Dec. 1, 2025
America's Story -- Longstreet Reconsidered
FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A funeral that halted a Southern town sets the stage for one of the most misunderstood lives in American history. We follow James Longstreet from West Point camaraderie with Ulysses S. Grant to the smoke-choked battlefield of Gettysburg, and then into a second, riskier career: defending Reconstruction, backing Black suffrage, and standing up to paramilitary terror in New Orleans. The journey overturns easy labels and asks a h...
FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message
A funeral that halted a Southern town sets the stage for one of the most misunderstood lives in American history. We follow James Longstreet from West Point camaraderie with Ulysses S. Grant to the smoke-choked battlefield of Gettysburg, and then into a second, riskier career: defending Reconstruction, backing Black suffrage, and standing up to paramilitary terror in New Orleans. The journey overturns easy labels and asks a harder question: what does it cost to change your mind in public when your entire community demands you don’t?
This is the unique story of General James Longstreet, Lee’s most trusted battlefield lieutenant, and yet who would spend the rest of his life fighting a different battle not for a cause but for his reputation.
03:59 - Introduction
08:26 - 1840's US
16:19 - Civil War
32:06 - 1870
45:40 - Conclusion & sources
WEBVTT
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On a frigid January day nineteen oh four, a solemn procession winds its way through the heart of Gainesville, Georgia.
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The streets are lined with thousands of mourners, their breath visible in the icy air, their faces marked with a quiet reverence.
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Flags hang low at half mass, rippling gently in the cold wind at the center of it all.
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A horse-drawn caisson carries the casket of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, Robert E.
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Lee's old war horse.
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The procession stretches for some two miles, shutting down the town entirely.
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Businesses are shuttered, and the usual bustle of daily life is replaced by the slow, rhythmic creak of wooden wheels against the cobblestones.
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Somewhere in the crowd, a lone Confederate veteran steps forward, slips an old worn uniform into the casket, a final gesture of loyalty to his fallen comrade.
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James Longstreet, a highly accomplished Confederate general, passed away just six days before his 83rd birthday.
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His death marked the end of an era.
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His funeral became the largest ever recorded in Hall County.
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His body lay in state in the old Hall County Courthouse, where mourners from across the region came to pay their respects.
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Special trains were commissioned to bring the crowds in from Atlanta, their passengers united in grief for a man who was both a giant of war and a polarizing figure in history.
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The funeral service was unlike any other, a Roman Catholic rite officiated by Bishop Benjamin Joseph Keeley.
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Longstreet, who had converted to Catholicism in 1877 and remained devout until his death.
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Bishop Keeley, an Irish-born Confederate veteran and a former blockade runner, now stood to bury his brother in arms and his brother in faith.
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The church bells tolled as he delivered the final blessings for his comrade.
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A man who had seen triumph, betrayal, and in his final years, vindication.
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This day he was laying to rest his comrade in arms, his brother in the faith.
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This is the life, the betrayal, and the final vindication of whom some called Confederate Judas, but who dared to say the war was over in 1865 and meant it.
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This is the short story of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, one of the Confederacy's highest ranking and most important generals.
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This series, America's Story, takes you on a journey through the pivotal moments of liberty, remarkable events of hope, and incredible cast of characters, good and bad, who have shaped our nation.
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Together, we'll explore the stories that built the country we know today and uncover what they still mean for us now and can teach us for our future.
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So, with that, here's America's story.
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James Longstreet was born on January 8, 1821, in Edgefield District, South Carolina.
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Though he spent most of his formative years in Georgia.
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Raised in a devout and hardworking family, Longstreet's early life was shaped by principles of faith, perseverance, and a strong sense of duty.
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His parents, James and Mary Ann Longstreet, instilled in him the values of discipline and integrity, which he carried throughout his life.
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It was a slaveholding family, and his father ran a cotton plantation.
