Helen Longstreet’s Lee and Longstreet at High Tide To Be Republished!

Longstreet's Russellville Headquarters Saved!

Will be Restored and made a Museum

LCWPA members and guest at Longstreet’s Russellville Headquarters,

27 May 2006

Front Row-L-R Dan Paterson, G-grandson of Gen. Longstreet, Thomas Robinson - President & CEO Morristown Chamber of Commerce, Larry Baker - Hamblen County Commissioner 

Back Row-L-R David Purkey - Hamblen County Mayor, Reece Sexton - Chairman Lakeway Civil War Preservation Association, Mike Beck - President Lakeway Civil War Preservation Association- 1st. Lt. Co. Tn. Div. S.C.V. and Camp Co. Bradford/Rose # 1638 S.C.V.

                                                                                                                        31 May 2006

     In late 2005 I’d received letters from Mr. Randy Miller, of Morristown, TN regarding Gen. Longstreet’s headquarters from 1863-1864 being up for sale and local group’s attempts to purchase it.  The probability was very high that the property, zoned commercial, was going to be developed and a Dollar Store built upon the property.  Mr. Miller was kind enough to send me photographs of the house which I’d never seen before.  Although I had knowledge of the general location of Gen. Longstreet and his troops and their actions during this part of the war and I’d visited Knoxville multiple times in the past, I’d never ventured to the area before.

    Thanks to Mr. Randy Miller I can now say that I have.  Mr. Miller put me in touch with Mike Beck, the local SCV Camp’s Lt. Commander and Mike kept me informed about the progress of properties purchase.  I was invited to give my program on General Longstreet in Morristown, TN; the start of what I feel will be a wonderful project upon completion. 

    Memorial Day weekend 2006: I can’t think of a better time, I found myself on a journey to East Tennessee to spend a weekend in the area where my ancestor’s troops spent the winter of ‘63-‘64 and near where the Battle of Bean’s Station was fought.  Upon my arrival I was immediately taken on a wonderfully comprehensive tour of the area where I saw sites that I would otherwise never been able to see, thanks to Mr. Mike Beck.  A relic hunter, part of the time, Mr. Beck has a detailed knowledge of the local sites and where the troops were, regiment by regiment.  This was one of the most exciting tours of a Civil War site that I’ve ever been a part of and I am most grateful for the experience. 

     After another quick tour of some other related sites, including Rogersville, TN, we went to the house in Russellville, TN known as “Longstreet’s Billet” so identified by a state historical marker in the front yard.  We had a photo opportunity provided by the local newspaper, the Citizen Tribune and CW Courier. 

     Saturday evening my program was well received at the local library.  A full house was on hand and the formal announcement following the program that the house was purchased and saved from development by the Lakeway CW Preservation Association.  The house will be restored to its wartime appearance and will serve as a visitor’s center for information on the entire area.

     I thank Mr. Randy Miller for getting in touch with me initially about the house.  Many thanks to Mr. Mike Beck and Bill White for touring me around the area where Longstreet’s men camped skirmished and wintered in 1863-64.  This was an excellent experience and I look forward to my return September 22, 2006 for a reenactment/living history whose proceeds will benefit the project, one that has my full endorsement and support.  Let us all spread the word about this project to the Civil War Community and anyone interested in battlefield preservation.

Dan Paterson

Great-grandson of James Longstreet

“I am happy to announce the recent purchase of a house in Russellville, TN. that was used by Gen. James Longstreet as his HQ during the winter of 1863/1864.  The State of Tennessee has recognized this house with a State Historical Marker entitled Longstreet's Billet.    The house was purchased by the newly incorporated Lakeway Civil War Preservation Association whose Board is comprised of local Civic leaders and Bradford-Rose Camp #1638 members.    On Saturday, May 27, our fundraising was kicked off with a presentation by Dan Paterson, the great-grandson of Gen. James Longstreet.    Attached are the ads and articles we were able to get in the local newspaper, the Citizen Tribune.  

1st Lt. Commander Mike Beck

mlb59@charter.net  

Tax deductible donations may be sent to:

Lakeway Civil War Preservation Association

P.O. Box 625

Morristown TN 37815

Dan Paterson at Longstreet’s HQs, Russellville, TN 27 May 2006

Helen Longstreet’s Lee and Longstreet at High Tide To Be Republished!

By Richard Pilcher

Thanks to the persistent efforts of Nickiy Payne, there will finally be a reprint of Helen Longstreet's book, Lee and Longstreet at High Tide. Nickiy, our chairperson for this project, worked out a deal with Broadfoot Publishing which will get the book back into print with a forward by Dan Paterson, General Longstreet's great grandson and a director of the Longstreet Society, and some additional photographs supplied by Dan.

