Civil War reading

It's quieting down from Christmas. This morning I turned on the classical station and found the Brandenburg 3, instead of the nonstop Christmas carols we had yesterday. In the 45 minutes it took to drive to our nephew's house, they played "Riu, riu, chiu" twice. I can think of a lot of worse things to play twice, but you still need to keep track of your playlist.

This is the book on the US Civil War that I picked up a while back and have been poking through reading at mealtimes:

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth R. Varon (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

As the subtitle suggests, concentrates on the postwar period. Runs through his pre-war life (he was career Army) very briefly - apparently there's not much to be said; all of Longstreet's personal papers were destroyed in a postwar fire - is not too clogged on his wartime service, but really gets going on his varied postwar career, focused on his not quite unique attitude of accepting that since the South lost, they didn't get to have things their own way any more. The result of this is that Longstreet became a Republican. Huge detail on his decade plunged into the maelstrom of postwar Louisiana politics, culminating in his leading Black police troops in a street battle against a white supremacist mob. Things like this made him vastly popular among other ex-Confederates, you can be sure.

The book jump-cuts - because that's what his life was like - into Longstreet's periods doing other things like being a federal marshal in Georgia and, most bizarrely, his brief stint as the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. You'd think this job in 1880 would be mostly focused on trade issues, and indeed the US had previously secured treaty rights for free passage of their trade ships through the Bosporus, something which the Russians also wanted and fought several wars with the Turks over, but it turns out his main concern was with American Protestant missionaries wandering around the back forties of the Empire. They'd annoy the natives, get into trouble, and the US Ambassador would have to bail them out.

But of course the main topic is Longstreet's reputation. He spent a lot of time defending himself against people who decided he'd been a bad general during the war because they disliked his activities after the war. Varon is diligent about summarizing the charges, Longstreet's writings, the crusading defenses by his second wife (a much younger journalist he married in his last, widowed years), and the opinions of previous biographers. Concludes with a discussion of Longstreet and the statues issue. There is exactly one statue of Longstreet. It's at Gettysburg, it's in an obscure corner, it was erected recently by a group which emphasized they were only honoring his generalship and not his postwar life, and it's small and makes him look like a dork (there's a photo). This book really gives a new view on the recent (and not so recent) controversies over the legacy of that still-contentious war.

I also started to read The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson (Crown, 2024) but gave up on it rather quickly. The period between Lincoln's election and the outbreak of war is searingly suspenseful, but Larson lets all the air out of it by chopping the story up into tiny vignettes, concentrating on personal walnettos instead of describing the issues, and insuring that no two consecutive vignettes have any connection, making the story even choppier. I know Larson is a wildly popular author, but I found this as boring as it was frustrating.