Leaders fail in different ways. Some are leaders in name only. They have followers in abundance, but live by the mantra of 19th-century French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (often quoted by Jonah Goldberg): “There go the people.” I must follow them, because I am their leader.” Any casual observer of modern American politics is depressingly familiar with these “leaders.”
But other leaders fail to attract followers to a cause or idea, even a worthy one. In her new biography Longstreet: the Confederate general who defied the Southhistorian Elizabeth Varon of the University of Virginia tells the story of such a leader: Jacobus Langstraata prominent Confederate leader who, as the title suggests, tried to convince his fellow Southerners to reject the Lost Cause.
Like many others, Longstreet chose to betray his nation and take up arms against the Union. Furthermore, the West Point graduate and close friend of Ulysses S. Grant (he attended Grant’s wedding) had no illusions about what the war was about: slavery. As he recounted in his memoirs, the Emancipation Proclamation “immediately placed the great struggle outward and open upon the basis where it had previously rested only on tacit and covert understanding.” When Lincoln offered full political rights to white Southerners who pledged loyalty to the Union, Longstreet wrote, “If they forsake their cause, they disgrace themselves in the sight of God and of man.” He ordered the executions of black spies and helped devise the Confederacy’s strategy. He fully supported secession, and he was highly regarded by both the Southern elite and the common man. Robert E. Lee once said of him, “Longstreet fought the Civil War to win it.”
But events – namely the Union victory – intervened. And so began a striking, quite rapid change of heart on the general’s part. Once the loyal, stubborn Confederate soldier, he soon became a steadfast supporter of Reconstruction. Aided in part by Grant’s personal kindness toward him (in the Appomattox courthouse, Varon writes that the Union general “extended his hand in friendship” and the two “embraced”), “Longstreet accepted the verdict of the war as final.”
While his colleagues delegitimized the North’s victory as a “power over right” injustice, Longstreet’s willingness to openly acknowledge defeat angered former Confederates. Southerners once praised Longstreet for his courage on the battlefield; now they blamed him for the surrender of the South. A group of Confederate veterans led this charge, as they “worked relentlessly to scapegoat him for the South’s defeat and immortalize Robert E. Lee as a saint beyond reproach.”
Longstreet, however, was not swayed. Spurred in part by waves of racial violence in Louisiana, he published a series of public letters in support of Reconstruction in the spring and summer of 1867. They were dazzling. “We put up a fair, and I hope I may say, creditable fight, but we lost,” he wrote. “So let us come forward and accept the aims of the struggle. (…) Let us accept the terms, as we are obliged to do.” He then warned Southerners to “abandon ideas that are outdated.” As Varon puts it, Longstreet—the very man who had forced Northern blacks into slavery a few years earlier during the war—even viewed black suffrage “as a fait accompli.” Longstreet even mused after the war that “a prevailing Providence had ordained that slavery in these States should cease forever in the year 1865.”
After taking a patronage job thanks to President Grant, Longstreet threw himself into Reconstruction “with gusto” and even attended a celebration of the ratification of the 15th Amendment. Although most Southerners came to hate him, many in the North recognized Longstreet’s courage. The Philadelphia researcher praised “the courage and manliness” required “to once again become a faithful servant of the Union” after having been “a prominent rebel.” Much of this praise came from grace. To cite an example, the mouthpiece of the African Methodist Episcopal Church wrote: “Of our white fellow citizens we do not ask the question, ‘What goods You? Union or Rebellion? We simply ask, “What Are You? Are you for Union? For freedom?” Longstreet’s answer was ‘yes’.
Longstreet even led black members of the Louisiana militia into battle against a white supremacist mob in 1874. In the aftermath of the skirmish, when even some allies blamed Longstreet for the militia’s failures, he sat for a newspaper interview. Following the insights of James Madison from Federalist No. 10 (“As long as man’s reason remains fallible, and he has the liberty to use it, different opinions will be formed.”), Longstreet mused:
People can’t all think alike, and the problem with the Southern people has always been that they don’t tolerate any difference of opinion. … My opinion is that the only real solution to the problems of the South is for the people to accept cordially and in good faith all the results of the war, including the Reconstruction measures, the acts of Congress, Negro suffrage, etc., and adheres to that. them as men.
After a brief stint as U.S. Secretary to Turkey, Longstreet was appointed U.S. Marshal to Georgia by President James Garfield. This job allowed him to dole out patronage and, most importantly, build a Republican Party apparatus in the South. But despite Democratic resistance and what Varon describes as “Republican factionalism,” the party floundered. Frustrated by the support of some black voters for the Democrats and the infighting between the parties that had ousted him from his position as marshal, Longstreet flirted with the concept of a Whiggish “white man’s party” focused on economic modernization. After the gamble failed, he corrected course and regained favor with black Republicans — though he spent his final years as a strong proponent of post-Reconstruction reconciliation. “He had at times been a valuable ally in the freedom struggle, but not a fully committed ally,” Varon writes.
Yes, Longstreet was a deeply flawed man to the end, someone who journeyed through a complicated and winding life. But he showed steadfastness and did his best to lead at a critical time. As Varon reflects – with meticulous detail and careful attention to nuance – “Longstreet’s story reminds us that the arc of history is sometimes bent by those who had the courage to change their beliefs.”
Longstreet’s willingness to accept defeat and move the South forward after the Civil War points to the essential difference between two types of failed leaders. The one who is in fact a follower and the one who fails to gain followers are both, in a sense, failures. But the former’s fate is dictated by others; he leaves no legacy of his own. This is not the case with the latter. Arguments that lose today may win tomorrow. Current failures can inspire future achievements. After all, leaders like Longstreet have an opportunity to be successful – to lead.
Read more at De Uitzending
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