Happy Birthday, Old Pete!

General James Longstreet was born this day in 1821 in Edgefield District, South Carolina. I've always found Longstreet to be a fascinating character, stolid and solid and lacking the cavalier air of many of the other Confederate officers. At the same time, his is the only major memoir of the war I've read that I have not yet been able to get all the way through. Zzzzzzz......

As to the notion that Longstreet deliberately threw the battle of Gettysburg because he disagreed with Lee's offensive tactics, I think this is patent nonsense cobbled together by people who loathed Longstreet because he turned Republican after the war.

On the other hand, I also believe that Longstreet's own preference to swing around to the right as opposed to a frontal assault would have left the Confederate lines dangerously stretched and ripe for disaster. As shown by the results of his own independant commands, Longstreet really wasn't all that brilliant a tactician.