A Scrapbook of Me

Did you know...
Though C.S.A. General James Longstreet was a Confederate in the war, after the war, he joined the Republican Party and supported rights and freedoms for former slaves which made him unpopular to former Confederates harrassed and impoverished by the War and Reconstruction. Longstreet was one of the foremost Confederate generals of the American Civil War and the principal subordinate to General Robert E. Lee, who called him his "Old War Horse" and "the staff in my right hand." He served under Lee as a corps commander for many of the famous battles fought by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Eastern Theater, but also with Gen. Braxton Bragg in the Army of Tennessee in the Western Theater. Biographer and historian Jeffry D. Wert wrote that Longstreet, "was the finest corps commander in the Army of Northern Virginia; in fact, he was arguably the best corps commander in the conflict on either side." After the War, he led African-American militia against the anti-Reconstruction White League at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874 in which he was eventually pulled from his horse, shot by a spent bullet (i.e. not badly injured) and taken prisoner. Criticism from authors in the Lost Cause movement attacked Longstreet's war career for many years after his death. Knudsen maintains that because Longstreet became a "reconstructed rebel", embraced equal rights for blacks, unification of the nation, and Reconstruction, he became the target of those who wanted to maintain racist policies and otherwise could not accept the verdict of the battlefield.