Event Details

RESCHEDULED EVENT FROM MARCH 2024
The Library Society and Buxton Books are pleased to host renowned historian, Elizabeth Varon, of the Civil War era, for her latest release – the story of American history’s most remarkable political about-face.

Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet is a bold new biography of the Confederate general whose support of constitutional rights for Black Americans after the Civil War enraged Southern critics and ignited a campaign to destroy his reputation. General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.

After the war, Longstreet dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South’s defeat in the Civil War.

Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation.

About the Book:
LONGSTREET reintroduces Americans to one of the Civil War era’s best known, but least understood, figures. This is the first full biography in decades, and the first to give proper attention to Longstreet’s long post-Civil War political career. Longstreet’s unusual life illuminates both the transformative changes and the entrenched inequalities of the Civil War era. Longstreet is being rediscovered in the new age of racial reckoning. Varon, an acclaimed Civil War historian and author of the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize-winning book, Armies of Deliverance, demonstrates that Longstreet’s controversial choices have enduring relevance for our modern debates over American history.