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The rise of cotton production in the region facilitated by the cotton gin made cotton production one of the staple crops, and it was a lucrative crop at that.
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In 1833, at the age of nine, James Longstreet lost his father.
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The young Longstreet moved to Augusta, Georgia to live with his uncle, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a prominent minister and writer, and more telling, a rabid pro slavery ideologue and secessionist.
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Augustus Longstreet was deeply involved in politics not just as a minister and writer, but also a newspaper editor.
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He helped in still in the young James the passion for states' rights.
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Longstreet was exposed to the vital debates during the nullification crisis of 1832-33.
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Augustus was a leading voice in supporting secession.
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The young James would listen to his uncle and his friends sit around the house and the office discussing the vital issue to the South.
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This period laid a foundation for his character as he was exposed to the blend of faith and intellectual rigor.
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Recognizing his talent, though, and his potential, his family encouraged him to pursue a prestigious education.
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Their efforts bore fruit when he gained admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1838.
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James would bring with him the mindset of the South's Plantation Society and furthermore, as a true believer in the Confederacy's racial politics.
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Though during his time at West Point, Longstreet would forge lifelong friendships, including a close bond with Ulysses S.
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Grant, who would later play a pivotal role during the Civil War.
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Pete and Sam, as they were known affectionately by their classmates, although they came from different backgrounds, the fiercest Georgian and the quiet, shy Midwesterner, they became the best of friends.
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Longstreet would say later of Grant reverently in recalling his West Point years with Sam in his later memoir.
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He, being Grant, was the man who was to eclipse us all.
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Though not an exceptional student academically, James excelled in leadership and military discipline, qualities that would define his career.
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Upon graduating in 1842, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S.
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Army, embarking on a path that would take him to the Mexican American War and gradually establish his reputation as a battlefield leader and tactician.
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Longstreet's time before the Civil War helped shape the man he would become.
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His experiences grounded in faith, family values, and military service, but also as a fierce advocate for states rights and the antebellum way of life that prepared him for the trials ahead as the nation moved toward its most tumultuous chapter.
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But before we get to that, it's the eighteen forties in the United States, and the country was playing with political dynamite.
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Texas, once independent republic, sat on the edge of the Union like a lit fuse.
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For years, Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren kept their distance, convinced that bringing Texas into the Union would mean war with Mexico and deepen sectional tensions at home.
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Then came President James K.
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Polk elected in eighteen forty four on the bold expansionist vision.
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Polk believed Americans were destined by Providence to span the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
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When he moved to annex Texas in December of eighteen forty five, the fuse finally burned down.
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War was no longer a question of if but when.
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Into this changed moment stepped a young, little known officer named James Longstreet.
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Fresh out of the West Point class of eighteen forty two, James had begun his career in the fourth US Infantry and later moved to the eighth, doing the quiet, grinding work of a peacetime officer.
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The Mexican American War would strip away all that anonymity.
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Sent to General Zachary Taylor's army at Corpus Christi, Texas, Longstreet suddenly found himself on the threshold of the nation's next great trial.
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His first baptism of real fire came in May of eighteen forty six at Palo Alto and Rasaka de La Palma, where the smoke, the concussion of artillery, and the abrupt finality of death replaced the abstractions of academic lectures.
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War was no longer a theory for James, it was the air he breathed.
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The true test of his character came later that year at Monterey.
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There American forces pushed against strong Mexican defenses, fortified positions, well placed guns, and determined soldiers defending their city.
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Under punishing fire, parts of the American line began to waver and fall back.
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In such moments an officer either recedes in the confusion or steps into the breach.
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Longstreet stepped forward.
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He rallied shaken men, drove them back into the fight, helped seize a crucial position, and joined in brutal, close quarters, hand to hand combat and fighting in the streets.
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The army took notice.
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His promotion to first lieutenant was more than a bureaucratic step.
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It was an acknowledgement that he was becoming a leader, others could follow into danger.
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His war, however, was far from over.
