GENERAL LONGSTREET IN 1901
Of him I would say, as his sun slants towards the west and the evening hours draw near, that his unmatched courage to meet the enemies of the peace time outshines the valor of the fields whereon his blood was shed so copiously in the cause of his country. I would tell him that his detractors are not the South; they are not the Democratic party; they represent nobody and nothing but the blindness of passion that desires not light. I would tell him that the great, loyal South loves him to-day as in the old days when he sacrificed on her altars a career in the army of the nation; when the thunder of his guns was heard around the world and the earth shook beneath the tread of his soldiers.
And as he journeys down to the Valley of Silence, the true sentiment of the generous South that he loves so well is voiced by Hon. John Temple Graves, in the Atlanta, Georgia, News:
“As there walks ‘thoughtful on the silent, solemn shore of that vast ocean he must sail so soon,’ one of the last of the great figures that moved colossal upon the tragic stage of the Civil War,—Longstreet, the grim and tenacious, the bulldog of war whose grip never relaxed, whose guns never ceased to thunder,—as the eye grows dim that blazed like lightning over so many stormy fields, let the noble woman who bears his name read to her heroic soldier the message that the South of the present, the not ignoble offspring of the past, compasses the couch of Longstreet with love, and covers his fading years with unfading admiration and unforgetting tenderness.”
Washington, D. C., December, 1903.
LONGSTREET THE MAN
HIS BOYHOOD DAYS
The original plan of this little work was to publish only the short story of Gettysburg which was written while General Longstreet lived. My friends have insisted that the generous public, although it has received the prospectus of the work with such warm appreciation, will be disappointed if I discuss only the one event of his most eventful life. And so have been added the paper on the Mexican War and chapters on his famous campaigns of the Civil War.
They have insisted further that I must speak of Longstreet the man. I have replied that I could not. My heart is sore. I cannot forget that he poured out his heroic blood in defence of the Southern people, and when there was not a flag left for him to fight for many of them turned against him and persecuted him with a bitterness that saddened his last years. They undertook to rob him of the glories of his many peerless campaigns; to convict him of treason to his cause on the field of battle. And when he lay dead, forty years after his world-famous victories, perhaps from an opening of the old wound received at the Wilderness, a Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy of the State beneath whose sod rests his valiant dust, refused to send flowers to his grave, because, they said, he disobeyed orders at Gettysburg. And a Southern Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans refused, for the same alleged reason, to send a message of sympathy to his family. If I should now undertake to write about him I might speak of such things as these with bitterness; and I must not so speak, because I am a Southern woman, and the Southern people—my people—must forever be to me as they were to him, “dear as the ruddy drops about his heart.”