Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History, and: James Longstreet: Lee's War Horse (review)

BOOK REVIEWS273 that there should be no need of any further word on the subject for some time to come. Judith Saunders Salem State College Lee's TarnishedLieutenant:JamesLongstreetandHis Placein Southern History. By William Garrett Piston. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987. Pp. 320. $24.95.) James Longstreet: Lee's WarHorse. By H. J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad . (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936; reprinted , with a Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher, 1986. Pp. 420. $19.95.) Most of the people who have read about James Longstreet during the past fifteen years probably have done so in Michael Shaara's novel, The Killer Angels. Set at the battle of Gettysburg, Shaara's fiction puts his readers inside the minds of several of his characters, including those whom he calls Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Longstreet emerges as almost a modern figure. Devoid of faith and illusion, he manifests a causeless courage; unlike, Lee, T. J. Jackson, and J. E. B. Stuart, he sees that romantic individualism and massed frontal assaults are ruinous in modern war. Perhaps he even sees that war is ruinous. He is a realist, surrounded by fools, visionaries, egotists , and men living in the past. Insofar as one equates Shaara's Longstreet with thehistorical man and shares the novelist's view of him, one is likely to finish the book respecting the general. We might infer from the extaordinary popularity of The KillerAngels that William Garrett Piston's main concern in Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant has been alleviated somewhat in recent years. Piston contends that Longstreet's reputation for integrity and competence has suffered unjustly at the hands of generations of memoirists, historians, novelists, and purveyors of popular culture. Piston musters evidence in support of an argument made by Thomas L. Connelly, who in turn drew partly on the postwar controversies among former Confederate officers. After the death of Robert E. Lee, his admirers made him the epitome of the justness of the Southern cause and the proof of its superior military ability. To explain its defeat, they blamed Longstreet, especially for his conduct at Gettysburg. His becoming a Republican during reconstruction made him an especially suitable target for the charge of weakness in devotion to the Southern principles embodied in the Confederacy. Piston's book has two parts. The first is an 81-page survey of Longstreet's wartime career; the secondreviews postwar censure of Longstreet, his responses, and almost one hundred years of Longstreetiana from John Esten Cooke to Bruce Catton and Clifford Dowdey. Piston faults Longstreet for such errors as his conduct in the battle of Seven Pines and his querulous tone 274CIVIL WAR HISTORY in his later writings about the war. However, for the most part, the first section defends the proposition that Longstreet was the "best corpslevel commander of the war" (p. x), while the second part chronicles the ulterior motives and stereotyped images shaping the work ofmost Civil War writers on the subject. By the end of the book, we only need to be told that certain authors adopted "the anti-Longstreet faction's version" (p. 183) in order to know what Piston thinks of them; and we are invited to share his indignation that Longstreet's likeness was excluded from "bubblegum cards, paper placemats, and packets of Dixie Crystal sugar" (p. 184) during the centennial. Among the works which Piston briefly discusses is H. J. Eckenrode's and Bryan Conrad's James Longstreet: Lee's War Horse, published in 1936 and newly re-issued by the University of North Carolina Press. All but seventeen pages of this book deal with the war. Rather than a biography of Longstreet, it is an assessment of the campaigns in which he participated, with intermittent commentary on his rolein them. Though Eckenrode and Conrad studied the war closely, their very thin annotation—mainly citing Longstreet's memoirs and the Official Records—leaves unsupported their categorical assertions about states of mind, intentions, and commanders' influence on one another. They portray Longstreet as an obsessively ambitious man who, by force of personality , induced Lee to make or to permit errors which hastened Confederate defeat. Piston criticizes Eckenrode and...