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Longstreet's regiment was soon shifted to General Winfield Scott's audacious campaign against Mexico City, beginning with the amphibious landing at Veracruz, the march inland toward the capital.
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In such battles such as Contieris and Churubisco, he again distinguished himself, earning brevet promotions for gallantry.
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Each engagement added to his reputation as a steady, reliable combat officer, brave but not reckless, capable of leading men under fire.
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At Malino del Rey, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, Longstreet once again proved his courage and received another brevet rank, further cementing his place among the army's rising talents.
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All of this built to a single defining moment the assault on Chipultepec on september thirteenth, eighteen forty seven.
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Chipultepec was more than a fortress, it guarded the road to Mexico City, and had housed the Mexican Military Academy.
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On that decisive day, Longstreet advanced with the storming party of the eighth, the regimental flag in his hands, a bright, conspicuous target on the deadly slope.
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The climb was steep, the defense is fierce.
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Smoke clung to the hillside as musket and cannon fire ripped through the attacking ranks.
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Longstreet pressed forward into haunt hand to hand combat at the enemy's works, until a musket ball slammed into his thigh, dropping him to the ground.
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Even then he refused to let the colors fall.
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He passed the flag to his friend, Lieutenant George Pickett, who carried it over the wall as Chapoltepec fell.
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The victory opened the road to Mexico City and hastened the end of the war, while Longstreet lay wounded, beginning a long and painful recovery.
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The war changed far more than Longstreet's body.
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It rearranged his life.
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During his convalescence and in the months that followed, his superiors came to see him as a proven combat leader, not just another line officer.
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In the March of eighteen forty eight after the war, he came home, married Maria Louisa Louise Garland, a daughter of his former commander John Garland, a marriage born in the close insular world of the regular army.
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They would go on to have ten children together, though many, tragically, as a pattern in the nineteenth century, would not live to adulthood.
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Through the eighteen fifties, the Longstreets lived the restless life of a frontier military family, posted from Texas to New Mexico at lonely outposts such as Fort Bliss.
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James handled the scouting, the paymaster work and the everyday burdens of garrison duty, gaining a deep practical knowledge of logistics and leadership far from the centers of power.
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Yet while he rode dusty patrols and balanced army ledgers, the nation he had fought for in Mexico was slowly, deeply tearing itself apart.
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Each year brought sharper quarrels over slavery, territorial expansion, and political control.
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The election in eighteen sixty of Abraham Lincoln turned simmering conflict into open rupture as southern states began to leave the Union.
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For James Longstreet, a Georgian by birth and sentiment, the question of loyalty became intensely personal.
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He had bled under the US flag and built his adult life in its service, but his family, his roots, and his social world lay in Dixie.
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In the early eighteen sixty one he made the fateful decision to resign his commission in the US Army and join the Confederacy.
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The young officer who had once carried the National Kellars up the slopes of Chapoltepec now stepped out onto a darker stage, where every earlier act of heroism would be reinterpreted through the long shadow of a nation at war with itself.
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From the moment the guns fell silent over Appomattox, the story of the Confederacy became less a history than a trial, and its chief witnesses were its generals.
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At the center of that struggle over memory, blame and blame stood James Longstreet, Robert E.
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Lee's trusted old war horse, who would one day be recast as the South's great betrayer.
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To see how that happened, you have to go back into the four years of the war that forged him, broke him, and set the stage for Gettysburg.
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The war gave Longstreet fame, but it began by taking nearly everything that mattered to him.
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In early eighteen sixty two, scarlet fever tore through his household, killing three of his young children in a single week.
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It was a blow so deep that his friends noticed a new gravity in him.
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His faith intensified, his manner more reserved, the grief never far from the surface.
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And yet he went back into the field.
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On the potential campaign that summer in the chaos of the Seven Days Battle, Longstreet proved himself indispensable to Lee.