Delivery time for the first 100 hardback copies will be about eight weeks. The price will be $30 for Longstreet Society members and $40 for all others. We will sell this first printing on a first come-first served basis and we will order a second printing only after the first sells out, so better order now. Add four dollars for shipping. If you have been in contact with Nickiy send your check to her, or you may send it to The Longstreet Society, PO Box 191, Gainesville, GA 30503 or order on-line at www.longstreet.org. Nickiy will be shipping the books from her home near Asheville, NC as soon as they arrive.

There are many of us, both Society members and non-members, who are so very grateful to Nickiy for her long and persistent effort to get this book back into print. Great job Nickiy!!

Helen Longstreet should have name on Federal Building

Our views

Opinion

The Federal Building located in Gainesville at the corner of Green and Washington streets should officially be named the Helen Dortch Longstreet Federal Building and United States Courthouse. The reasons for such an action are many, and the process will not be quick and simple. If accomplished, it would be the second federal building in the United States named for a woman. It would be the first federal building named for a person whose life was devoted to a famous Confederate general.

This process can begin now if the local Longstreet Society will adopt it as a project. Garland Reynolds, a member and founder of the society, shared his knowledge of Helen Longstreet's remarkable life in The Times last Sunday.  Members of the Longstreet Society should go before the Gainesville City Commission and make the request. The commission may want to hold a hearing on the idea, and, if adopted, make a formal request to 10th District U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal.

Deal would need to enter a bill in the U.S. House that would go before the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management, which operates out of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Congressional committee hearings then would be scheduled on the request.

The federal building will be 100 years old in 2009. Helen Longstreet was able to get it built here as this mountain town entered the 20th century. At that time, the town had only just begun to put itself on the map. The local railroad depot was busy with logs and timber coming in from mountain sawmills; two new cotton mills were being built; the Baptist Female Seminary had just changed its name to Brenau College; and there was much talk about a new military academy that Gen. Sandy Beaver was building. Nevertheless, the town's streets still were mostly dirt. The new marble federal building, which opened in 1909, was a magnificent piece of architecture that left local people in deep awe. The average person never would have entered it if it hadn't housed the post office in addition to the federal court and other offices. That's where Helen Longstreet served as one of this nation's first female postmistresses.

But having the ability to get this building for Gainesville is only one small segment of her contributions to Gainesville, to the South and to this nation. She was a U.S. patriot when patriotism was not popular in the South. She fought to protect the privileges, opportunities and personal liberty of all people.

She was among the first people who recognized the need to protect and preserve the physical beauty of our mountains. She was a librarian, an author and a journalist when men filled these occupations.

Helen Longstreet never stopped in her efforts to support her husband, Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, who was 42 years her senior and died in 1904. After the war, Longstreet had renewed his friendship with his old friend and cousin-in-law, Ulysses S. Grant, and joined the Republican Party. Because of his support of the federal government, he was slandered by the South's Lost Cause Movement.

Mrs. Longstreet also never stopped in her efforts to support this country. In 1943, Life Magazine had pictures of the "Confederate General's Widow" working at Bell Aircraft plant in Atlanta. At the time, she was about 80 years old and was quoted as saying "I am going to assist in building a plane to bomb Hitler." She was a riveter working the 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. shift.

Helen Dortch Longstreet was not daunted by the long and loud public opposition to her activist positions concerning U.S. patriotism, civil rights and mountain protection. Today, the deep worth of her efforts can be acknowledged by naming the federal building the Helen Dortch Longstreet Federal Building and United States Courthouse. We hope the Longstreet Society soon will begin the process.

Originally published Sunday, November 27, 2005 in The Gainesville Times

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Who Buried the Children 

By Longstreet Society member Jan Vanderheiden

 In Richmond, VA during winter 1862, the three youngest children of General James and Maria Louisa Longstreet died from scarlet fever. This personal tragedy is mentioned in biographies and discussions of Longstreet the General. However events that happened, or did not happen in regards to little Mary Ann, James Jr. and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet following their deaths seem vague and troubled.  For many decades it was believed that in those dark hours James and Louise were too distraught to see to the children’s funeral arrangements, or even attend the services. Longstreet’s friend Brigadier General George Pickett, who was in Richmond at the time with 16 year-old LaSalle Corbell, intervened. It was George and Sally (soon to be the third Mrs. George Pickett) who took care of all arrangements and attended for the grief-stricken parents. However, this long established tale rings false for some Longstreet scholars, especially since the only source for its authenticity is contained within a letter of condolence written by LaSalle herself to Longstreet’s  second wife, Helen, upon the General’s passing on January 4, 1904.

