From Rebel to Republican

James Longstreet had all the makings of a die-hard rebel, certain to one day grace an exclusive pantheon of Confederate heroes. Born in cotton-rich Edgefield County, South Carolina, and raised in Gainesville, Georgia, he hailed from a family of relative wealth and middling slaveholders. Steeped in proslavery ideology and martial culture, Longstreet graduated from West Point, served in the Mexican War, and eagerly volunteered for Confederate military service after secession. Rather than a reluctant rebel, he was, according to Varon, a true believer in the Confederate project of slavery and secession.

As confirmation of his zeal, Longstreet rose to command the Army of Northern Virginia’s storied First Corps, earning a reputation as Lee’s “old war horse” following his exploits at the battles of Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Chickamauga. He also warned of slave resistance and alluded to race war to motivate his troops, ordering his armies to seize free African Americans and runaway slaves and return them to bondage. In word and deed, Longstreet embraced the Confederacy’s racial politics.

Then came Longstreet’s stunning second act. Believing that defeat entailed accommodation to the victors, and convinced of the folly of continued defiance, Longstreet quickly made peace with the new political order and accepted what he termed “reconstruction in full recognition of the law.” Seeking a fresh start, he partnered in a cotton brokerage firm in postwar New Orleans, a bustling hive of economic activity and a proving ground for Reconstruction policies. He became increasingly influenced by his long-standing friendship with West Point classmate Ulysses S. Grant, as well as by the party dynamics and interracialism of postwar New Orleans, and soon began to distance himself from his former comrades in arms. By the spring of 1867, he had evolved into a Republican and full-blown proponent of Reconstruction.

While Republicans celebrated his dazzling about-face, a mounting chorus of critics pegged Longstreet a “scalawag,” a derisive term for white Southerners who joined the party of Lincoln and, consequently, supported some level of multiracial political democracy. In response, Longstreet condemned the Democratic Party as a vehicle for violence and racial prejudice. Although Varon never quite puts it in these terms, Longstreet became an economic modernizer who endorsed liberal capitalist state-building and an interracial democratic vision of the New South — one eventually backed by tens of thousands of white Southerners, including former Confederate leaders John S. Mosby and, later, William Mahone, head of Virginia’s Readjuster movement.

Akin to most scalawags, however, Longstreet was never a racial egalitarian. Of course, violent resistance to Reconstruction was about far more than racism. Southern elites detested the Republican effort to transform Southern society not simply because it sought to politically elevate black men but because formerly enslaved political agents and wage earners imbued with some degree of negotiating power had the capacity to challenge owners’ supreme control of the labor force.

Like his planter antagonists, Longstreet understood that emancipation had unleashed a social revolution that had to be controlled for fear of “anarchy.” He even rationalized his Republican conversion in racist, paternalistic terms by suggesting white elites must steer what could otherwise become a revolutionary party dominated by African Americans and poor whites. For Longstreet, white Republicanism, not white supremacist paramilitarism, was essential to maintaining the social order.

Nevertheless, as Varon shows, Longstreet made bold alliances with Northern-born Radical Republicans like William Pitt Kellogg and an ascendent class of African American political leaders, including P. B. S. Pinchback and Oscar Dunn, champion of Louisiana’s black artisan class. As surveyor of customs, he integrated public offices and used his patronage power to nominate black men for key positions. While president of the Central Republican Club of Louisiana, Longstreet worked on behalf of integrated public schools and fundraised, organized, and marched alongside black activists and workingmen. Most critically, the former rebel continuously endorsed black voting rights, which he viewed as essential to remaking the South.

Slowly, Longstreet tacked from moderate to Radical even as political indifference in the North and elite-driven violence in the South conspired to undermine the world’s first experiment in mass interracial democracy. By the 1870s a consensus was already emerging among most white Americans that Reconstruction was a mistake, a “tragic era.” Formerly enslaved people, in this view, were unprepared for freedom, and their involvement in politics produced corruption, misrule, and white victimization. The very existence of men like Longstreet — ardent Confederates turned “race traitors” — presented a formidable threat to this growing Lost Cause orthodoxy.

As confirmation, Longstreet, now head of the Louisiana State Militia, issued a general order mandating political equality before the law regardless of race or color. Then, in 1874, he verified his interracial principles by leading the mostly black militia and the interracial New Orleans Metropolitan Police against an attempted coup by the White League, the paramilitary arm of the state’s Democratic Party. While the resulting battle of Canal Street — later recast by Longstreet’s opponents as the heroic “Battle of Liberty Place” — proved a turning point on the road to Democratic “redemption” and the restoration of white rule, Varon calls Longstreet’s support for black soldiering “his boldest, most radical contribution of Reconstruction.” From the perspective of elite former Confederates, it was also his most unforgivable.

The Battle of Memory

As Reconstruction faded, street battles morphed into literary contests. Longstreet returned to north Georgia in 1876, swapped his sword for a pen, and dedicated much of the remainder of his long life to battle on the field of Civil War memory.

Fully ostracized from Confederate memorial culture, Longstreet’s Republicanism made him the favored target of the Southern Historical Society Papers and the cult of Robert E. Lee, led by Jubal Early, one of Lee’s lieutenant generals. Lee’s cheerleaders obscured the failure of his aggressive tactics at Gettysburg and attributed the Confederate defeat to Longstreet and his preference for a defensive battle. At the same time, the Lee faction identified Gettysburg as the turning point in the war, which allowed them to charge Longstreet with not just the loss of that battle but the entire war. These were self-serving mythologies, as Longstreet rightly asserted, but that didn’t stop them from becoming accepted wisdom among large swaths of the US public.

