My Civil War Selections

These are a few books dealing with a little-known aspect of the Civil War: The deification of Robert E. Lee at the expense of James. B. Longstreet.

  The literature on the Civil War is vast and continues to grow.  Virtually every aspect of the war has been dissected, resected, analyzed, and debated.  My selections about the Civil War are very narrow and deal with only a single aspect of the war. Actually, what I describe here occurred after the Civil War, continuing well beyond the Civil War centennial in the mid-20th century.  In these selected books, I call the reader's attention to the deification of Robert E. Lee at the expense of one of his corps commanders -- some would say his most competent commander -- Lieutenant General James B. Longstreet.

During and after the War,  Lee was only one of several Confederate heroes.  He enjoyed no greater stature than Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, in fact, Jackson was more popular than Lee during and after the war.

All this was to change in the years beginning after Lee's death in October, 1870.  The South had gone into the war with the belief that our cavalier gentry would quickly defeat the industrial workers from the North.  In the years immediately following the war, Southern energies were consumed with rebuilding but, as rebuilding proceeded and memories of the horrors of the war receded, thoughts turned to writing the history of the war.

In the late 1860s, the myth of the Lost Cause emerged and would become a central myth in U. S. history, enshrined not only in Southern histories and popular writings, but also in the works of such respected writers as Douglas Southall Freeman, Bruce Catton, and Shelby Foote.  The Lost Cause myth was cultivated by Southerners to explain how our righteous cause, carried into battle by descendants of English Cavaliers, and blessed by God, could fail.  According to the Lost Cause myth, which I grew up hearing and studying, the South did not lose.  Instead, we were overwhelmed by superior Yankee numbers and betrayed by some in our midst.  The battle of Gettysburg became the "high tide of the Confederacy" and it was in the course of that battle that the scapegoat for the Lost Cause was to be found.

Confederate Lieutenant General James B. Longstreet had been a corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.  Lee made frequent references to Longstreet's capabilities as a soldier and called him " my old war horse."   A review of Longstreet's military record during the Civil War reveals that he made a few tactical blunders but, in the main, he was deserving of Lee's praise.  In fact, in the early histories of the war, written in the years immediately after Appomattox, Longstreet is recorded to be a powerful, effective military leader, sharing the spotlight with Lee, Jackson, Beauregard, and J. E. Johnston.

However, Longstreet had two strikes against him:  First, he was from rough, north Georgia hill country stock, not a Virginia Cavalier and, second, after the war he wound up in New Orleans where he sided with the Republicans and reconstruction.  As a cabal of Virginians, many of them second-rate general officers, took over producing the history of the war, and as Southern reaction to "black Reconstruction" emerged, Longstreet's post-war position doomed him.  The third strike was his blunt, aggressive defense of himself and his continued portrayal of himself as the genius behind many Lee's actions.

Through the 1870s and 1880s, the history of the war was recorded in works produced by the Southern Historical Society Papers.  In fact, the flawed history presented in the Papers would serve as the basis for much Civil War history written well into the 20th century.  The Papers were dominated by a foursome of Virginians:
 

Lt. Gen. Jubal Early (CSA).  Early had a lot to cover up.  He had been a severe critic of secession and had switched his allegiance to the South at the last minute. Late in the war, his leadership of the Second Corps in the Shenandoah Valley was so disastrous that Lee relieved him.  Early had ordered the burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.  And, at Gettysburg, he tarried, looking around for his Corps commander when Lee needed him. In fear of post-war Federal prosecution for burning Chambersburg, Early fled to Canada.  When he wrote a defense of his Shenandoah campaign, Lee refused to approve of the book.  In 1869, Early returned to the States and became the head of the Lee Monument Association and, later, president of the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia.  From these two positions, he was able to resurrect his own shaky position, which he did with gusto.