General James Longstreet was Lee's senior lieutenant in the Army of Northern Virginia and the general whose conduct at the battle of Gettysburg remains a topic of heated debate more than 130 years later.
This stunning biography sheds new light on the commander of the Confederacy's First Corps--and shatters the accepted view of the Gettysburg defeat. Wert also fully explores Longstreet's postwar years, during which he joined the Republican party, an act of political apostasy in the South.
Longstreet first saw action in the Mexican War. He joined the Confederacy soon after the Civil War began and fought in nearly every campaign in the western theater.
He led troops from brigade to the corps level, at first and second Manassas, Seven Pines, Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness and Petersburg.
He scored a decisive victory at Chickamauga. And at the war's end he stood alongside Lee at the surrender ceremony at Appomattox.
Longstreet led the First Corps under Lee, outranking the better-known commander of the Second Corps, Stonewall Jackson. "Old Pete," as his soldiers called him, was a superb battlefield commander with great tactical skill.
But he has long been blamed, especially in the South, for the crucial Confederate defeat at Gettysburg.
Jeffry Wert argues that Longstreet opposed Lee's ill-fated frontal assault on July 3 and that,
had Lee followed Longstreet's advice to take a more defensive posture, the battle might have turned out differently.
After the war, Longstreet joined the Republican Party and became a political apostate in the South during the Reconstruction era.
When he died in relative obscurity in 1904, only his old soldiers remembered him.
This is the first full-scale biography of Longstreet in forty years, and it returns him to his position of central importance in the Civil War.
Jeffry D. Wert's extensive research includes unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters from several archives.
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Jeffry D. Wert is the author of many articles and essays and two previous books on the civil War,
From Winchester to Cedar Creek: The Shenandoah Campaign of 1864 and Mosby's Rangers.
His post works include;
Gettysburg Day Three,
A Brotherhood of Valor: The Common Soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade C S A and the Iron Brigade U S A,
Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer,
Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan,
Pers Memoirs of P H Sheridan PB and
The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac.
He teaches at Penns Valley High School and lives in Center hall, Pennsylvania.
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