The character:	James Longstreet
The actor:	Tom Berenger
The movie:	Gettysburg (1993)

In the first half of the movie, John Buford (Sam Elliott) foresees what will happen if the Confederate army get to Gettysburg in force before Union troops do. He can see the frontal assault that will become Pickett’s Charge, but in his mind, the men going up the slope are wearing blue and not gray. “The way you sometimes feel before an ill-considered attack, knowing it will fail, but you cannot stop it,” he says. “You must even take part and help it fail.”

Two days later, James Longstreet, commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, has to convince one of his lieutenants, John Bell Hood, to make an attack on Little Round Top. “I argued against it yesterday,” he says to Sam. “I argued it all morning. I’ve been arguing against any attack at all. I can’t call this one off. You know it.”

The day after that, Longstreet hems and haws. He can’t bear to order the attack, even though the shame of it won’t go on his ledger for the rest of history: “Pickett’s Charge,” not “Longstreet’s Charge.” He squanders the cannonballs and grapeshot from Alexander. He waits until the afternoon, when the Federals are ready for him, to order the attack. He has no better advice for his division commanders than to zigzag a little while they’re marching over a mile. He watches it happen. And then he recedes.

Gettysburg came out not long after Ken Burns’ Civil War was released to great acclaim. Lost Cause revisionism was hip, whether that had to do with the conservative turn in American politics via Nixon and Reagan or Shelby Foote’s magnolia-scented praise of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Maybe, in the case of Gettysburg, the very Southern hand of Ted Turner took the wheel. Even Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which was adapted for the movie, focuses primarily on the Southerners. Joshua Chamberlain and John Buford are the primary Union characters, and neither man, for all the good they did, can rival Grant or Sherman for influence. James Longstreet and Robert E. Lee can and do, and they are as much the focus of the novel as anyone else. Longstreet becomes the de facto protagonist of Gettysburg, which is a choice I respect. Lee and Chamberlain, the other two heads of this Civil War Cerberus, are fantasists. Lee’s fantasy is a reckless belief in his own invincibility, and thus the invincibility of his army. Chamberlain’s fantasy is an egalitarian America in which Black people are more props than men. Longstreet has a single fantasy, and it’s the most lunatic fantasy of them all, one that sounds like something Shelby Foote or Ted Turner could have believed for even a second.

“We should have freed the slaves, then fired on Fort Sumter.” What a crock of shit! What a ridiculous thing to put in someone’s mouth! There are centrists out there who think that’s an absolutely insane statement. But it’s in the movie all the same, Tom Berenger says it, and it has lingered in my ears for thirty years because it makes no sense. All the same: it makes Longstreet a prize villain. Here is someone who thinks that he has some rationality. We won this day of fighting, he tells Lee at the end of July 1st. We don’t need to retreat, but redeploy. He explains himself, apologizes even, to Hood, and then he sends Hood to battle and to the amputation of his leg. Then Pickett’s Charge, which was always going to fail, but which Longstreet sabotaged by fighting his guilt. There is a great sin in Longstreet. He does not realize what kind of man he really is, and in failing to name his own craven rationalizations, he evinces a weakness of character that sends thousands of men to their deaths and thousands more to crippling injury.

The irony of all this is that the movie’s Longstreet is not history’s Longstreet. After the war, Longstreet was the most prominent Confederate general to commit cardinal sins against the memory of the Lost Cause. He argued that Lee was fallible. He went to work for his old friend, once hammer of sedition, now President Ulysses S. Grant. The Longstreet of real life obviously erred in siding with the South, but after the war he showed some strength of character. There is no such character in the filmic Longstreet, no matter how much he tries to pretend that his pessimism is independent thinking.