In defending his war record, Longstreet crafted a new image as a statesman for Southern Republicanism, a booster for regional economic development, and a moderate alternative to ex-Confederate hard-liners. Mirroring the wider pro-business Thermidor within the Republican Party, by the 1880s he refrained from advocating black civil rights or critiquing the rising segregation regime. In this Gilded Age milieu of galloping capitalism and Civil War nostalgia, Longstreet became a herald of sectional reconciliation and a Blue-Gray reunion that forged a common nationalism through industrialization while accepting racial segregation.

North-South détente clearly required elite reconcilers to eschew or subordinate interracialism and avoid the memory of emancipation, but the “road to reunion” was paved by capital. Varon argues that, by century’s turn, there were “simply not enough Longstreets in the South” to sustain interracial democracy. That’s true. But she neglects to consider how a party led by affluent centrists whose “main goal” was to facilitate market expansion and commercial rights — to mimic the North’s “mercantile energy” — might also perpetuate fundamental inequalities.

Longstreet may have been a “traitor to his race,” but he was hardly a turncoat to his social class. From his planter roots to his championing of the New South creed, Longstreet — whether through secession or leading black soldiers — never seemed to abandon his predilection for hierarchy, order, and property. As one Vermont paper argued, if Longstreet were “less prominent,” Democrats would have simply “‘ku kluxed’ him . . . as the aristocratic Southerners did the poor negroes at Colfax.” Instead, Longstreet’s class, race, and prestige compelled his assailants to limit their attacks to scapegoating and character assassination.

Longstreet’s Waning Reputation

Collective memory is always a reflection of who wields power in the present. Longstreet’s popular reputation — like that of Grant, Thaddeus Stevens, and other advocates of Reconstruction and black civil rights — plummeted with the rise of Jim Crow. While other Confederate leaders came to dominate grand public spaces throughout the South, such as at Georgia’s Stone Mountain and Richmond’s Monument Avenue, Longstreet remained a favorite target of white elite reaction.

This wasn’t because narrative creators deemed him and other dissenters irrelevant but because their pro–civil rights posture was a direct challenge to the comforting narratives underwriting an apartheid system that kept African Americans and poor whites divided. Varon highlights how school textbooks, sanctioned by Confederate “heritage groups” including the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and popular Lee hagiographies, such as those of Douglas Southall Freeman, reinforced Lost Cause themes, consigning Longstreet to the status of Southern pariah.

Meanwhile, the memory of white pro-Reconstruction Southerners on the labor left, which Varon understandably bypasses, reflected the broader arc of organized labor from racial exclusion toward civil rights unionism. During the 1870s, the Workingman’s Advocate, the official newspaper of the National Labor Union, whose leaders were largely hostile to the Reconstruction project, had endorsed the notion that Longstreet was another opportunistic bureaucrat who had “sold himself for profit.”

By the 1930s — when black Communists, including Angelo Herndon, were convicted under moth-eaten anti-carpetbagger laws of “inciting to insurrection” — the Daily Worker came to identify its cause with the South’s Radical Republican legacy. This was partly a result of the party’s civil rights–oriented telling of the Civil War era, and partly because the Jim Crow press cast Communists as modern-day scalawags and carpetbaggers for attempting to “invade” the former Confederacy and impose “negro rule.”

That same decade saw Longstreet’s widow form the Longstreet Memorial Association, whose sole mission was to raise money to erect a statue of her late husband. Launched in 1938, amid the Depression and on the eve of World War II, the effort quickly ran aground. In fact, it wasn’t until 1998, long after the civil rights movement and scholarly reassessments had ennobled the so-called scalawags, and after Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and the 1993 movie Gettysburg had rehabilitated the general’s image, that Longstreet finally got his commemorative due.

Even then, the Sons of Confederate Veterans agreed to sponsor a Longstreet monument at Gettysburg on the condition that it exalt his war service and not his ignominious “postwar activities.” The unveiling was marked by Confederate flags, rebel yells, and a drum corps playing “Dixie.” As the sun set on the twentieth century, honoring Longstreet remained premised on neo-Confederate denialism.

The Lost Cause and the Other South

Longstreet’s story lays waste to the Lost Cause fiction of a solid former Confederacy by conjuring what historian Carl Degler termed the “Other South” of interracial labor and reform movements: Radical Republicans, Readjusters, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, Populists, and dissenters from the white racial solidarity consensus whose literal and commemorative existences were swept away by the forces of counterrevolution.

At the same time, Longstreet’s postwar career speaks to the limitations and contradictions of the Reconstruction political coalitions — predicated on universal manhood suffrage but ultimately devoid of economic egalitarianism — and the power of a sectional reconciliation culture dominated by white elites.

In that sense, Longstreet stands as an important symbol — albeit an imperfect one — of multiracial democracy and resistance to white nationalism and its inherent violence. But the life of this Confederate Judas also underscores Reconstruction as what James S. Allen called an “unfinished revolutionary task” — one that continues to provide a storehouse of lessons concerning the possibilities and limitations of liberal democracy, the role of power and property in shaping historical narratives, and the necessity of class-based interracial alliance in advancing the cause of freedom under capitalism.