James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s old war horse, was born in South Carolina in 1821 and raised on the Georgia frontier by his uncle Augustus. He finished near the bottom of his West Point class but befriended William Rosecrans, George Pickett, and Ulysses S. Grant, whose wedding to Longstreet’s cousin Julia Dent he attended. In January 1862 scarlet fever killed three of his children in a single week, and the jovial poker player became the stoic commander his staff called a rock.

Longstreet favored a strategic offensive with tactical defense, and at Gettysburg he argued against the assault Lee ordered on the third day. After the war he urged Southerners to accept defeat, joined the Republican Party, and in 1874 led a biracial militia against the White League at the Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans. Jubal Early and William Pendleton then blamed him for Gettysburg. The episode covers his wounding in the Wilderness, his post as diplomat to the Ottoman Empire, and his marriage at 76 to Helen Dortch.

• Wounded in the thigh at Chapultepec, Longstreet handed his regiment’s colors to George Pickett.
• He told Lee that no 15,000 men ever arrayed for battle could take the position at Gettysburg.
• In front of Jefferson Davis, he said Braxton Bragg knew nothing of the business of war.
• His Wilderness flank attack used an unfinished railroad bed before friendly fire paralyzed his right arm.
• William Pendleton’s claim that Lee ordered a sunrise attack at Gettysburg has no supporting evidence.