[On April 11, 1951, President Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his position as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. MacArthur is one of many U.S. Generals who have a great deal to tell us about our wars, our military histories, and many other political and social contexts, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of other famous generals, leading up to a complex layer of our current military and American moment.]
On two Civil War Generals who exemplify divergent post-war histories, and a third who really deserves our attention.
Back in May 2019 I focused one of my more personal Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns on my childhood love for General Robert E. Lee, my concurrent childhood disdain for General James Longstreet, and how my perspective on those two has been drastically reversed in recent years. Check out that column if you would, and then come on back for further thoughts on those two U.S.-turned-Confederate Generals.
Welcome back! When we add into the mix a pre-Civil War history that I didn’t get to include in that column—that both Lee and Longstreet got their start as military officers in the U.S. Army during the Mexican American War—their divergent post-war roles become even more interesting. It’s already quite striking and compelling on its own terms that after the war Longstreet served, under his friend President Ulysses S. Grant, as a military leader of Reconstruction-era federal forces, including commanding Black troops in a battle against a white supremacist militia in 1874 New Orleans. But when we factor in his Mexican American War service, what that really means is that Longstreet began and ended his military career leading U.S. troops, and that it’s possible (if of course complicated) to see his Confederate Army service more through the lens of another military role rather than a commitment to the C.S.A.’s white supremacist cause. At least as compared to Lee, who, as historians have worked hard to remind us in recent years, was not just a slaveowner but a particularly violent one at that.
As I wrote in that column and am reiterating here, I’m thus a big fan (as a wiser adult at least) of Longstreet’s arc. But compelling as redemption stories are, we shouldn’t let them overshadow the stories of folks who were on the right side all along—and one particularly impressive such figure was also famous for his service as a U.S. General in charge of troops in New Orleans: Benjamin “Beast” Butler. Butler’s designating escaped enslaved people as “contraband” during the Civil War, in order to keep the Confederates from having any claim to them, led directly to Lincoln’s shift toward emancipation as a key war goal; his Radical Republican leadership in the House of Representatives during and after the war led to his role as lead prosecutor in the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson; and his service as Chairman of the House Committee on Reconstruction led him to author the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Now that’s a Civil War General truly worth commemorating and celebrating.
Next General Studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Generals or other military histories you’d highlight?
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