Book Review: From Manassas to Appomattox by James Longstreet

From Manassas to Appomattox by James Longstreet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After spending years on campaign to win your new nation’s independence, after the war unsuccessful conclusion your former comrades bury you after you decided to support the victors. From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America was James Longstreet’s answer to the post-war criticisms leveled by those who created the Lost Cause myth.

Longstreet gives a quick overview of his early life, his time in West Point, and his service in the Mexican War before going into his resignation from the US Army and journey from New Mexico to Virginia to join the Confederate Army. As the title of the memoir indicates, Longstreet was a participant of the first major battle of the war at First Manassas and he described his own actions throughout the battle as well as the overall course of the confrontation. Longstreet would continue this throughout the book, but also added in his interactions with Lee, Jackson, A.P. Hill, and various Confederate government officials including President Jefferson Davis especially when defending his actions around Gettysburg which Lost Cause proponents claimed cost Lee and thus the South victory. Longstreet also talked about his strategic view of the war as the conflict progressed and viewed the situation in the West where the war could be changed for the better of the Confederates but found his superiors neither supportive before Gettysburg nor once allowed to help in the West undermining the efforts of Confederate forces. Longstreet’s detailed account of the end of the war in early 1865 brought the desperate fight in full view until the surrender before acknowledging that his friendship with General Grant started up again right after the surrender that helped him going forward in his life.

Given this was a memoir and a defense of his own actions against the attacks of those who were political motivated to raise up Lee and Jackson as part of the Lost Cause meant they needed someone to actively undermine them and thus caused the South to lose, one must think hard about what Longstreet is writing through this lens. While fighting for his own reputation, Longstreet was not afraid to show the human fallibility of both Lee and Jackson though not at the expense of their accomplishments nor to aggrandize his own except when the reputations of the troops under his command was at stake. Longstreet’s strategic view of the war, especially the West but also in the Gettysburg campaign, were a fascinating read and interesting to think about. If there is one criticism of the edition that I read it was with the battle maps included as they were hard follow given poor shading and small print which did not really distinguish between Union and Confederate forces.

From Manassas to Appomattox is obviously not an unbiased account of the war from the view of a Confederate general, yet James Longstreet unlike some other Confederates aimed to show the flaws of the Confederacy instead of creating a mythos of a Lost Cause.

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