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Watching his calm general under fire, Lee said his mastery of the hard fighting came to rely on him utterly so.
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He further went on to say Longstreet is the staff in my right hand.
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From there Longstreet's star rose quickly at second Manassas.
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His massive flank attack crashed into the Union left and sent it reeling.
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At Antietam holding the line against the bloodiest single day in American history, his steadiness earned him the nickname that would follow him for life My Old Warhorse.
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If his talent had a signature, he was on the defensive.
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At Fredericksburg in December of eighteen sixty two, Long Street turned Marie's Heights into a killing ground.
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He oversaw the construction of solid earthworks, placed his artillery to command the approaches, and waited.
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Union troops charged again and again into carefully prepared fire, paying for every step with blood.
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That day confirmed what Longstreet already believed.
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In a war of attrition the South could not afford reckless assaults.
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Its best hope was to fight from strong ground and make the enemy do the dying.
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By late eighteen sixty two Longstreet was Lee's senior lieutenant general, his most trusted subordinate.
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His philosophy, tactical defense within a broader strategy was clear, tested, and so far vindicated.
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All of that collided with Lee and his instincts on three hot days in July of eighteen sixty three at a quiet Pennsylvania crossroads called Gettysburg.
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On july second, standing on Seminary Ridge and studying the Union Army dug in along the heights opposite, Longstreet saw danger at every fold of the ground.
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The Federals this time held the high ground, anchored on Cemetery Hill and Little Round Top.
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He urged General Lee to disengage, swing wide around the Union left, and force them to attack the Confederates on ground of their choosing another Fredericksburg, but in Northern Territory.
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Lee refused, flushed with success from the first day's fighting, convinced his men could do anything, he pressed the attack.
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Longstreet thought his chief had lost his balance, that his blood was up, and that no argument would move him.
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Reluctantly, Longstreet carried out the assault on the Union left that afternoon.
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His men gallantly stormed Devil's Den, the wheat field, the peach orchard, and some of the hardest fighting of the war.
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Tactically the attack was skillfully managed.
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Operationally it failed.
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The Union line bent but did not break.
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The next day brought the real catastrophe.
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Lee now fixed on a direct assault against the Union Center, what would become known as Pickett's Charge.
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Longstreet opposed the plan with everything he had.
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Studying the mile of open ground, the guns mast on the Union Ridge, he told Lee that no fifteen thousand men on Earth could cross that field and take that position.
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Lee insisted.
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When the moment came, George Pickett rode up to ask if he should advance.
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Longstreet could not speak.
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He simply bowed his head.
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He nodded into the affirmative.
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The men then stepped off into history and into slaughter.
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Of roughly twelve thousand Confederates who began that grim walk, more than half became casualties.
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Pickett's division lost over two fifths of its strength, Pettigrew's even more.
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Trimble's brigades were shattered.
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Survivors streamed back in broken clusters.
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Lee met them on the ridge asking Pickett to rally his division.
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General, Pickett answered, I have no division left.
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When Lee encountered the badly wounded Petigrew coming back, he offered an apology to the younger man, who seemed too dazed to even hear him.
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That evening Lee gathered Longstreet and his other corps commanders and accepted the blame.
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It is all my fault, he said.
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Again and again.
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Longstreet was forty two years old.
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He would live for another four more decades, long enough to see those three days at Gettysburg pulled apart, argued over and used as a weapon against him.
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As his biographer William Garrett Piston observed, those hours in the rolling hills around a sleepy Pennsylvania town became the focal point of his life, and for many Southerners, the explanation, fair or not, why the Confederacy lost the war.
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After Gettysburg and the shadow of disaster, Longstreet's standing as a fighting general remained largely untouched, at least while the war still raged.
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Frustrated in Virginia, he looked west for a new opportunity.
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There at Chickamauga he found it.
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Arriving with a portion of his corps, Longstreet helped deliver one of the Confederacy's clearest battlefield victories, smashing a hole in the Union line and sending Federal troops along with their commander William Rosecrans reeling from the field.
