Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Background

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet was born on September 22, 1790 in Augusta, Georgia, United States. His parents, William and Hannah (Randolph) Longstreet, of Dutch and French-English ancestry, migrated to Georgia from New Jersey about 1785.

Education

From 1808 to 1810 Longstreet attended the academy of Dr. Moses Waddel in Willington, South Carolina, and in 1811, following the example of his friend John C. Calhoun, he entered Yale College. He finished his course there in 1813, and, still following Calhoun, entered the Litchfield (Connecticut) Law School. In 1814 Longstreet returned to Georgia, where he passed the bar exam the following year. He was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1815.

Career

Longstreet started his career as a lawyer in Greensboro, Georgia and gained some prominence. In 1821 he began a term in the Georgia General Assembly as a representative from Greene County. From 1822 to 1825 was a judge of the superior court. In 1824, he offered himself for election to Congress, but soon afterward the death of his eldest child caused him to abandon all political ambition, and to turn from his hitherto skeptical attitude in religion to the devout Methodism of his neighbors.

He returned to Augusta to live in 1827, and there wrote a series of sketches called "Georgia Scenes, " begun anonymously for the Milledgeville (Georgia) Southern Recorder, but soon transferred to his own paper, the Augusta State Rights Sentinel. These humorous, often crudely realistic compositions, dealing with life in Georgia as he knew it, were at once widely popular. The author silenced his misgivings relative to their frivolity by reminding himself of how valuable they would become as a source of history. In addition they are significant as being among the earliest manifestations in America of the type of literature which later produced such characters as Tennessee's Partner, Uncle Remus, and Huckleberry Finn.

Longstreet first published the Georgia Scenes in book form (still anonymously) in Augusta in 1835, but in 1840 the firm of Harper & Brothers in New York gave them introduction under the author's name to a national body of readers which proved enthusiastic and persistent. They were frequently imitated, but scarcely equaled even by Longstreet himself, who in the same vein wrote many other stories and sketches, and also a novel, Master William Mitten (1864). Literature was in Longstreet's mind always chiefly a means of diversion.

His real interests were politics and religion. He established and edited a newspaper, the State Rights Sentinel (Augusta, 1834 - 1836). In 1838 he became a Methodist minister, and in that capacity, with conspicuously good results, he presided (1839 - 1848) over Emory College, newly founded in Oxford, Georgia. In 1844 he went to New York to take part in the General Conference of his Church at which the denomination, after debating the propriety of slave-ownership among its bishops, divided into two branches. The disagreement centered about Bishop Andrew, of Oxford, and Longstreet took active part in the discussion through both speech and writing, publishing, in 1845, Letters on the Epistle of Paul to Philemon, or the Connection of Apostolic Christianity with Slavery, and two years later, A Voice from the South (1847).

During 1849, he was president of Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana, and from 1849 to 1856 of the University of Mississippi. Here his administration was successful, but his continued political activities, as evidenced primarily by his Letters from President Longstreet to the Know-Nothing Preachers of the Methodist Church South (1855), published by the Democratic State Central Committee, occasioned so much opposition that he determined to withdraw from public life.

He had barely retired with his family to his near-by plantation when he was invited (1857) to become president of the University of South Carolina. The opportunity was more than he could resist. The executive's position there was at that time most difficult, but he soon established his mastery. In 1865 he settled down again in Mississippi and wrote extensively to prove that the South had always been right and the North always wrong. He died in Oxford, Mississippi.

Achievements

• Longstreet's fame rested on his book "Georgia Scenes" (1835), originally published in newspapers, then gathered into a volume at the South, and finally issued in 1840 in New York. It featured realistic sketches of Southern humor. He also played a central role in the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Voice From the South: Comprising Letters From Georgia to Massachusetts, and to the Southern States, With an Appendix Containing an Article From the ... on the Wilmot Proviso (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A Voice From the South: Comprising Letters F...)

  • Master William Mitten: Or a Youth of Brilliant Talent, Who Was Ruined by Bad Luck (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Master William Mitten: Or a Youth of Brillia...)

  • Valuable Suggestions Addressed to the Soldiers of the Confederate States (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Valuable Suggestions Addressed to the Soldie...)

  • Stories with a Moral: Humorous and Descriptive of Southern Life a Century Ago

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's "Georgia Scenes" Completed: A Scholarly Text

    (Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, Characters,...)

  • Patriotic Effusions

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, in the First Half Century of the Republic (Classic Reprint)

    (LllCL r-ivAKY 155002 ASTOH. Lrf- XA NO rad, according to ...)

Religion

Longstreet joined the Methodist church in 1827.

Politics

In politics Longstreet belonged to the Jeffersonian school of strict construction and states rights. He was a fervent advocate of nullification as the proper course for the state of Georgia.

Views

Longstreet was a vigorous proponent of secession, but when he saw war actually upon him--and, what was worse, upon his students--he had no longer any courage in his belief, and went about appealing frantically on all sides that something be done at once to hold off the terrible destroyer. From then on till the war's end he was a strenuous but sadly dismayed patriot.

Personality

Longstreet had to a phenomenal degree the gift of attracting friends and keeping them. In everything he did he was sincere and throughout his life was animated by high motives.

Connections

In 1814 Longstreet married Frances Eliza Parke, of Greensboro.

Father:

William Longstreet

Mother:

Hannah (Randolph) Longstreet

Spouse:

Frances Eliza Parke

References

• Judge Longstreet. a Life Sketch
• Bibliography of American Literature, Volume 6: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Thomas William Parsons (Bibliography of American Literature Seri)
• Augustus Baldwin Longstreet: A Study Of The Development Of Culture In The South
• AUGUSTUS BALDWIN LONGSTREET.