For those who don’t know, the Confederate general James Longstreet was a descendant of Alexander Magruder. His descent as I know it is (1) Alexander Magruder + Elizabeth [maiden name unproved, possibly Hawkins] > (2) Alexander Magruder (II) + 2nd wife Susannah Busey > (3) Alexander Magruder (III) + 2nd wife Elizabeth Howard > (4) Alexander Howard Magruder + Jane Truman > (5) Nancy Anne Magruder + Thomas Marshall Dent > (6) Mary Ann Dent + James Longstreet > (7) James Peter Longstreet.

(If you’re wondering about all those 2nd wives…yes, maternal mortality was high in Colonial Maryland.)

When the Civil War started, James Longstreet was a professional soldier with twenty years service. An 1842 graduate of West Point, he fought in the U.S.-Mexico War and in campaigns to displace indigenous people in the western territories. Having been raised in Georgia among states-rights advocates, at the outbreak of the war he immediately resigned his commission and offered his services to the Confederacy.

Robert E. Lee called Longstreet his “Old War Horse” and “the staff in my right hand,” but promoters of the Lost Cause narrative vilified him after the war for accepting command of a bi-racial state militia in Louisiana under the Grant administration and embracing the Republican agenda for Radical Reconstruction.

Before that, however, Longstreet had already made two mistakes that harmed his reputation in the South: 1) he argued with Lee at Gettysburg, and 2) he was right. The frontal assault known as Pickett’s Charge was a disaster for the Confederacy, and those who revere Lee would rather blame Longstreet for foreseeing it than Lee for ordering it. In fact, Longstreet was skeptical about Lee’s second invasion of the North in general, and right about that too.

I’m posting because you might be interested in a new biography that examines Longstreet’s life in all these contexts, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth Varon (Simon & Schuster, 2023).

If that’s too much reading, there’s a good bio sketch at The American Battlefield Trust, or have a look at Kevin M. Levine “James Longstreet, the Lost Cause, and the Original Cancel Culture,” from his online newsletter, Civil War Memory.