Why There Are No Southern Monuments to this Confederate Civil War General

Gen. James Longstreet, hailed in the South as one of the great Confederate military leaders, became a pariah when he supported rights for Black people after the war.

Longstreet statue at Gettysburg, PA. Photo credit: battlefieldportraits.com

It’s not easy to find the statue of Confederate General James Longstreet at the Gettysburg National Memorial. You have to look for it. It almost makes you wonder if that was intentional.

The statue is tucked away in a wooded area in the 6,000-acre park on the site of the pivotal battle of the Civil War. It's odd-looking. The horse, frozen in a wheeling turn as if about to charge, is too small in scale for the man astride it. Instead of standing on a pedestal so you have to look up at it, it's on the ground.

In the South, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of memorials to Confederate leaders, generals and soldiers. Eight U.S. military bases are named for Confederate generals despite the fact that they violated their sworn oaths of allegiance by taking up arms against the Union. 

Longstreet led Confederate troops in the two battles at Manassas, the Peninsula Campaign, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chickamauga, Knoxville and Gettysburg. Robert E. Lee, who he served under as second-in-command in the Army of Virginia, called him "my right hand” and “my old war horse." Longstreet was a Confederate hero. Until he wasn't.

Today, the only statue of Longstreet is the one at Gettysburg, in the North, and that one was only erected in 1998. There is no statue of Longstreet in the South. Despite his war record, Longstreet would become a pariah among white Southerners in the decades after the war. He abjured the Lost Cause, the fantasy that persists to this day that the Southern side in the Civil War was a gallant, heroic struggle against the odds. But worst of all, he did something that was unforgivable. He advocated for civil rights for Black people.

"The Lost Cause, like any good cult, needed its saints, which Lee was, and it needed its demons, which Longstreet became," says Kevin Waite, a professor at Durham University in England.

James Longstreet. Photo credit: Marion Doss

Longstreet's life story contains one of the most extraordinary second acts of any public figure in American history.

James Longstreet was born in South Carolina in 1821. He was raised in Alabama by an uncle, a slave owner and vociferous defender of slavery.  Longstreet himself owned slaves. He was an unquestioning true believer in the inherent superiority of the white race and the right of white people to own Black people. 

Like many Confederate generals, Longstreet had gone to West Point. He was in the same class as Ulysses S. Grant and the two were friends. Longstreet was best man at Grant’s wedding. Both served with distinction in the Mexican War, though not together.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Longstreet resigned his Army commission to become a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. As Lee's adjutant at Gettysburg, he vehemently disagreed with Lee's decision to launch what would become known in history as Pickett’s Charge, an attempt to break through the Union defensive line on the final day of that climactic battle. The attack failed and Lee was forced to retreat. 

Two years later, in 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. Longstreet was there. Soon after, the Civil War, in which as many as 700,000 Americans died, was over.

The Battle of Gettysburg 1863. Photo credit: Boston Public Library

After the war, Longstreet and his family moved to New Orleans where he became a businessman. Under post-war Reconstruction, former slaves had been granted the rights of citizens. Throughout the South, including New Orleans, most whites resisted. But Longstreet accepted the new order.

"In urging the South to accept the reality of defeat, Longstreet made the obvious point that the losing party should not expect to impose its perspective on the victor," the historian Eric Foner wrote in The Atlantic magazine last year.  

Longstreet did more than acquiesce. 

"Longstreet threw himself into his role as an agent of Reconstruction, in his capacity as civil servant and warrior," wrote Elizabeth Varon, a University of Virginia history professor in her 2023 biography, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied The South. "The centerpiece of its plan was the enfranchisement of Black Southern men as voters and their inclusion in the body politic as citizens. In aligning himself with this program, Longstreet joined ranks with the Republican Party, the party of the North, of Lincoln, of emancipation, of Union victory, of everything Confederates had loathed and feared."

Supporting the right of Black men to vote, in particular, was viewed as a provocation and a threat to white Southerners. In many former Confederate states, the Black population was greater than the white population, which meant ceding political power to people who just a few years earlier had had no more rights than a farm animal. Violence directed at Blacks, Northern whites and "scalawags," the derisive name for Southerners who supported Reconstruction, escalated. The Ku Klux Klan was born and grew to the size of an army as it launched a vicious campaign of murder and intimidation.

