Lecture Date: March 11, 2025
The Walter Jervis Sheffield Lecture
General James Longstreet is remembered by many as a prominent Confederate general during the American Civil War. He also was reviled by generations of white Southerners as an apostate—both for criticizing the generalship of Robert E. Lee and becoming a Republican and supporting Black voting and interracial governance during Reconstruction. Centering Longstreet’s rejection of Lost Cause tropes, his friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, and the theme of race relations in postwar Louisiana, Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South explores Longstreet’s influential political career and connects it to the perennial debates over his wartime record at Gettysburg and elsewhere. Longstreet’s life dramatizes, Varon shows, divisions within the South and the elusiveness of reconciliation over the meaning, legacies, and memory of the Civil War era.
Longstreet was reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic and Guardian. The book won the inaugural American Battlefield Trust Prize and the Georgia Historical Society’s book award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times biography prize, among other honors.
Speaker: Elizabeth Varon
Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive council of UVA’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Varon grew up in northern Virginia and attended Swarthmore College for her B.A. and Yale University for her Ph.D. She has taught at Wellesley College and Oxford University. She is the author of six books, including Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, which won the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Varon’s current project is a biography of humanitarian Clara Barton.