James Longstreet



James Longstreet (1821-1904) was a general who served under Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Longstreet was born in Edgefield District, South Carolina, but grew up in Augusta, Georgia, until age 12 when his father died and the family moved to Somerville, Alabama. He graduated from West Point in 1842, in time to serve with distinction in the Mexican War and rise to the rank of major. He would remain in the United States Army throughout the 1850s (during which time he became friendly with Ulysses S. Grant. He resigned from the U.S. Army in June of 1861 to cast his lot with the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Longstreet was highly regarded as an officer and immediately secured appointment as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. He fought well at the First Battle of Bull Run, and earned a promotion to major general. Longstreet's career took off in the summer of 1862 when Gen. Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia. During the Seven Days Battles, Longstreet had operational command of nearly half of Lee's army.

As a general, Longstreet showed a talent for defensive fighting, preferring to position his troops in strong defensive positions and compel the enemy to attack him. Once the enemy had worn itself down, then and only then would Longstreet contemplate an attack of his own. In fact, troops under his command never lost a defensive position during the war. Lee referred to Longstreet affectionately as his Old War Horse. (Longstreet's friends generally called him Pete.) His record as an offensive tactician was mixed, however, and he often clashed with the highly aggressive Lee on the subject of the proper tactics to employ in battle.

Ironically, one of his finest hours came in August 1862, when he commanded the army's Right Wing at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Here, he and his counterpart in command of the Left Wing, Maj. Gen. Thomas Jackson, switched their normal roles, with Jackson fighting defensively on the Confederate left, and Longstreet delivering a devastating flank attack on the right that crushed John Pope's slightly larger Union Army of Virginia.

James Longstreet in Southern Victory
James Longstreet entered politics after the War of Secession, eventually becoming the fourth President of the Confederate States, leading his country through    the Second Mexican War and expanding the C.S. to the Pacific Ocean.

At the Battle of Camp Hill, Longstreet displayed offensive skill when he advanced on the right flank of the Army of the Potomac. The flank's commander, General Joseph Hooker, was temporarily stunned by a near-miss from a Confederate artillery shell, and after Hooker failed to respond to the probing attack, Longstreet took advantage of the confusion to order a general attack. The right flank was turned, and the Army of the Potomac was destroyed, allowing Lee to advance on Philadelphia and win the war.

After the war, Longstreet became involved in politics. In 1879 he was elected President of the CS as a member of the Whig Party. As President, he purchased the states of Chihuahua and Sonora from the Empire of Mexico. US President James G. Blaine informed Longstreet that the US would not tolerate the purchase on pain of war, and Longstreet led the country to victory in the Second Mexican War. Though Longstreet despised Mormons, he became the first Confederate president to support their resistance movement in Utah. The same policy was carried out by his wartime successors, Woodrow Wilson and Jake Featherston, in later wars against the US.

After the Second Mexican War, he kept a promise he'd made to his allies, Britain and France, which they had extracted as the price for their support for the CS in the war. The promise was that he would support a Constitutional amendment ending slavery as strongly as possible.