WORSHIPPED BY THE SOLDIERS OF THE CONFEDERACY
The political estrangements between General Longstreet and many of the leaders of the South never extended to the soldiers who did any large amount of fighting for the South. There was a Confederate reunion in Atlanta in 1898. A camp of Confederate Veterans, of Augusta, Georgia, made up of his old command, sent General Longstreet a special request to come down from his home in Gainesville, and to wear his old uniform. He replied that his uniform had been destroyed years ago in the fire which burned his home and practically everything else he had, but that he would gladly go down with what was left of himself—that his old trunk of a body was the only relic of the Confederacy remaining to him. They then secured his measure and had a new Confederate uniform made for him to represent the old as nearly as possible. During all his stay at that reunion the old soldiers flocked about him with a devotion that Napoleon would have envied. They went wild over him. When he went to the dining-room at the hotel, the doors had to be closed so that he could take his meals without interruption. One evening, in the Kimball, his old “boys” surged about him by the thousands for hours, eager to touch his hand, to touch his garments, to look into his face, and the tears streamed down his cheeks. Just before that, one day, outraged at some unkindness that had come from the South, I had said to General Longstreet, “The Southern people are no longer my people. I have no home and no country.” In the midst of the splendid demonstration at the reunion of 1898, when the thousands who had followed his colors stood with uncovered heads in his honored presence, I said to him, “This is the South that I love, because it loves you; it is the magnificent, generous, loyal South that I love with every impulse of my heart; these are my people.”
I think he never forgot the Confederate reunion in Atlanta in 1898. His old soldiers came to his room in a continuous stream. One afternoon, when he was asleep, utterly worn out, a one-legged, one-armed veteran, poorly clad, looking poorly fed, came to his room. I told him of the General’s exhausted condition—that he needed the rest, and I was really afraid to disturb him. Then he said, “Won’t you let me go in and look at my old commander, asleep. I haven’t seen him since Appomattox. I came all the way from Texas to see him, and I may never see him again.” Without a word I opened the door, and as the worn veteran looked upon his old chieftain we both cried. In the midst of it General Longstreet wakened and called the veteran to him. They embraced like brothers and wept together.
On the eve of the Spanish-American War General Longstreet received hundreds of letters from his old soldiers in every part of the country, asking for the privilege of seeing service with him under the flag of the Union. One of them wrote: “If this country is going to have another war, I want to be in it, and I want to follow my old commander.” General Longstreet answered that he was seventy-eight, deaf, and paralyzed; that he had two sons he would send to fight for him, but that if his country needed his services, his sword was at its command.
As Commissioner of Railroads, General Longstreet made a tour of the West in 1899. He was received with beautiful consideration everywhere, but the welcome which touched him most was that of his old soldiers who greeted him in every State. It was marvellous to see how the veterans of a war that was over forty years ago had scattered through the West, and it certainly seemed that every one there had heard that General Longstreet was coming, and came to the nearest station to see him. With them were many Union veterans who gave him an equally cordial greeting.
I will digress here to say that General Longstreet could never stand on a foot of Northern soil where he was not received with every manifestation of earthly honor and esteem by the Union veterans and their descendants, and this touched him as nothing else in the world could have done. I wish to offer the humble tribute of my love to the chivalrous section that is to-day so close to my heart; the honors they paid General Longstreet, their tributes to him, did not end with the grave. Two weeks after the prospectus of this little volume had been sent out, the first edition had been bought, long before it was ready for delivery, by the Grand Army of the Republic, and the orders were accompanied by testimonials to General Longstreet as soldier and patriot that would make a memorial volume of rich value, and a brief selection, at least, I hope to give in future editions.
At one place, on his Western tour in 1899, it became necessary for him to telegraph to an official of the Rock Island road to ask if he would “pass” his car. It happened that this official had been a Union officer who had received hard blows from Longstreet on many bloody fields. He replied that in the old days that tried the courage of men he was much more anxious to “pass” Longstreet than to meet him; that now he was going to insist on meeting him first, and afterwards he would “pass” anything the General wanted him to “pass.”
Next to the pleasure of meeting his old friends on this Western tour, General Longstreet most enjoyed the wonderful development of the country that had taken place since he was chasing wild Indians across its wide plains. The smiling farms that greeted him, the magnificent cities, the marvellously fertile irrigated sections that he had last beheld as deserts, the net-work of competing railroads which had taken the place of the trail and the half-worked wagon-roads, the evidences everywhere of a magnificent country built up by progressive people,—all these, with all the suggestiveness attaching to them, appealed with mighty force to his heart and to his mental appreciation. The picture of industrial growth is a beautiful and impressive one. It is a story in itself that needs only a suggestion to make it as large a part of this as it should make.
Genuine Americanism, a love of his country in every sentiment that concerns it and every line of development affecting it, formed a very large and attractive phase of General Longstreet’s character. And so, from every stand-point he enjoyed this Western trip to the full.