inhabitants: a strong core of pre-war, white Unionists (former Whigs and pro-tariff sugar-planters) and a large, freeborn, mixed-race Afro-Creole population, French-speaking, relatively well-educated, and centered in the state capital. In the Louisiana context, “Creole” referred to individuals with French and French Caribbean roots, people who were offspring of the French and Spanish colonial culture that tolerated inter-racial relationships.

During the war, Republicans in Louisiana fought not only against conservative Democrats and Confederates, but against each other, as the state pursued readmission to the Union under Lincoln’s 1863 Amnesty Proclamation, which stipulated that, once 10 percent of a state’s 1860 electorate had taken an oath of loyalty to the Union, the state could set up a new, loyal government. 

Two Republican factions grappled over the state’s future: a moderate group led by Lincoln’s right-hand man, General Nathaniel Banks, and his choice for governor, Michael Hahn, and a radical faction led by New Orleans attorney Thomas Durant and the New Hampshire-born teacher Benjamin F. Flanders. Both factions were committed to ending slavery and granting citizenship rights to black people, but they differed over how quickly the change should come. Hahn’s group hoped that a deliberate pace of change and conciliatory language would enable them to win over conservative whites; Flanders and Durant thought conservatives to be irredeemable, and spoke in uncompromising terms about the need to extend education, suffrage, and economic opportunity to former slaves. Lincoln publicly favored Hahn, who had soundly beaten Flanders in the February 1864 gubernatorial election.

General Benjamin Butler, the initial commander of Union-occupied Louisiana, initiated an experiment in black military leadership by commissioning Afro-Creole line officers; this defied the widespread opposition among whites to according command roles to blacks. Butler’s successor in Louisiana, General Banks, was part of that opposition; he rolled back Butler’s experiment, purging black officers from the Union army rolls, but not before they had proved their bravery and skill in battles such as the May 1863 Union assault on the Confederate stronghold of Port Hudson, Louisiana, where James Henry Ingraham’s combat leadership earned him a hero’s status.

The approximately 110 African American men who were commissioned at the rank of lieutenant or above in the Union army made their mark, leveraging their collective military experience into political activism. The purged officers of the Louisiana Native Guards formed a political phalanx, leading the charge for black suffrage and other basic civil rights. In the spring of 1864, they petitioned Lincoln and the Congress to grant voting rights to black men in Louisiana, insisting that, ”as slavery is abolished, with it must vanish every vestige of oppression.”

President Lincoln followed up by writing his now-famous March 13, 1864 letter

to Louisiana governor Hahn suggesting that black veterans could perhaps be granted the right to vote. Hahn in turn quietly lobbied for black male suffrage during the 1864 Louisiana constitutional convention, only to find that there was not sufficient support, even among liberals, to pass the measure. 

Louisiana’s new state constitution abolished slavery without compensation, and opened up schools, militias, and courtrooms to blacks. But the fact that these people remained disfranchised rankled Radical Republicans. Lincoln’s assassination and Andrew Johnson’s ascendancy in the spring of 1865 derailed the Ten-Percent Plan and changed the course of Louisiana’s Reconstruction. The man who succeeded Hahn as governor, former planter James Madison Wells, embraced Johnson’s permissive policy of pardon and amnesty for ex-Confederates, seeking to build a coalition of conservative Unionists and former rebels. 

The statewide elections of November 1865 brought the Democrats back into power. They promptly instituted racially discriminatory laws that came to be known as the Codes; these were intended to deprive freed people of basic legal rights, turn back the clock on emancipation, and undermine the status of Creoles of color. The historian Ted Tunnell has written of this period of Johnsonian restoration: “For two long years in Louisiana and the South, rebels vilified, purged, and massacred loyal citizens.” 

When, in July 1866, Louisiana Republicans tried to reassert power by reconvening the 1864 state constitutional convention to introduce universal suffrage, a white supremacist mob, including many members of the New Orleans police, attacked a peaceful pro-suffrage demonstration, murdering 46 black people. “The New Orleans violence was essentially a continuation of the Civil War,” writes Douglas R. Egerton, pointing out that “more than half of the whites involved were Confederate veterans, while just less than half of the African Americans had served in the U.S. Army.” 

