General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier—A Biography (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWSI55 delivered a decade later adds a fourth ingredient, victory). Freeman reduces Lee's method of promoting morale to five maxims: know your resources, get good officers, be absolutely just, look after your men, and put your trust in God. Later lectures focus on Lee's more general leadership qualities. Ultimately, Freeman erects a rather elaborate definition of leadership as exemplified by Lee. He cites seven qualities to explain why Lee was "accepted as a leader" (165) by his army and another six elements to explain the success of his offensive strategy. The latter ingredient—an offensive strategy—is nearly as important as the building of morale to the success of an army, says Freeman, and so he takes some pains to explain Lee's aggressive strategy. Ultimately, this is all problematical. Freeman may have succeeded in explaining the success of Lee, but he would be the first to admit that personality and individual circumstances go a long way toward defining leadership and what is required of a leader. Later lectures, delivered after World War II and drawing on examples from the Revolutionary War and the career of George Washington (while Freeman was writing Washington's biography), deal with such relatively narrow topics as leadership in an "enforced defensive" and leadership in "allied operations." By this time, forced to think more broadly about his subject, Freeman had reduced his requirements for leadership to three elements: know your stuff, be a man, and look after your men. Each book, therefore, even while pursuing the same general subject, has an appeal of its own. Leadership During the Civil War offers sophisticated insights by modern scholars on the careers of a wide range of wartime political and military leaders. The Freeman essays offer the collected, if more narrowly focused and somewhat dated, thoughts of an icon in Civil War historiography . Taken together, the two volumes provide food for thought and a handy distillation of past and current thinking on Civil War leadership. Daniel E. Sutherland University of Arkansas General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier—A Biography. By Jeffry D. Wert. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Pp. 508. $27.50.) Jeffry D. Wert's biography ofJames Longstreet is a welcome corrective to the Freeman redux school which continues to inflate the reputations of Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson at Longstreet's expense. It is by far the best traditional cradle-to-grave study of Longstreet to date. When Longstreet's first biographers, Hamilton J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad, produced James Longstreet, Lee's War Horse in 1936, it embodied the criticisms that Douglas Southall Freeman leveled against Longstreet in his biography of Lee. Like Freeman they viewed Longstreet as a vain, recalcitrant subordinate who chafed under Lee's yoke, impeding rather than advancing the Southern war I56CIVIL WAR HISTORY effort. Donald B. Sanger refuted this misconception with a detailed analysis of Longstreet's military record. But when his manuscript, written in the 1930s, was finally published posthumously in 1952, it was paired with an account of Longstreet's postwar career by Thomas R. Hay that endorsed the Freeman school. The inherent contradictions within the resulting book, James Longstreet: Soldier, Politician, Officeholder, and Writer, robbed Sanger's half of its revisionist impact. During the 1960s, Glenn Tucker and Abbot M. Gibney found commercial presses uninterested in a Longstreet biography . Gibney alone produced a manuscript, which remains unpublished. Although Wilbur Thomas wrote an uncritical and highly partisan work lauding Longstreet in 1979, his General James "Pete" Longstreet, Lee's "Old War Horse," Scapegoatfor Gettysburg was privately printed and did not circulate widely. Wert's General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial General—A Biography deliberately concentrates on Longstreet's military record, covering his antebellum years in two chapters and his postwar controversies in only one. Since setting the record straight on Longstreet's wartime years inevitably detracts from the stature of Lee and Jackson, some readers may place Wert with revisionists such as Thomas L. Connelly, Alan T. Nolan, and this reviewer. His work, like theirs, will be condemned by those who continue to worship the Virginia duo. Unlike current Lee and Jackson partisans, Wert rejects as blatantly fraudulent...