Longstreet, James
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
James (1821-1904), an American soldier. He was born in Edgefield, South Carolina , January 8, 1821, and died at Gainesville, Georgia, January 2, 1904. He was graduated at West Point in 1842 and saw service in the West as well as in the Mexican War. In 1861 he resigned from the United States army and entered the Confederate army with the rank of brigadier-general. He was in both battles of Bull Run and served with credit in the peninsular campaign against McClellan. He commanded the Confederate right wing at Antietam and the left wing at Fredericksburg. At Gettysburg he held the rank of lieutenant-general and commanded the division that sustained the brunt of the fighting and furnished the memorable column that Pickett led. He saved the day for the Confederates at Chickamauga, met Burnside at Knoxville, and was back again with Lee in the battles of the Wilderness. Throughout the war he was one of the most dauntless fighters and hardest hitters on either side. After peace was established he accepted the results of the war in good faith. He settled in business at New Orleans , where he held office as surveyor of customs and again as postmaster. He removed to Georgia in 1875. He was United States minister to Turkey in 1880-1, and later marshal of Georgia and a United States railway commissioner. His reminiscenses of the Civil War appeared in 1896 under the title From Manassas to Appomattox. See Civil War Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a story by Edward Bellamy, published in 1888. It is a story of communism. It purports to be written in the year 2000 in the midst of a communistic city. The plot is laid in a prior age, 1887, an age of competition, waste, and corruption. See Bellamy
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's brisk 1910 verdict — "one of the most dauntless fighters and hardest hitters on either side" who after the war "accepted the results in good faith" — sits oddly beside the fight that was raging over Longstreet's name even as it was printed. Former Confederates led by Jubal Early had spent decades blaming him for losing Gettysburg by delaying Lee's attacks, and his postwar Republicanism, his friendship with Grant, and his command of integrated Louisiana militia against white-supremacist insurgents in New Orleans in 1874 made him a traitor in Lost Cause eyes; that hostility, not his generalship, is why Aiton's phrase about good faith reads so pointedly. Modern historians have largely reversed the charge, treating him as Lee's ablest corps commander and his Gettysburg caution as sound, a rehabilitation helped by Michael Shaara's 1974 novel The Killer Angels and the 1993 film made from it. A monument to him was not raised on the Gettysburg battlefield until 1998, well over a century after the battle and generations after statues to lesser Confederates.
Written for this edition, 2026.