Defending Ole Pete

I’m currently TA’ing for “The Blue and the Gray” a military history of the US Civil War, the only military history class at Ole Miss. The course is taught by Dr. John R. Neff, author of Honoring the Civil War Dead, a department favorite among many students here, both graduate and undergraduate. I usually agree with Dr. Neff, and if I don’t at first, he usually wins me over with his remarkable ability to point out impracticality. However, there are a few areas where we do disagree and last week another one emerged.

The lecture topic for the day was the first and second day at Gettysburg. I should point out here that the Civil War is not an area where I specialize but is a topic that interests me and, as an undergraduate, I took every class offered on the Civil War era; whether or not this enables me to speak with some authority on the subject, I will leave to the reader. Our topic of disagreement centered around, surprise surprise, Lee’s relationship with Longstreet. Normally, the point of contention on this issue, among historians and the buff community, concerns the disagreement between Lee and Longstreet over the best plan to assault the Union position on the second day and why Longstreet took so long to get into a position to press the Union left in order to gain the Emmetsburg Road. However, this was not the point I found most troubling.

It was Dr. Neff’s contention, as I understood it, that there was never any dissension between Lee and Longstreet on this issue and Longstreet had simply made up this disagreement in his postwar memoirs to rescue his reputation. His point was that the Lee-Longstreet controversy at Gettysburg was a direct product of Longstreet’s memoir and his writings for the Southern Historical Society Papers, which were written during a storm of controversy as Longstreet tried to justify his wartime decisions to a hostile public that was furious with him for joining Lincoln’s Republican Party. According to Neff, Longstreet, like everyone else in the Army of Northern Virginia after Chancellorsville, believed Lee could do no wrong and agreed to implement his orders with little or no disagreement.

While I agree that Longstreet’s postwar views on the battle are biased and may not display an accurate account of “what actually happened,” I don’t think you can argue that Longstreet wasn’t dissatisfied with Lee’s plan of attack on the second day, the evidence simply isn’t there.

Faulting Lee’s failure at Gettysburg on Longstreet has its origins, mainly, in a speech given by Jubal Early at Washington and Lee University on 19 January 1872. Early, a leader of the Lost Cause coalition, sought to answer accusations made by Longstreet to a New York Times reporter that Lee’s Gettysburg strategy was flawed, by defending his commanding generals plans and accusing Longstreet of disobeying orders. Yet one of Early’s central accusations against Longstreet was that he did not give Lee’s plan enough support. If Longstreet had not disagreed, as Neff asserts, it would seem only logical that Early and his supporters would have pointed out that Longstreet was lying about his dissension in their indictments, instead of making it a central premise upon which their arguments were based. To my knowledge no one ever accuses Longstreet of lying about this point in the documents and simply claiming that we can’t trust Longstreet on this because his memoirs are flawed seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Longstreet did disagree with Lee at Gettysburg. As to the nature of this disagreement and how dissension influenced Longstreet’s decision-making on the second and third day is another matter and will not be argued here. I simply point out that the “Old Warhorse” was not happy with Lee’s strategy on those fateful days in Pennsylvania in early July, 1863 and to accuse him of lying on this point is a faulty and groundless accusation.