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Naturally, I would like to begin by thanking the 91���� and the esteemed prize committee for this honor; it is so humbling and inspiring to be included with the group of superb finalists, and especially with Scott Hartwig and Friederike Baer, whose award-winning books are masterpieces of historical research and writing. 

I’ll share a few words with you all tonight about the salience of James Longstreet’s life for the mission of battlefield preservation.  A keyword search for “Longstreet” on the Trust’s website yields more than 200 hits, and one can use the many excellent articles there to trace Old Pete’s Civil War career from Manassas to Appomattox, and to get a taste of the controversies that attended that career.

My book is an effort to show how prolonged and multi-faceted those controversies were, and to connect the terrains of military history with political and social history.  I’ll use my comments tonight to explore three ways that Longstreet’s life dramatizes the centrality of historic battlefields to American history writ large.  I’ll highlight how battlefields are touchstones in our politics; catalysts for social transformations; and wellsprings of new knowledge and expertise. The first point I’d like to make is one often emphasized by my dear friend and mentor Gary Gallagher—that results of Civil War battles were spun and politicized by the participants and stakeholders in those battles, bringing the very meanings of victory and defeat into dispute.  That spinning begins as soon as battles end and indeed often before they’ve ended, and Gettysburg is of course the archetypal example:  was it a crushing turning-point defeat that set the Confederacy on the road to Appomattox, or a successful raid that left Lee’s army largely intact, as determined as ever to fight to the last ditch? Gettysburg debates have raged ever since July 1863, and Longstreet’s famous disagreement with Lee about going on the tactical offensive has been the primary sticking point.  At Gettysburg and elsewhere, as scholars try to make sense of the cacophony of competing claims, the battlefields themselves, and the resources provided by those who preserve and maintain them, serve as a reality check, a source of data, a lab for testing theories, and a spur to the imagination.

No one will ever get the last word on Longstreet’s performance at Gettysburg, but I felt, based on my own walking of the terrain and dive into the sources, that it was important to make a sharp distinction between in-the-moment accounts and latter-day ones. I emphasize that Longstreet’s and Lee’s disagreement in July 1863 was over means not ends—over how to win the battle not whether to win it.  In his own accounts Longstreet stressed his deference to Lee and his hope that the various pre-battle maneuvers and delays would increase, not decrease, the Confederates’ chances of success.  Most important, I emphasize that Longstreet was not singled out by Confederates as the scapegoat for the Gettysburg defeat during the war itself; his reputation as Lee’s war-horse remained intact.  Firsthand accounts of Lee’s utterly despairing reaction to Longstreet’s wounding at the Wilderness drive that point home.  There was a wartime blame-game among Confederates over Gettysburg, but its purpose, at the time, was not to augur their ultimate defeat but instead to derive lessons that might still lead to victory. It was only after the war, in the spring of 1867 when Longstreet embraced Congressional Reconstruction, the Republican Party, and Black voting, that he fell into disrepute among white Southerners.  Opponents of Reconstruction reacted to his political conversion with wrath and incredulity.  They called Longstreet Judas, Lucifer, and Benedict Arnold, among other epithets, and condemned him for his “wanton, wicked desertion of his friends and his country.”  “It has become a subject of regret that the wound he received at the [battle of the] Wilderness was not mortal,” the Mobile Daily Tribune editorialized. “We would then have been spared the mortification of seeing him … side by side with the enemies of his country and race.”  Longstreet’s critics saw him as a clear and present danger to Lost Cause ideology—the pro-Southern propaganda that glorified slavery and the Confederacy and denigrated Union victory as the triumph of might over right.  In the face of this firestorm, Longstreet doubled down rather than backing down—he launched himself on a 40-year career as a Republican operative and officeholder, and iconoclastic critic of his own society.  He promoted racial integration, Black militarization and voting and officeholding, and Republican governance of the South.  This brought further backlash.  It was in the early 1870s, when Longstreet’s role in Reconstruction was at its peak, that the attacks on his Gettysburg performance began. His critics, unreconstructed Southern Democrats such as Jubal Early and William Nelson Pendleton, accused him of insubordination and sabotage at Gettysburg—they thereby instigated a bitter and never-ending litigation and re-litigation of Longstreet’s culpability for Confederate defeat in the war. Indeed they extended their charges against Longstreet beyond Gettysburg to include, among other battles, Second Bull Run, where they accused of him of the type of sloth and willful disregard of Lee’s wishes that they emphasized regarding Gettysburg. 

Even as Longstreet defended his Gettysburg performance, in speeches and essays and his massive memoir, he put a different battle at the center of his own political journey:  namely, Appomattox. Longstreet traced his Republicanism to that battlefield:  at Appomattox, he had accepted his old friend U.S. Grant’s lenient surrender terms in precisely the spirit Grant intended them—as an invitation to repent and to turn the page. “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 was so embattled as a postwar politician.  His unreconstructed detractors believed that although their hope for a Confederate nation had been lost, they could reinstate elements of their prewar slavery-based society through paramilitary violence and political proscription.  They played up the significance of Gettysburg, as the place of eternal “what ifs,” and played down Appomattox, as the site of their capitulation.  In short, Longstreet’s life exemplifies, like no other, the ways that battlefields have political afterlives.  

