At the age of eighty-three General Longstreet has passed away—a noble character, a good soldier, one of the hardest fighters of the Civil War. General Longstreet was pretty badly treated by the people whose battles he fought with so great courage and capacity. He was no politician—just a soldier, and at the close of the war committed the error of “fraternizing” with all his countrymen. He “accepted the situation,” not wisely, but too early. With a fine and generous unwisdom he laid away the animosities of the war-time and put himself at once where all stand now,—on the broad, high ground of American citizenship. No part had he in the provincial conceit of the thing that has the immodesty to call itself a “Southern gentleman.” It probably never occurred to him that the qualities distinguishing a gentleman from a pirate of the Spanish Main had so narrow a geographical distribution as the term implies. He paid for his breadth of mind—became a kind of social outlaw and political excommunicant in “the land once proud of him.” Briefly, his shipmates marooned him. Well, he has escaped—he has “beaten the game,” as, sooner or later, we all conquer without exertion. After a while Southern capitals will be adorned with statues of Longstreet and upon his grave posterity will see “his foemen’s children loose the rose.”
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(New York Tribune.)
Lee and Longstreet.
The death of General James Longstreet, as was to be expected, has revived to some extent the controversies which have raged over certain memorable incidents in his military career. For the last twenty-five years persistent efforts have been made to throw on General Longstreet’s shoulders responsibility for Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. Not a few Southern writers have gone so far as to accuse him, if not of insubordination, at least of culpable inattention to orders given him by the Confederate commander-in-chief. General John B. Gordon, in his recently published reminiscences, revived and amplified these charges against Longstreet, stating explicitly—as his own conclusion and as that of impartial military critics generally—that Longstreet’s blunders had blasted Confederate hopes at Gettysburg, and that General Lee “died believing he had lost by Longstreet’s disobedience.” Strangely enough, General Longstreet’s wife had prepared an elaborate refutation of General Gordon’s theories, and had arranged for its publication on January 3—the day following General Longstreet’s death.
We do not think that history will sustain the contentions of General Longstreet’s critics. They are interesting enough as post-mortem demonstrations of what might have been. But they ignore actual conditions. They picture a situation which could have existed only as a military after-thought. General Longstreet cannot be made a scapegoat for all the sins of hesitation or omission chargeable to Confederate commanders at Gettysburg. General Gordon is himself disposed to censure General Lee for not vigorously attacking the Federal forces in their new position on the evening of July 1. He condemns utterly Longstreet’s failure to assault the Federal left wing early in the morning of July 2. But he waves aside entirely the exhaustion of A. P. Hill’s corps at the conclusion of the first day’s battle and the physical impediments to forming and executing an attack on the Federal left wing before noon of July 2. That Longstreet’s assault suffered in effectiveness from the delays of July 2 is greatly to be doubted. The fighting done by his corps far excelled in dash and brilliance anything done at Gettysburg by Ewell’s corps or A. P. Hill’s. Longstreet bore the brunt of both the second and third day’s struggle and emerged from the conflict with his reputation as a corps commander unimpaired. There is no reason to think that he could have fought more brilliantly or more successfully if he had attempted the attack which General Gordon philosophizes about in the early morning of the second day.
General Lee at the close of the battle justly and honorably assumed entire responsibility for the Confederate defeat. Lee lost at Gettysburg because on the offensive he seemed incapable of rising to the full height of his military talent. His generalship in his two brief invasions of Northern territory was commonplace.
In Lee’s own lifetime not a word of criticism was aimed at Longstreet. It is needless to inquire what influences have conspired to foist on him the blame for the Confederate failure at Gettysburg. Another generation of Southern writers will do him more impartial justice. He will certainly be classed hereafter by open-minded critics as one of the ablest and most intelligent of the commanders who fought under the South’s flag in the Civil War.
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