually untenable, and a desperation to affirm what we believe at the expense of all conflicting information and perspectives. Longstreet was a deeply complicated and problematic man, yet he admitted the errors of ways and pushed back against his beloved community long past the point of comfort. We could all learn more from the example he tried to set for his fellow misguided Confederates.