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Many historians, including William Garrett Piston, would later judge Chickamauga as the finest achievement of Longstreet's military career.
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The glow did not last.
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And an ill starred campaign against Knoxville coupled with poisonous friction with General Braxton Bragg blunted his western momentum.
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Yet when Longstreet finally returned to Virginia and to General Lee, he was greeted with genuine warmth and relief, confessing how sorely he had missed both Longstreet and his corps.
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The old war horse was back, just in time to face an old friend turned relentless adversary.
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Ulysses S.
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Grant had come east.
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In May of eighteen sixty four, during the tangled smoky chaos in the wilderness, Longstreet demonstrated once more why General Lee trusted him above all others.
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After a grueling thirty six mile forced march, he arrived on the field and rapidly organized a textbook counterattack that rolled up the Union flank and threatened to turn a bloody stalemate into a southern triumph.
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In that moment as he looked through, Longstreet might replay his greatest blows from second Manassas to Chickamauga, but this time against Grant himself.
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Then in an echo of Stonewall Jackson's fate a year earlier, everything changed in an instant.
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As Longstreet rode forward along the orange plank road, Confederate troops mistook his party for Federals and fired.
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A bullet tore through his neck and shoulder, paralyzing his right arm and nearly killing him on the spot.
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The counterstroke he had set in motion faltered.
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Longstreet disappeared from the field and from high command for a critical five months.
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He returned to duty before the end and remained at his post until the final curtain, surrendering alongside Lee at Appomattox Courthouse.
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There the generous terms and the quiet dignity of Ulysses S.
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Grant made a deep impression upon him.
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Longstreet did not see those terms as a tactical pause.
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He saw them as an invitation to rebuild, and he accepted them.
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The war ends in eighteen sixty five, the Confederacy is crushed, the South left burned out and broken, and yet from those ruins a new story began to rise.
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Not a story of defeat, but of gallant knights in gray of noble sacrifice, and of a cause that was somehow right even in losing.
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This was the birth of the lost cause, a powerful romantic myth built to redeem the Confederacy and justify what it had fought for.
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It was a story the white South needed, maybe even craved, but to make it work the tale required spotless heroes and convenient villains.
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Robert E.
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Lee had to become an almost saintly figure above reproach, which meant someone else had to carry the blame for defeat.
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Entel entered Jubal Early and his allies.
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These former Confederates set out quite deliberately to protect Lee's legend and recast the war's meaning.
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To do that they needed a scapegoat for Gettysburg.
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Their gaze settled on one man, James Longstreet.
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What followed was no mere whisper campaign.
00:28:34.880 --> 00:28:39.359
In deliberate articles, speeches in veteran circles.
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They slowly turned Longstreet's caution at Gettysburg into something darker.
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Hesitation became obstruction, disagreement became disobedience, and strategic doubt became betrayal.
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The same general they had once praised as Lee's old war horse was steadily slowly recast as the man who lost the war.
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And just as this campaign against him gathered momentum, Longstreet did something that in their eyes confirmed every change.
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He accepted that the Union had won the war, should have won the war.
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He called openly for reconciliation.
00:29:29.119 --> 00:29:31.200
Then he crossed the ultimate line.
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He joined the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, and now Grant.
00:29:39.599 --> 00:29:44.319
One can just imagine the shock across the post war South.
00:29:45.759 --> 00:29:49.680
To many former Confederates, this was just not bad judgment.
00:29:49.920 --> 00:29:51.599
This was apostasy.
00:29:51.920 --> 00:29:59.839
Longstreet wasn't merely wrong, he was a traitor to his section, his comrades, and the very memory of the.
00:30:00.240 --> 00:30:04.240
Of the Confederacy, but it did not stop at words.
00:30:05.680 --> 00:30:18.319
In March 1867, Longstreet published a letter in a New Orleans paper declaring in essence the war was over and its terms should be accepted in good faith.