Longstreet’s battlefield record can also furnish insights into the social revolution of emancipation and the role of Black resistance as freedom’s opening wedge--themes that the Trust’s “Road to Freedom” initiative has done so much to highlight.  Longstreet’s journey from ardent Confederate to ardent Republican was a highly unlikely one.  During the Civil War, Longstreet was a true believer in the Confederacy’s racial politics. As a military commander, he gave stem-winding speeches to his troops decrying Yankee abolitionism and radicalism and he tried to preempt and to punish the many forms of Black resistance to the Confederacy, such the flight of slaves and their offering of their services as spies, scouts, and soldiers to the Union army.  Longstreet aggressively sought to undermine emancipation, through acts such as seizing free Blacks during the Gettysburg campaign and sending them south as slaves. His military career is thus a window into the ways the Civil War pitted “the South vs. The South,” with Confederates facing off against Black Southern Unionists.  Like other Confederate commanders, Longstreet was deeply anxious about the workings of the “internal enemy,” and particularly with the ways that Blacks conveyed military intelligence about rebel troop movements and the Southern terrain to the Union army.  Seen in such a light, the secondary campaigns in Longstreet’s career, such as the Suffolk expedition in 1863, take on new importance, illustrating how the grassroots resistance of the enslaved preoccupied Confederate commanders and drove the process of emancipation.  In other words, I was reminded again and again in researching and writing this book that because freedom advanced with the Union army’s victories and receded with Confederate ones, all Civil War battles, whether or not they involved USCT troops, had profound consequences for the demise of slavery.

Moreover, recovering Longstreet’s wartime view of race relations is essential to fathoming the ideological distance he traveled over the course of his life.  Longstreet’s postwar political conversion, I explain, was traceable not only to his friendship with Grant, and the Appomattox terms, and disillusionment with Confederate dysfunction, but also to his experiences in New Orleans, where a distinct class of activist, visionary Civil War veterans--Afro-Creole USCT officers, such as Port Hudson hero James Ingraham—worked to reform Longstreet’s views on race.  Longstreet’s conversion aligned him, improbably, with Black Radical Republicans, against some of the very men he had led as a Confederate commander; the theme of the “South vs. the South” is a through-line that links the Civil War and Reconstruction chapters of Longstreet’s life, as Reconstruction too pitted Southerners against each other.  The armed clash between Longstreet’s interracial Louisiana state militia and insurgent White Leagues in 1874 shows how Reconstruction had, literally, its own battlefields.

Which brings me to my final point.  Battlefields serve to enlighten us because of the ways they generate new knowledge.   Historic preservation doesn’t just save these landscapes from being paved over by strip malls and call centers—it also curates the landscapes, to make them legible and accessible to the general public.  It is tempting to romanticize battlefields as places so evocative that they speak for themselves and infuse us with profound truths.  There is no denying the power and aura of such places--we’ve all had mystical experiences walking battlefields.  But we all know, too, that battlefields are particularly powerful and revealing when we have experts on hand—NPS and Trust's guides, educators, archivists, preservationists, the Scot Hartwigs and John Hennessys and Carol Reardons of the world who not only command the details, not only update their tours to reflect new finds, but also create new knowledge, new stories and new interpretations, to enlighten us.  I have benefitted again and again in my own scholarly career from the counsel of such experts—an Appomattox tour I took with NPS historian Patrick Schroeder, in which he highlighted the participation of USCTs in the events there, stands out as especially revelatory.  I saw this Longstreet project as a way to “pay it forward,” if you will: to use my own expertise as a biographer to make battlefields more legible.  The example I’ll give is of the somewhat infamous Longstreet equestrian statue at Gettysburg.  That statue, erected in 1998, has a long backstory that isn’t all self-evident when one gazes upon it and marvels quizzically at how Longstreet’s horse is too small (!).  The statue represents the difficulty of memorializing Longstreet and of reconciling his discordant Confederate and Republican records. As I explain in my book, Longstreet retreated from Radical Republicanism in the last phase of his life, to reconciliationism.  He was determined to claw back some of his lost popularity in the South, and he refashioned himself as a herald of sectional reunion, who was eager to clasp hands, along with other veterans, in the symbolic brotherhood of the blue and the grey.  His partner in this image make-over was his second wife Helen Dortch Longstreet, a Georgia journalist some 42 years younger than him, who staunchly defended his Confederate military record.  When Longstreet was buried in Gainesville, Georgia in 1904, after dying of pneumonia, his casket was bedecked in both American and Confederate flags, and he was eulogized by Northerners and many Southerners too as a great statesman.

But it proved impossible to lay to rest the bitter controversies that had swirled around Longstreet.  Longstreet’s critics and detractors, especially in Virginia and Louisiana, did not let up--they would obsessively relitigate the battle of Gettysburg and relive the 1874 “Battle of Liberty Place,” as they redubbed the coup attempt there.  Helen Dortch Longstreet entered the fray, attempting to defend both Longstreet’s wartime military record and his postwar statesmanship.  In 1938, Helen used the 75^th anniversary gathering at Gettysburg to form the Longstreet Memorial Association, to raise money to erect a statue to her late husband within Gettysburg National Military Park.  The project was derailed by WWII, and Helen did not live to see it through (she died in 1962 at age 99).  When an equestrian statue of Longstreet was eventually unveiled at Gettysburg in 1998, its sponsors in the UCV focused exclusively on his war record:  they pointedly insisted that they sought to honor Longstreet’s Confederate service, not his postwar politics, and the unveiling ceremony on July 3, 1998 was steeped in Lost Cause imagery.  In other words, the Longstreet statue at Gettysburg, like Longstreet’s life itself, represents the elusiveness of reconciliation among Southerners over the meaning of the Civil War.  Battlefields manifest, in ways both conspicuous and subtle, the competing memory traditions that have shaped our understanding of the Civil War.

In sum, when we invest in battlefield preservation we are investing not only in saving landscapes but also in promoting education, and preserving certain habits of mind—the careful, patient, rigorous study of evidence, both material and literary; the appreciation of expertise, both professional and amateur; and the realization that no matter how useful and constructive our various new technologies can be, there is no substitute for seeing and experiencing a landscape with your own eyes.  Please accept my gratitude for this award, and for your devoted and generous stewardship of our historic sites.