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The forgotten Confederate general who deserves a monument


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Washington Post
Charles Lane
January 27 2016

Born in 1821 in South Carolina, James Longstreet graduated from West Point in 1842 and served with distinction in the Mexican War. As the officer corps split along sectional lines, he joined the Confederacy in 1861, eventually rising to join Gen. Robert E. Lee’s inner circle.

But it was after Appomattox that Longstreet truly distinguished himself — as the rare ex-Rebel to accept the South’s defeat, and its consequences. He urged fellow white Southerners to support the federal government and help rebuild their region on the basis of greater racial equality. He joined Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party.

In the 1870s, he commanded a biracial state militia loyal to Louisiana’s Reconstruction government, aggravating an old war wound while fighting alongside his troops against violent white supremacists in the streets of New Orleans.

Today, this illustrious American is famous only to Civil War buffs. He remains obscure, even as the country struggles anew with the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction — from the removal of the Confederate battle flag at South Carolina’s state capitol, to this week’s flap over Hillary Clinton’s remark implying Lincoln’s successors were too “rancorous” toward the defeated South.

Yet ending Longstreet’s obscurity, and properly honoring him, can and should be a part of the discussion. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a full and fair reckoning with the past in which such a personality gets no more than a footnote.

 

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America’s Civil War: Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet at Odds at Gettysburg

 

6/12/2006 • 20TH MAINE, A.P. HILL, ANTEBELLUM PERIOD, BATTLE OF ANTIETAM, CEMETERY HILL, CEMETERY RIDGE,CIVIL WAR 1862, CIVIL WAR 1863, CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS, CONFEDERATE GENERALS, CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS, CULP'S HILL, DANIEL SICKLES, DAY TWO, DEVILS DEN, GEORGE MEADE, JOHN HOOD, LITTLE ROUND TOP, MILITARY HISTORY,PORTER ALEXANDER, RICHARD EWELL, ROBERT E LEE, STONEWALL JACKSON

 

History has come to many obscure places, has stayed awhile and, after its departure, has rendered those places famous. In America’s saga, perhaps no out-of-the-way place has taken on greater historic importance than the southern Pennsylvania village of Gettysburg. There, during three summer days, July 1-3, 1863, the nation’s fate may have been decided. When the battle was over, General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia began the retreat to Virginia, defeated by Major General George G. Meade’s Union Army of the Potomac. ‘Gettysburg’ would forever hold a place in the minds of all Americans.

 

Since those unforgettable three days of battle, controversy has stalked nearly every facet of Gettysburg. In the postwar years, Southerners came to regard the battle as the great ‘if’ of Confederate history. Southern independence had beckoned on the farmers’ fields and wooded knolls for three days, then, like an alluring siren, had disappeared. To Southerners, the fault lay not with the great chieftain, Lee, but with his most trusted and senior lieutenant, James Longstreet. Of all Gettysburg’s controversies, none has so shaped history’s interpretation of the battle as has the Lee-Longstreet dispute. Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://www.historynet.com/americas-civil-war-robert-e-lee-and-james-longstreet-at-odds-at-gettysburg.htm

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