General James Longstreet, was one of the “three persons of the South” whom President Andrew Johnson believed should “never receive amnesty.”

President Johnson was half-right. Longstreet had “given the Union cause too much trouble.” Longstreet never apologized for betraying his country. He never regretted crushing Union troops at bloody battles, including Second Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. He never renounced his region’s reprehensible pro-slavery war aims. He would write: “That the South had just cause for war in protecting and defending lawful property is proved by the sequel.”  

Yet he was no General Lee or Jeff Davis. While other Southerners romanticized “the Lost Cause,” he had the guts to tell Confederate comrades their cause was lost...

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