General James Longstreet’s disagreement with Robert E. Lee over tactics at Gettysburg did not affect their close friendship. “The relations existing between us were affectionate, confidential and even tender, from first to last,” Longstreet later wrote. “There was never a harsh word between us.”
During the night of July 1 in the vicinity of the sleeping town of Gettysburg only Meade’s Federal troops acted with urgency. While the defeated survivors of the day entrenched themselves on Cemetery Hill, new arrivals hurried through the windless night to occupy the ridge southward from Cemetery Hill all the way down to the Round Tops, where Lee planned to attack.
In Longstreet’s two divisions near the field, the men who were to make that attack went into bivouac from two to six or more miles from Seminary Ridge. It was not thoughtfulness for his men which caused Longstreet to allow the unfought troops to sleep before reaching the position from which they would attack. The reason lay within the strangely disturbed mind of James Longstreet.
Regarded as the army’s one dependable corps commander, an old reliable who continued the character of the pre-Chancellorsville army in the reorganization, Longstreet had given little hint of the agitated state in which he prepared for the second day’s fighting. His later explanations for his behavior, written years after the war in an atmosphere of bitter recrimination between Longstreet and his former brother officers, revealed that Old Pete himself possessed no clear understanding of the nature of his turmoil at Gettysburg.
Then forty-two years old, James Longstreet had been born in the Edgefield district (that “red hill and cotton” country) of South Carolina, though his roots were not in the aristocratic republic. His people, of Dutch background, had come to the South from New Jersey, and in Longstreet the strain of Dutch characteristics ran more strongly than environmental influence. On his father’s death, Longstreet’s family moved to Alabama when he was twelve, and all during his youth he visited much in Georgia, where his uncle, Judge A. B. Longstreet, was a scholarly and highly esteemed citizen. Without an ancestral place-identification, Longstreet was more or less attached to the Lower South and was not a typical product of any Southern state.
This least Southern of Confederate leaders was a prudent man, methodical and cautious by habit, blunt-spoken and stubborn in manner, with a disregard for the social graces. Yet his personality was by no means unattractive. Powerful of chest and shoulders, very strong, without fear, he possessed that uncomplicated nature which makes for an easy adaptability in undemanding societies. There was a stalwartness about him, a quality of reassurance in his bluff presence, and he had a hearty sense of humor. He liked to banter with other men and, when amused, laughed loudly. Men of his own type were strongly attracted to him, and he formed enduring friendships. One of his oldest friends was General Grant, an intimate since West Point, who was married to Longstreet’s cousin.
Longstreet’s wife was a Virginia girl, daughter of his former brigade commander, and the ten children of their union had caused him to exchange military glory for security in the old army. A line captain at the age of thirty-four, Longstreet transferred to the paymaster department with the higher rank and higher pay of major. Without the war, he would probably have lived out his days in this mundane niche at the Albuquerque post, enjoying the fine outdoor sports offered by the New Mexico country. Even when he went with the South, he still wanted security first. Saying that “I had given up all aspirations for military glory,” he applied for a commission in the Confederate pay office.
A circumstance changed his mind and course. Because of the long trip by way of Texas, where Longstreet deposited his family, he did not reach Richmond until the end of June 1861, long after most other returned Southerners had received commissions as colonels. When Longstreet appeared at the war office, there was a desperate need for a brigadier to assume command of three raw Virginia regiments on the main defense line at Manassas. By this chance his date of rank, July 1, gave him seniority to the majority of brigadiers of his age, some with more distinguished records in the old army.
As a result, he was upped to major general in October 1861, when his contemporaries were making brigadier. This temporal seniority, along with his stolid self-assurance, caused Lee to entrust considerable responsibility to him when Lee first took command of the army. As Longstreet thrived on it, he was the inevitable choice for corps commander when Lee organized his force into the Army of Northern Virginia.
As corps commander, Old Pete gave complete satisfaction to everyone. Although sometimes slow, and preferring to have everything just so before committing himself, he was always sound. Despite a starvation diet, he kept his troops well-conditioned and in fine unit spirit, and as a fighting force in straight-on action they were probably unsurpassed in the modern history of warfare. Wearing a heavy, bushy beard and looking at the world with unblinking blue eyes, the sturdily built general looked the part of the ultimately dependable lieutenant, “Lee’s warhorse.”