Cavalier Tales

After Pickett’s death in 1875 LaSalle began to write and lecture about her famous husband. Her tales of Pickett and the times he lived in were highly romanticized and unfortunately, also suspect in terms of their truthfulness. In the introductory pages of her biographical work, “General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend”, Lesley J. Gordon describes the difficulty of separating fact from fiction when attempting to study Pickett’s life, due to the writings of LaSalle. “Civil War historians have tried to tell George Pickett’s story without LaSalle and found it immensely difficult…Her fabricated and romanticized tales have become accepted parts of not only the Pickett legend but also Civil War canon,” Gordon bemoans, noting that famous Civil War historian Gary Gallagher “denounced her (LaSalle) not only as author of the published George Pickett letters but also plagiarizer of Walter Harrison’s history of Pickett’s division.” According to Gordon, LaSalle Pickett wrote at a time when “Public memory of the antebellum South and the Civil War focused on noble causes and honorable actions…” It would seem possible that her account of the Longstreets and their children’s death’s fit into this thought process. LaSalle’s exact words to Helen Longstreet, as taken from “Lee and Longstreet at High Tide” were: “My love and sympathy go out to the dear children whose mother was my beloved friend, whom I have held in my arms in childhood, and whose little brothers and sisters faded away before my loving eyes when their flower of life had not yet unfolded from the bud of their sweet infancy and the mortal casket was entrusted to General Pickett and myself to be laid away among the church-yard lilies when the jewel of the pure soul had been taken beyond.” If LaSalle’s words are to be regarded as something more romantic than actual, what did happen following the children’s deaths?

Dearth of Information

From the Richmond Daily Dispatch on January 27 - “In this city, on the 24^th inst., Mary J and on the 25^th inst., James, children of Maj. Gen. Longstreet, Confederate States Army. The former aged 13 months, the latter 4 years and 6 days. The funeral will take place this afternoon at 3 o’clock, from the Arlington House.”

An obituary notice for Augustus, who died one week later, never appeared in the Dispatch. A search for its publication in another Richmond newspaper goes for naught, since copies for winter 1862 are missing. Information or photos of the Arlington House is elusive. Only one other mention of it in the Dispatch during the fall 1861/winter 1862 is found. In the advertisement column, it states simply, “Arlington House located at the northeast corner of Main and 6^th Streets.” In “General James Longstreet, the Confederacy’s most controversial soldier”, Jeffry Wert says “Louise and the children boarded with friends in the capital” during that time, but does not mention the Arlington.  No data on it is readily available from the Library of Virginia, or the Richmond Historical Society. The Arlington could seem more ghostly than real if not for diarist Mary Chesnut. The Chesnuts were good friends of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina. Due to overcrowding they left the Spotswood Hotel, where the Davis’s temporarily lived, in favor of the Arlington House during August, 1861. Chesnut had high praise for her newest place of abode: “On the front steps every evening we take our seats and discourse at our pleasure. A nicer or more agreeable set of people were never assembled than our present Arlington crowd.” Were the Longstreet’s staying at or near the Arlington? Chesnut was away from Richmond during winter 1862, so doesn’t mention them.

Nothing concerning Longstreet is reported in the Dispatch, nor is the epidemic that took his children’s lives even mentioned there, although its ravages seemed to have traveled as far north as Washington D.C. (A check of internet resources concerning the epidemic reveal the story of a Dr. Richard Stuart, who smuggled medical supplies from the Northern capital to the Confederacy. Stuart and his wife lost two of their children to the same scourge that claimed the Longstreet children’s lives.) If the Longstreet’s did not have the fortitude to attend their children’s funerals, what happened at the cemetery? From reading LaSalle Pickett’s words to Helen Longstreet, it would seem that the children were interred in Hollywood Cemetery ground during the winter when they died. However, it has since been discovered that the children’s bodies were placed in a vault owned by the John W. Davies family. Though it was supposed to be a temporary situation, the children remained there for eight years, along with numerous other bodies that awaited burial.  In April 1870 the president of the Hollywood Cemetery ordered all 29 unclaimed bodies in the Davies vault to be buried. During a check of records at the Hollywood Cemetery office, it was revealed that on June 29, 1870, James Longstreet purchased the lot where the children presently rest. The cost to him was $28, and his signature supposedly appears on the transaction. The children were interred at the site on August 18, 1870

Again referencing Wert, it can be seen that in 1870 James Longstreet held the position of surveyor of customs for the port of New Orleans, was appointed adjutant general of the state militia, and was named president of the newly organized New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. The three positions earned him between ten and fifteen thousand dollars – “a very substantial sum for the times”, according to Wert.

It can be surmised that with his comfortable earnings, if James paid for the burial plot, he also bought the headstone that marks the children’s grave. Whether or not James or Louise were present for the interment cannot be said at this point. The children’s grave can be found in the officer’s section of Hollywood Cemetery. It is located next to General John D. Imboden. The vault that served as a temporary repository for the children’s remains is still there, too. It is now the W.W. Pool vault. The structure is built into the side of a hill, and is adorned at its crown by a statue of a lamb.                                                                                                                                 

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