Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

This incisive biography from historian Varon (Armies of Deliverance) offers a fresh take on Confederate general James Longstreet (1821–1904), who was Robert E. Lee’s trusted “war-horse.” Rather than trod the usual ground of Longstreet studies—his renowned military command during the Civil War, including his generalship at the Battle of Gettysburg, where he argued against Lee’s disastrous decision to attack the center of the Union line—Varon provides a thorough account of Longstreet’s remarkable postwar political conversion from “ardent Confederate to ardent Republican.” Inspired by his longtime friend Ulysses S. Grant, Longstreet joined the Republican Party after receiving congressional amnesty and, during Grant’s presidency, inflamed former Confederates by supporting the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. In 1874, white supremacists attempted to overthrow the Republican-controlled Louisiana state government in New Orleans, but Longstreet led an interracial state militia that stopped the coup attempt. The backlash against Longstreet for firing on former Confederates was vicious, but the more “white Southern critics treated him as an apostate on the issue of race,” Varon writes, “the more receptive he became to Republican ideology.” Varon draws an intriguing parallel between this event and the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection, and suggests the consequences of not punishing rioters can be irreversible. The result is a must-read for Civil War buffs that contains valuable insight on today’s political polarization. (Nov.)