*****
(St. Louis Globe-Democrat.)
“Republicanism does not necessarily involve treason to the South.”
One aspect of General Longstreet’s career from Appomattox till his death the other day brings out a very unlovely attribute which was obtrusive in the South during these years. That was the ostracism to which he was subject because he joined the Republican party and accepted two or three offices from Republican Presidents. This antagonism towards him by a large portion of the old Confederate element gradually diminished as a new generation in the South appeared on the scene. Some of the feeling, however, remained to the close of his days, and evinced itself in the obituaries of many of the Southern papers.
A few facts are sufficient to expose the absurdity of this Southern antagonism to Confederates who cast their fortunes with the Republicans after the Confederacy fell—this feeling that an adherent of the lost cause must cling everlastingly to the Democratic party through evil and good reports under the penalty of eternal proscription. In the score of years from Longstreet’s graduation from West Point to his resignation, shortly after Sumter’s fall, he was in the army, and a participant in the wars in Mexico and along the frontier in which the army was engaged. The probability is that until after Appomattox he never cast a ballot in his life. Moreover, at the time of his graduation, many of the South’s most prominent statesmen—Tyler, Brownlow, Toombs, Legare, Bell, Clayton, Upshur, Henry T. Wise, Botts, Alexander H. Stephens, and others—were Whigs. The Whig, Zachary Taylor, of Louisiana, carried more Southern States than did his Democratic antagonist, Cass.
What warrant had the South for proscribing Longstreet, because he, a soldier who never had any politics in the old days, joined the Republican party just as soon as he became a civilian and got a chance to exercise his privileges as a citizen? Mosby, Mahone, and many other ex-Confederates who had been civilians before the war, and who, presumably, had taken some part in politics, also joined the Republican party, though they did not do this quite so promptly as did Longstreet. When Foote, of Mississippi, and Orr, of South Carolina, both of whom had been prominent in Democratic politics before the war, the latter of whom had been Speaker of the House in part of Buchanan’s days in the Presidency, and both of whom had been in the Confederate service, became Republicans soon after the Confederacy collapsed, their neighbors ought to have grasped the fact that there must have been something in this party which appealed to intelligent public-spirited men of all localities, and that membership in it by a South Carolinian, a Georgian, or a Louisianian did not necessarily and inevitably involve treason either to the South’s interests or to its traditions. Mixed in with the many shining virtues of the people below Mason and Dixon’s line, there was, as shown in their attitude for many years towards Longstreet, one very unattractive trait.
*****
(Vicksburg, Mississippi, Herald.)
“There was no more magnificent display of heroism during the entire war than at Gettysburg.”
As truly as Warwick was the last of the barons of the feudal era, was Longstreet the last of the great Confederate commanders. He rose to prominence in the early engagements of the war—his was a household name as one of the chief hopes of the cause, when those of all the remaining survivors of like rank were colonels and brigadiers. At the first Manassas, Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Seven Days’ fight, the second Manassas, Sharpsburg, and Fredericksburg he was the chief subordinate figure except where he divided the honors with Stonewall Jackson. And after the death of that very Napoleon of war, until the ultimo suspiro at Appomattox, Longstreet was Lee’s right hand; or, as our great commander fondly called him, “my old war-horse.” How highly he was held at head-quarters and the war department was shown in his being made the senior lieutenant-general, even over Jackson, after the 1862 test by fire.