This open record of person and performance comprised the Longstreet that the army and the Confederate people knew. Inside, there was another man, known only to Longstreet—and not too well known to him. This inner man was born sometime in the eighteen months between the war’s first battle at Manassas and his good day at Fredericksburg in December 1862. During that period, when Longstreet was between forty and forty-two, he experienced a rebirth of the “aspiration for military glory.” As he kept it to himself, the ambition fed a growing delusion that his gifts were commensurate with his aspiration, and the good corps commander convinced himself that he possessed a genius for high command.
After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Longstreet tried in various ways to have himself detached from Lee’s army, where he felt the chance would never be given him to win the fame he deserved. Stonewall Jackson stood in the way. Old Jack was the one the songs and poems were written about (“Stonewall Jackson’s Way”), and people began to refer to “Lee and Jackson” and then to the rest of the army. In the public mind Longstreet was the warhorse, merely a trusted subordinate.
It was partly Longstreet’s desire to stay away from Lee’s army which removed him and two divisions from Chancellorsville, where his rival won his supreme glory. While Longstreet was maneuvering for a transfer with his divisions to the West, Jackson died and everything changed. In the reorganization of the army, Longstreet would be next to Lee.
Longstreet’s jealous brooding over Jackson apparently led him into a misconception of the relationship between Lee and Jackson; and Old Jack, more than has been recognized, became a motivation in Longstreet’s behavior in the Gettysburg campaign.
Lee and Jackson were not equal collaborators, as they must have appeared to Longstreet. As Lee said, he, the commanding general, had merely to suggest to Stonewall. Suggestions from Jackson were not precluded, but always these were fundamentally tactical suggestions made within the context of a strategy on which the two generals shared that curiously intuitive understanding.
In contrast, Longstreet’s short-range defensive thinking was antithetical to Lee’s concepts of war, and he was by demonstration a limited soldier. To be a top-flight corps commander was in itself no small achievement (few were in the whole Confederacy), and it was a big leap for a contentedly physical type who two years before had been satisfied to serve as paymaster on an army post. In making that leap to the status of high-ranking subordinate Longstreet had employed his fullest potential. His ideas on strategy were vaporous and primitive, as he proved in his essays at independent command and in his suggestions to Lee.
Longstreet arrived at Gettysburg believing that he had already established his concept of a Jacksonian collaboration with Lee. He had even deluded himself into thinking that, in the collaboration, he had imposed his ideas of strategy on the commanding general. He was deeply shocked and bewildered when Lee, on Seminary Ridge during the afternoon of the first day, dismissed his suggestions. But he was a stubborn Dutchman. That night, while his troops were resting before moving up in the morning, Longstreet was making no plans for beginning the early movement that General Lee had requested. He was pondering ways of bringing Lee around to his own preferred plan of action.
Just as his secret stirrings of ambition had gone undetected, not one person in the army suspected that the Longstreet they depended on to solidify their victory was a stranger to them—and, in a way, to himself.
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From the time that Longstreet arose just before daylight on the 2nd, no one can ever know with any certainty what went on in his mind or what transpired between him and Lee and other officers. In the reports, each hour of the next two days became obscured by the entanglements of the “Gettysburg Controversy” that was waged between Longstreet and his former brother officers for from five to thirty years after the war.
Even the origin of the controversy was disputed, with each side claiming that the other had thrown the first stone. However, no evidence appears of any public attack on Longstreet prior to his derogation of Lee as quoted in a book published in 1866 and in a letter of his which was apparently in circulation around the time of Lee’s death in 1870. The first public criticisms of Longstreet in 1872, by Jubal Early and the Reverend William Pendleton, seem to have been primarily a defense of Lee. To attack Lee in that period would have been considered unchivalrous in anyone, and in Longstreet personally it was most unbecoming.
For Longstreet had committed what ex-Confederates considered the apostasy of “turning Republican.” Appointed to a post in New Orleans by his friend, President Grant, in 1867, he took an active part in the Reconstruction government there. By 1872, according to Claude Bowers, “in Louisiana … Longstreet was ostracised.” In September 1874 he commanded an occupation force that fired into a group of former Confederates who came at him with a Rebel Yell. The tensions and loyalties among disenfranchised Southerners created a climate of bitter passions in which the controversy over Gettysburg developed between Longstreet and men who became his enemies.