00:30:19.119 --> 00:30:32.079
He even went further, endorsing congressional reconstruction and black suffrage, a stance almost unimaginable for a former Confederate corps commander.
00:30:32.559 --> 00:30:42.559
In eighteen sixty eight he formally joined the Republican Party, publicly supporting his old friend and former battlefield opponent Ulysses S.
00:30:42.720 --> 00:30:48.480
Grant for the presidency, while Grant entered the White House.
00:30:48.799 --> 00:31:04.480
Longstreet accepted a federal appointment as surveyor of customs in New Orleans, a position confirmed in eighteen sixty nine that gave him both income and influence at a time when many ex Confederates were struggling.
00:31:05.119 --> 00:31:08.880
Across the South, the reaction was volcanic.
00:31:09.279 --> 00:31:16.160
From Richmond to Mobile, from Montgomery to the Mississippi Delta, denunciations poured in.
00:31:16.799 --> 00:31:25.200
Newspapers and former comrades alike braided him a traitor, scalawag, and worse.
00:31:25.519 --> 00:31:32.880
The mythology of the lost cause Longstreet became exactly what the narrative needed him to be.
00:31:33.599 --> 00:31:47.279
The man who lost at Gettysburg has sold out the South now, and proved by his post war politics that he had never truly belonged among its heroes.
00:31:48.640 --> 00:31:55.440
In reality he was doing something far harder than clinging to a comforting myth.
00:31:56.079 --> 00:31:59.440
He was choosing a reunion over resentment.
00:32:00.240 --> 00:32:06.319
He was choosing to live in the future rather than stay imprisoned in the past.
00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:25.039
In the heavy, salt, thick air of Reconstruction New Orleans around eighteen seventy, a familiar figure in worn Confederate gray stepped out onto an entirely new battlefield.
00:32:25.440 --> 00:32:27.039
James Longstreet, Robert E.
00:32:27.200 --> 00:32:40.799
Lee's old war horse, once a hammer of the Confederacy, now took command of a biracial state militia, black and white soldiers drilling side by side under a Republican governor.
00:32:41.039 --> 00:32:51.759
His mission was not to break the Union line, but to defend Louisiana's lawful government against a rising campaign of terror.
00:32:52.400 --> 00:32:57.599
What rolled across the South then was more than ordinary lawlessness.
00:32:57.920 --> 00:33:11.359
Hooded riders, the Ku Klux Klan, Knights of the White Camellia, and the White League waged a ruthless underground war to undo appomatics by other means.
00:33:11.599 --> 00:33:20.079
They burned schools and churches, whipped freedmen from the poles, and gunned down black office holders in cold blood.
00:33:20.480 --> 00:33:23.680
The goal was simple and yet chilling.
00:33:24.160 --> 00:33:33.599
Drive African Americans out of politics and topple the fragile biracial governments that reconstruction had built.
00:33:34.400 --> 00:33:36.400
From the White House, Ulysses S.
00:33:36.480 --> 00:33:47.920
Grant saw it clearly for what it was a rebellion in everything but name, a continuation of the Civil War by night raids instead of open battle.
00:33:48.240 --> 00:34:05.039
His answer was the Enforcement Acts of eighteen seventy and eighteen seventy one, federal laws meant to crush the Klan, protect black citizenship, and give Republican state governments some hope of survival on hostile ground.
00:34:05.279 --> 00:34:10.079
To make the promise real in Louisiana, Grant needed men he trusted.
00:34:10.559 --> 00:34:18.320
One of them, ironically, wonderfully, was a former Confederate corps commander.
00:34:18.960 --> 00:34:22.800
He called James Longstreet a bulwark against the Klan.
00:34:23.119 --> 00:34:34.159
Longstreet was appointed adjunct general of the Louisiana State Militia and soon became the key military force behind the state's Reconstruction government.
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