Two Civil War Biographies

Are these Great Books with a capital G and a capital B? No. Virtually no one will read them in a hundred years. (Sure: some future Ken Stephenson will one day walk through the oldest stacks in the quaint thing called a library, breathe in the delicious, wholesome air of the browned and brittle pages, find these books, and learn from them, so I won’t say absolutely no one will read them a century from now.) They haven’t won Pulitzers (although one has won the American Batllefield Trust Prize). But did these books make me think and rethink about what I understand of American history? Yes.

First, the better-written of the two books: Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. Only last year, I found out that Longstreet plays an important role in the Lost Cause Myth: the notion that the South didn’t truly care much about slavery and fought a noble, hopeless war for liberty, led by great Christian heroes and stopped only by a godless butcher (according to the myth, Grant) and a crass commercial enterprise that simply made more guns (according to the myth, the United States). Whatever the tenets of this poorly supported historical theory, General James Longstreet certainly cared about slavery and white supremacy during the war: his rallying speech to his troops in front of Richmond warned them that a United States victory would mean abolition and a black-run society. But near the end of the war, he explained several times that he saw inevitable defeat for the Confederacy and determined that he would work to live at peace in the new, slaveless polity. He became a Republican (the liberal, pro-civil-rights party at that time, remember), worked to elect Grant, earned a spot as Customs Controller for New Orleans, and then was tapped to head the Louisiana Militia. When, in September of 1874, thousands of white supremacists gathered on Canal Street and threatened a violent end to Reconstruction and black voting rights, General Longstreet led the militia out to defeat them. The former rebel, now determined to abide by the newly amended Constitution and to recognize the constitutional rights of all citizens, led a militia of black soldiers and white soldiers, a militia in which every man of equal rank received equal pay regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude. A militia in which black soldiers could be and were promoted, all the way to the rank of general. A militia in which regiments were integrated. A militia in which white officers led both black and white soldiers and black officers led both black and white soldiers. Southern Democrats never forgave him.

I see a lot to admire in a man who left a life in which racial hatred and fear could lead him to betray his sacred oath to his country (he was a commissioned U. S. officer when secession started) and adopted a new life in which respect for the law could raise members of the recently enslaved race to positions of high authority. But Jubal Early and his ilk didn’t, and they started a campaign against him, a campaign whose ramifications are still felt today, whose tenets I’ve read in history books that have won a Pulitzer. By the time Early got the ball rolling, the Daughters of the Confederacy were publishing materials defending the justness of the Confederate cause and, in their words, praising the “moral and military infallibility” of Robert E. Lee.

So look, there’s controversy about Longstreet. The Lost Cause side says that he disobeyed Lee’s orders at Gettysburg and lost that battle, thus losing the war, betraying his new country (let’s ignore the first betrayal), betraying his race (at least that’s what they said in the 1800s), and betraying his commander (whose military infallibility, I guess, couldn’t overcome one supposedly disobeyed order). Do I really, finally know if he screwed up at Gettysburg? do I really, finally know that he ended up a good guy? No (although my parentheticals in this paragraph perhaps indicate which way I lean). But when the side that started the defamation program claims moral infallibility for their hero, I’m strongly inclined to believe that they have at least stretched the truth about their nemesis, also.

When I say this isn’t a Great Book, I don’t mean to malign Varon’s writing: her research is detailed, her arguments are nuanced, and her prose is smooth and polished. I’m just saying I don’t predict that her work will last as long as Herodotus’. John A. Carpenter’s Sword and Olive Branch, by comparison, is much less literary but, to me, equally enlightening. It, too, relates the life history of a Civil War general. Its subject also was and has been the subject of a smear campaign whose effectiveness can be gauged by its reverberations in Civil War histories of our time. And its subject also worked for the promotion of the four million new citizens naturalized by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sword and Olive Branch tells the story of Union General Oliver Otis Howard, who watched his corps disintegrate in fifteen minutes at Chancellorsville. For this and for a retreat at Gettysburg (to a more defensible position!), he developed and suffered, as the history books continue to tell us, a bad reputation with the rest of the Army of the Potomac. And yet, when I continue to read accounts of the Civil War, I find him later in a place of high authority acting nobly and effectively under Sherman, without, to my recollection, authors pointing out that his earlier bad reputation may not have been deserved or had at least been atoned for by greater success later in the conflict. Carpenter points all this out, though, and I’m glad to see Howard’s full war record properly celebrated.

But the story gets really good after the war. As the Director of the Freedman’s Bureau, General Howard fought hard to get black citizens housing, jobs, pay, and, above all, education. I knew he founded Howard University, which is why I wanted to read about him. I didn’t know his work with the Bureau actually helped create several other colleges open to blacks (and women!) as well as almost two thousand elementary and preparatory schools. And I didn’t know that Howard by himself achieved in a few days what the government backed by the Army had not been able to do in thirteen years by treating successfully with Cochise (and apparently to Cochise’s satisfaction!) and almost eliminating violence between whites and Apaches in Arizona. I’m not quite finished with the book, and I think things don’t go so well or so honorably with the Nez Perce later. But what I’ve read so far makes Howard fascinating and admirable.

If these two books teach anything, they at least demonstrate that you can’t believe anything just because you read it in black and white. So let me just clarify before I close this too lengthy post that, while I have now read one biography of each general, each biography decidedly tending toward approval of its subject, I haven’t drawn any lines in the sand: I won’t say definitively whether either of the two was a good guy or a bad guy. But I tentatively admire each general while firmly believing that neither was either morally or militarily infallible.