The high-ranking and highly placed officers who attacked Longstreet in print concentrated on his failures to the point of making him the villain of Gettysburg. In rebuttal, Longstreet expanded on his initial criticism, which claimed that Lee had failed because he refused to follow Longstreet’s advice, and made of himself the potential hero of Gettysburg. In these post-war writings, Longstreet’s attempts to prove his superiority led him into a rearrangement of his part in the battle to accord with a rational pattern of behavior based on his ignored strategy. But this after-the-fact version of the campaign revealed both a hazy memory of the events and a disregard of available facts.
Longstreet invented things that never happened, distorted recorded incidents, told outright lies apparently without realizing it, and contradicted himself in his various accounts. In reporting his undeclared duel with Lee, the stolid soldier attributed to himself some high-flown oratory which seems most unlikely in the circumstances and which not one officer present remembered hearing. However, the point of his conflicting versions is not so much that they are untrustworthy accounts of what he said and did, but that the self-vindications indicate Longstreet’s confusion about his own state of mind.
The state of mind derived from his misconception concerning a collaborative status with Lee, and from his delusion that before they came North the commanding general had agreed to fight according to his plan.
From the moment that Old Pete stepped into the Jackson role, he urged Lee to remain on the defensive in Virginia and wait for another Fredericksburg. Longstreet’s idea of military heaven was the Battle of Fredericksburg repeated indefinitely, with his men standing in nigh impregnable positions and receiving clumsy lunges from the enemy. As all Union generals could not be depended upon to perform as ineptly as had Burnside, and as such repulses accomplished nothing toward victualing the army or winning the war, Lee dismissed the advice with his usual courtesy. He explained that he was not launching an invasion to seek the enemy’s army. He hoped to draw the enemy out of Virginia after him and, while supplying his troops, he would receive battle where conditions offered opportunity for a decisive victory.
Satisfied that the army was not assuming the offensive, Longstreet regarded Lee’s plan as an extension of his own determination to fight only on the defense. He recommended to Lee that, “after piercing Pennsylvania and menacing Washington, we should choose a strong position and force the Federals to attack us. … I recalled to him the battle of Fredericksburg.”
With his mind burdened by the problems of operating in the enemy’s country, Lee had offhandedly agreed to the general principle of defensive tactics in a strategic offensive. He certainly did not eliminate what Bismarck called “the imponderables” of war and commit himself to a fixed plan that would restrain him from taking advantage of any opening.
Longstreet, with his insensitivity to the nuances of human relationships, convinced himself that the polite gentleman had actually promised that he would fight only as Longstreet had suggested. In fact, Old Pete later contended that he had “consented” to the invasion only because Lee promised that he would fight on the defensive. The use of the word “consented” by a corps commander shows the depth of his delusion about the equality of the collaboration.
Such a promise was so remote from Lee’s thoughts that after the war, when he was told about Longstreet’s contention, he could not believe that Longstreet had ever said it.
A friend recorded that Lee said “that the idea was absurd. He never made such a promise and never thought of doing any such thing.”
That General Lee did not even remember the conversation about the defensive invasion would explain his distracted dismissal of Longstreet’s importunities when Old Pete joined the commanding general’s party on Seminary Ridge late on the first afternoon. The collision between the two armies had then dictated the nature of the action, and, except for Longstreet, every general on the field recognized that solidifying their gains was the one urgent necessity for the decisive battle sought by Lee.
But in his fixation on fighting a defensive battle, another Fredericksburg, Longstreet ignored the condition of the battle that had evolved its own pattern. Despite the circumstances that he found at Gettysburg, he clung to a course which could not possibly apply to the existing situation.
Longstreet could not have been in full possession of his military faculties when he determined on changing winning tactics, to which the whole command of the army was committed, in the midst of an engagement. Nor could the after-the-fact rationale he attributed to his behavior have been present when he began the day of July 2 with the purpose of thwarting the plans of the high command which the rest of the army was preparing to execute.
After a breakfast while the stars were still shining, he left his temporary camp along Marsh Creek and started the four-mile ride to Seminary Ridge. His mind was demonstrably not on getting his troops up as early as possible. He was hurrying to Lee to find means of persuading the commanding general to shift the battle to make it Longstreet’s fight. Offense had been the strength of his late rival, Jackson. He had no intention of trying to replace Stonewall by operating in the sphere of Old Jack’s strength.