Shockingly, President Johnson sided with the rioters, blaming the violence on Radical Republicans. Their supporters in Congress recoiled at the New Orleans massacre and other such anti-black violence in the South, and pushed through their Reconstruction Acts in the spring of 1867. Their goal: to override Johnson’s policies, invalidate his state governments, and create a new body politic, with former slaves as voters. 

The US military presided over this process, and Louisiana became part of the Fifth Military District (one of the five federal jurisdictions, under War Department control, into which the former Confederate states were divided by Congress); the Fifth District was commanded by General Philip Sheridan. He replaced Wells with Benjamin F. Flanders, as provisional governor, and, in the “registration summer” of 1867, a massive campaign of registering loyal voters set the stage for the next phases in Louisiana’s Reconstruction: the election of delegates to a new constitutional convention, and their drafting a new state charter. Congress was establishing, in essence, new, biracial, Republican governing coalitions for the South.

“A deep gloom spread over the white South” when Congress’s program went into effect, the historian George C. Rable has noted. Southern Democrats “insisted that the party condemn the usurpations of Radical Republicans in unequivocal language.” Confederate veterans such

as the former general Jubal Early, vowing never to be reconstructed, expressed their unremitting bitterness at defeat. In a March 1867 letter to former Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, Mr. Early cast the Republicans in Congress as “infernal demons,” and maintained that he would “like to begin the fight over right now. . . . I think I could scalp a Yankee woman and child without winking my eyes,” he hissed, while fulminating against abolitionism and defending the “propriety, advantages, and justice” of slavery.

These developments were the backdrop and context for Robert E. Lee’s old “war horse” James Longstreet’s controversial letters. His new course was charted in March 1867 when a prominent New Orleans Democratic newspaper, The Times, solicited the view of the city’s leading citizens on the dominant question in Southern politics: Should former rebels comply with Congress’s new Reconstruction program, or should they resist it? On March 18, Longstreet wrote the following for this paper: “There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors. Nor is there any occasion for a feeling of humiliation. We have made an honest, and I hope that I may say, a creditable fight, but we have lost. Let us come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle. . . . Let us accept the terms, as we are in duty bound to do.”

Longstreet developed this theme in a second letter to the newspaper on April 6. Again, he spoke of the need to accept defeat. This time, he enumerated exactly what he felt Confederates had staked in the war and lost: 

Among former Confederates, reactions to Longstreet’s initial letters were muted. His sterling military reputation gave him the benefit of the doubt. As the Richmond Dispatch put it, military commanders were “presumed to be men of chivalry and honor” and “practical in all cases.” Longstreet, it seemed, was simply advising the South to face reality: it no longer had the power to fight, and so must “frankly and manfully” conform to the law. Longstreet’s letters were interpreted as a plea that Southerners assert themselves in Reconstruction politics in order to “make the best of a bad bargain,” as none other than Confederate naval hero Raphael Semmes stated in an editorial entitled “Longstreet’s Epistles.” 

This early press coverage often aligned Longstreet with others, such as Robert E. Lee and P. G. T. Beauregard, each of whom urged

Southerners to be law-abiding and to rebuild their political influence within the Union.

Even newspapers that were critical of Longstreet’s early letters refrained from writing him off altogether. Pronouncing his first letter to the Times a “curiosity,” the Augusta Constitutionalist stipulated that, because of his wartime “deeds of valor,” Longstreet deserved a “respectful hearing.”

The paper then chided him for knowing “little of politics or statesmanship” and went on to declare that the South should not sacrifice its principles by accepting the “degrading” terms of the Reconstruction Acts. Longstreet’s letter was “unfortunate,” it concluded, and might in time “prove pernicious.” 

The Memphis Public Ledger took a similar tack, reminding Longstreet that Congress’s plan was “punitive and mandatory,” and scoldingly saying that his letters filled the minds of his admirers with “regret” at his having gone public with his unorthodox views.

Regret soon turned to rage. On June 3, 1867, Longstreet wrote a third letter, which appeared in the New Orleans Times and was reprinted with extensive commentary across the country. This letter was addressed to a former Union soldier and staunch New Orleans Republican named John M. G. Parker, the brother-in-law of Union general Benjamin Butler. Parker was one of a number of Republicans who made overtures to Longstreet in the spring of 1867, reflecting their sense that he had already begun to distance himself from his fellow Confederates and was receptive to new ideas. Parker invited him to attend a Republican rally in May that was to feature a speech from Massachusetts senator and abolitionist Henry Wilson. 

