Was General Longstreet a Person of Faith?
By Sam Stragand
On July 1, 1863, the first shots were fired over the rolling fields of Gettysburg in the greatest civil conflict in America History. Gettysburg was to become the most decisive battle of a war which caused more casualties than all the other American conflicts combined. General Robert E. Lee, the commander and driving force behind a seemingly invincible Confederate army, offered all his plans and insecurities to only one person: General James Longstreet, his second-in-command. Like every human throughout history, Longstreet continuously struggled with both the faith he had and the faith he believed he should have possessed.
As the leader of an entire corps, Longstreet commanded many thousands of men who he possessed faith in to fight as gallantly and bravely as possible. He knew that his men would have faith in him to lead them through the many trying battles and journeys that would take them throughout their divided country. He had so much faith in them that he expected and received superhuman performances on a regular basis. In the battle of Gettysburg, he would ask them to show even more courage and perseverance than ever before. They would not let him down in the tragic fight for Cemetery Ridge that would cost him nine thousand of his fifteen thousand men in two hours. Without this personal faith, he would have been totally incapable of leading his troops at all.
The Dutchman, as Longstreet was called, also had overwhelming faith in himself to judge a situation correctly and deliver others’ faith in him. Throughout the war, people questioned his defensive warfare advice that, if followed at Gettysburg, could have changed the outcome of the war. His faith in himself commanded that he also possess a great faith in his commander, Lee, to always order what he believed best for the army. Throughout the war Longstreet had an uncontradicting faith in both Lee and his plans until the battle of Gettysburg.
While his faith in Lee’s motives remained strong, at Gettysburg, Longstreet lost faith in Lee’s plans to attack the Army of the Potomac. Before the decisive battle, Lee and Longstreet had agreed on many points in strategy, but from the beginning of the fateful battle, the two Generals disagreed on how to attack. This argument culminated on the third day when Lee decided to have three divisions charge the center of the Union line while Longstreet recommended retreat in order to find a more favorable position. Longstreet correctly predicted the tragic end to Lee’s plan to which he had no faith. Pickett’s Charge, as it was called after the division general who led the rush, had no parallel anywhere in history. More artillery was concentrated on a small place than ever before and the Charge’s tragic end led to the end of what Winston Churchill called “the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts.”
Throughout this battle and for the rest of his life, James Longstreet would possess an internal struggle between his faith for Lee as a person and the decisions Lee made that led to the Confederates’ downfall in the greatest civil conflict in history. At even the most extraordinary levels of humanity, Longstreet’s faltering faith portrays how man is most human at his most contradicting moments.