Book Review: ‘Longstreet,’ by Elizabeth R. Varon

Longstreet and his household moved again to Georgia, and as a loyal Republican, he served as deputy collector of inner income after which as postmaster. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him minister to Turkey in 1880, which, although not a prestigious posting, afforded Longstreet a chance to enhance diplomatic relations. This, Varon notes, was additionally a part of Longstreet’s political conversion: To him, Republicans may enhance home and worldwide commerce by increasing markets, which might ultimately assist the beleaguered South.

Predictably, the appointment was controversial and Longstreet was caricatured because the unfit instrument of the Republicans, who had been rebuked for rewarding a traitor. Nonetheless, he carried out in addition to he may, on condition that the U.S. authorities, as Varon explains, had no actual affect over the Ottoman Empire.

Quickly referred to as dwelling in 1881 when President James A. Garfield appointed him U.S. marshal in Georgia, Longstreet tried to bolster the native Republican Get together within the face of vigilante violence and inner wrangling. And although many Black Republicans distrusted Longstreet, they revered his willingness to battle for Black voting rights and to make interracial alliances. Through the McKinley administration, with the help of a number of Black Republicans in Georgia, Longstreet was appointed U.S. railroad commissioner. By now, although, Civil Battle veterans, Federal and Accomplice, had been being “swept up,” Varon writes, “within the burgeoning cult of sectional reunion.” The aim of this reunion, she implies, was to paper over the true explanation for the battle — slavery, and its pernicious legacy — in order that either side “may share the ethical excessive floor in American reminiscence.”

Although Longstreet continued to refute the parable of the Misplaced Trigger in articles and interviews, he gave up on Reconstruction. As soon as once more, Varon notes, Longstreet managed a “political balancing act.” Within the Nineties, he broadly condemned white supremacist violence, however he in contrast lynching, which he thought of deplorable, to the labor strikes and dysfunction within the North — an echo of the comparability trotted out by the advocates of slavery earlier than the battle to justify the peculiar establishment. On this new equivocal spirit of comity and negligence, North and South, radical and conservative, may thus be part of arms presumably to bury the bloody previous and ignore the current.

Whereas Varon brilliantly creates the broader context for Longstreet’s profession, she leans, alas, way more towards historiography than biography. Quoting extensively from the Nineteenth-century press and fashionable historians, Varon contends that Longstreet’s current biographers depict him as politically inept and ignore the complexity of a courageous man whose very “legacy would show to be a battlefield of its personal.”