Longstreet accepted the invitation and was hailed at the ensuing rally with acclaim and applause. His June 3 letter began by saying that he was “agreeably surprised to meet such fairness and frankness in a politician (Wilson) whom I have been taught to believe uncompromisingly opposed to the white people of the South.” 

Longstreet again professed to offer a “practical” approach to Reconstruction, with the aim of peace and prosperity. But, then, he made an altogether arresting rhetorical pivot: “It matters not whether I bear the mantle of (former Confederate president) Mr. Davis or the mantle of (the fiery abolitionist Massachusetts senator) Mr. Sumner, so long as I may help to bring the glory of ‘peace and good-will toward men.’” 

This was highly provocative, as the Radical Republican Charles Sumner was loathed by Confederates. The letter would get more provocative still. Longstreet offered the “self-evident” proposition that “the highest of human laws is the law that is established by appeal to arms,” and he then deduced that, since the “sword has decided in favor of the North,” Northern principles had become the law. It was the duty of the defeated South, he insisted, to “abandon ideas that are obsolete.” 

Among the things he classed as obsolete was the Democratic Party itself, which was nothing more, he said, than a vehicle for old “prejudice.” Sounding a whole lot like a Republican, Longstreet described Congress’s Reconstruction Acts as “peace offerings” that the South should accept as starting points “from which to meet

future political issues.” Moreover, he addressed directly the issue of race relations, casting Black suffrage in the South as a fait accompli and arguing that the experiment of black voting should be extended to the North and “fully tested.”

On June 7, Longstreet submitted a fourth letter as a coda to his June 3 offering. He reiterated his claim that the “war was made upon Republican issues . . . and that the settlement should be made accordingly.” The “object of politics,” Longstreet observed, “is to relieve the distress of the people and to provide for their future comfort.” In his view, Republicans shared his desire for peaceful reunion, while recalcitrant Southern Democrats, determined to wage ideological war on the North and to resist change with violence, did not. Peaceful reunion was only possible, he reckoned, if those white Southerners willing to concede defeat stepped forward to assume some of the burdens of leadership.

Longstreet’s June letters ignited a political firestorm. Southern newspapers opposed to Reconstruction dissected them in a spirit of mounting wrath and incredulity. Former Confederate Navy Captain Raphael Semmes, lamenting that Longstreet’s letter-writing had “become chronic,” commented archly, “It is a very difficult thing to know when to speak, and how often to speak.” He found Longstreet’s characterization of the Reconstruction Acts as a “peace offering” to be ludicrous and chided him with a suitably nautical metaphor: “In accepting the reconstruction acts, we are accepting a hard bargain, driven . . . by a heartless and unrelenting enemy, who would be glad to sink us many fathoms deep in mid-ocean, if the thing were possible.” 

Referring to the likes of Charles Sumner, Semmes charged that the Republicans were led by “ranting, raving New England Puritans.”

Such views were common among Southern Democrats who were appalled that Longstreet had jumped ship. The Louisiana Democrat explicitly targeted the passage in which he had declared that “it mattered not” whether he bore the mantle of Jeff Davis or Charles Sumner: “If it matters not with General Longstreet, it matters a great deal with those who fought under him,” the paper objected, adding, in a coup de grace: J"ust imagine General Lee classing the mantle of Sumner with that of Jeff Davis!” Longstreet was, the Democrat charged, no more than a tool of Radical Republicans; he was feeding on “federal pap” and would be “left to starve by his new allies” as soon as they had taken advantage of his “enviable reputation.” 

No longer, after the June letters, did Democratic papers liken Longstreet’s post-war advice to Lee’s. Instead, they cast him as “alone in his apostasy,” comparing him to Benedict Arnold for his “wanton, wicked desertion of his friends and his country.” Southern papers took particular umbrage at Longstreet’s “sword-as-arbiter” proposition. “According to the Radical logic of General Longstreet,” the Charleston Mercury suggested, “when our Lord was crucified, Christianity should have died. Force had settled that Christ was an imposter; and if General Longstreet had been one of his disciples, he would . . . have joined

Jesus’ murderers and have helped them to prosecute his other disciples and to crush his cause.” 

