Longstreet

Few turnarounds in American history match the one made by James Longstreet, a Confederate general whose wartime service and postwar decisions made him one of the most divisive figures of his age. This biography traces his path from the battlefield into the politics of Reconstruction and asks why the South has never raised a statue or memorial to a man who held so senior a rank.

During the Civil War, Longstreet fought for the Confederacy with considerable tenacity. He stood beside Lee at Gettysburg, where he urged against ordering the assault on Union forces dug in there. He also secured a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded in a later battle.

After the war, Longstreet settled in New Orleans and changed course sharply. He backed voting rights for Black citizens and joined the newly elected, integrated government of Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to overthrow that government, he led the interracial state militia against former Confederates.

His defiance caused a storm of controversy. White Southerners branded him a race traitor and, after the fact, blamed him for the Confederacy's defeat. Although he ranked among the highest-ranking Confederate generals, the South has never honored him with statues or other memorials, because he rejected the Lost Cause mythology and called for racial reconciliation. Today, amid renewed reckoning over race, he is being rediscovered as a figure whose ideas still speak to present concerns.

The book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the American Battlefield Trust Prize for History. It is described as the first authoritative biography of Longstreet in decades, and it places his career within a broader historical context.