"Nothing alarmed white southerners more than the specter of blacks casting votes," wrote Ron Chernow in his biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

White Southerners were shocked and enraged by what they saw as Longstreet's very public betrayal. He spoke out in favor of Black male suffrage. (Women of any color could not vote.) He joined the New Orleans school board which integrated public schools. In 1867, he became adjutant general of the Louisiana state militia, which had Black and white officers. For a time, he ran the Federal Customs House and integrated it. He was a stalwart and vocal supporter of Reconstruction and became a Republican when most Southerners were Democrats, the more conservative party which harbored Confederate sympathizers. He even allied himself politically with a Black man, P.B.S. Pinchback, who was briefly the first Black governor of Louisiana. Longstreet once lauded Pinchback for having "the coolest brains and the shrewdest faculties of any public man in the State."

The 1868 presidential election would pit Longstreet's old West Point pal, Grant, against a Democratic ticket that ran an openly racist campaign. Longstreet backed Grant, further evidence of his treachery. A few years later, he published his memoirs and in it dared to criticize Lee for his decision to invade the North and his strategy at Gettysburg.

"There were certain things you could do in the South after the war, and certain things you couldn't do," said Christopher Gwinn, chief historian at Gettysburg National Military Park, in an article on CNN.com. "One of things you couldn't do was criticize Robert E. Lee."

Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans. Photo credit: wallyg

In 1874, Longstreet went even further. When thousands of armed members of the White League, a vigilante group that included veterans who had served under him, took to the streets of New Orleans to protest the election of the Republican governor, Longstreet led an integrated militia force against them. The two sides clashed in the streets and the vigilantes prevailed. Longstreet was taken prisoner by the mob which included soldiers who had once served under him. He was freed a few days later by federal troops. His apostasy was now complete. The Southern press was especially merciless.

"It has become a subject of regret that the wound he received at the [Battle of the Wilderness] was not mortal," wrote the Mobile (Alabama) Daily Tribune. "We would then have been spared the mortification of seeing him in the bum-boat of radicalism, side by side with the enemies of his country and race."

Former Confederate generals - his colleagues and friends during the Civil War - even began blaming Longstreet, not Lee, for the failure of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, saying he delayed getting troops into position. Some suggested that he did so intentionally.

How much of Longstreet's conversion was a matter of moral conscience and how much was political pragmatism is open to debate. Did he genuinely become a liberal or was it because he understood that one had to accept that the South would have to change and that change meant granting rights and ceding some political power to Black people? Did Longstreet actually believe Black people were the equals to whites?

"He probably supported Black suffrage more for strategic reasons because he thought that was the best way for the South to reunify with the North," Waite told me. "I don't think you could ever make the argument that he thought Black people were absolutely, in every respect, equal to white people. But he did think that if you want to reconstruct the nation on more firm footing, that giving Black people the right to vote was a good idea."

The only memorial to Longstreet in the South is at the Georgia cemetery where he is buried. Photo credit: battlefieldportraits.org, Michael Noirot

Later in life, Longstreet's zeal for Reconstruction would soften, but he never abandoned it. And he was never forgiven. Waite said the savagery of criticism and his ostracism "ate at him everyday."

"I don't know what exactly he was expecting when he registered as a Republican in 1868 or stumped for Grant," Waite said.. "He probably knew that was not going to win him too many friends among his former comrades in the South. But, at the same time, I don't think he fully appreciated just how vicious the backlash would be. I don't think he expected to become sort of Public Enemy No. 1 in the South." 

Defenders of Confederate statues and monuments - among them former President Trump - argue that they are not monuments to slavery or white supremacy, but to the personal heroism of Confederate soldiers. Tearing them down, they say, is erasing history. But if preserving history and celebrating heroes is the point, why are there no statues of Longstreet in the South? 

In her Longstreet biography, Varon wrote, "In the face of ex-Confederates’ intransigence, his greatest provocation was his willingness to change."

Longstreet understood that to re-unite the United States required moving on, accepting a new order. For that, he was erased.