Not content with this insult, the Mercury added that Longstreet would have sided with the Inquisition against Galileo: “The man who asserts that force settled truth,” it concluded, “is hardly worthy to have either a conscience or a God.” Some of his Southern critics expressly cast Longstreet as a race traitor. The Mobile Daily Tribune wished Longstreet dead: “It has become a subject of regret that the wound he received at the Battle of the Wilderness was not mortal. We would then have been spared the mortification of seeing him in the bum-boat of radicalism, side by side with the enemies of his country and race.”

This rhetoric tapped into the dominant Confederate interpretation of Appomattox. At the very moment of surrender, Confederates began laying the building blocks of the Lost-Cause ideology: claiming that the North’s victory was one of might over right, and that Southerners had fought flawlessly for a still-righteous cause. 

The Lost Cause perspective on defeat was designed to preempt social change: by denigrating the Northern victory as a mere show of force, Southerners hoped to deny Northerners a political mandate for Reconstruction. James Longstreet’s letters seemed to his critics to be a wholesale rejection of this Confederate position and a wholesale embrace of the heretical idea that the Union had won a moral, as well as military victory in the Civil War.

In recent years, America’s overdue reckoning with Confederate memorialization, catalyzed by white supremacist violence in Charleston and Charlottesville, has reframed Longstreet’s life and legacy. Remarking on the absence, outside of Gettysburg, of any statue in his honor, a spate of published opinion pieces has asked, rhetorically, “Where are the monuments to Confederate Gen. James Longstreet?” 

The answer, highlighting his postwar life, is that Longstreet’s embrace of Republicanism and Reconstruction rendered him unfit as a symbol of the Lost Cause. He is thus the exception that proves the rule: Confederate statues were not simply “tributes to military heroism,” but instead “totems of white supremacy,” as the historian Kevin Waite has put it.

One such totem – an explicitly anti-Longstreet memorial – was among the first to come down, leading a wave of removals. Long a divisive and controversial symbol, the towering “Battle of Liberty Place” monument in downtown New Orleans commemorated the insurrection in 1874 by Democratic supporters, especially the paramilitary White League, as part of their struggle to overturn the Reconstruction government, which white supremacists saw as tyranny. In 1974 a plaque was added noting that the monument no longer reflected modern attitudes. The monument was finally taken down in 2017 with the support of Mayor Mitch Landrieu. 

Reflecting on the shadow cast by Confederate statuary in the city, Landrieu observed,
 
To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most

prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol following the 2020 presidential election brought forth more allusions to Longstreet’s role at “Liberty Place,” as commentators drew out the parallels between the 1874 attempted coup and current events. Sounding a warning about the need to hold the modern rioters to account, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie offered the opinion that “impunity in the face of mob violence” would lead to more violence. He noted that because the 1874 Canal Street coup went unpunished, “the White League became a model for others in the South who sought an end to ‘Negro rule’ in their states.”

As statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders have come down, some commentators have explicitly called for the erection of new statues to Longstreet, in recognition of his postwar political stance. Former governor of Georgia Roy Barnes, for example, argued in 2021 that a statue of Longstreet should replace the statue of John Brown Gordon at the state capitol-Gordon’s role in the Klan made him unworthy, while Longstreet’s support for Black freedom made him worthy, Barnes argued.

But Longstreet has never fit the profile of a marble man, whose life story could be set in stone. His political evolution and public image were too complex and contradictory for that. Longstreet fought the Civil War to win it. If he had succeeded, slavery would have persisted – and his own remarkable reinvention, and the reforms he promoted after Appomattox, would have never come to pass.

“To me, the surrender of my sword was my reconstruction. I looked upon the ‘Lost Cause’ as a cause totally, irrevocably lost.” So Longstreet mused in 1880, capturing why he has been the most embattled military figure from America’s Civil War. We like to bestow praise on historical figures who had the courage of their convictions. Longstreet’s story is a reminder that the arc of history is sometimes bent by those who had the courage to change their convictions. He accepted defeat with a measure of grace and tried to learn, and then to teach, the past’s lessons. And for that, he commands our attention as one of the most enduringly relevant voices in American history.