Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet was born in the last decade of the eighteenth century in Georgia, and grew up in a milieu shaped by frontier commerce, experimentation, and public debate. His father, William Longstreet, was known locally as an inventive mind and a persistent promoter of new mechanical ideas, a figure whose confidence in practical ingenuity left a clear impression on his son. From early on, Augustus encountered the cadences of courtroom speech, the rhetoric of politics, and the rough humor of backcountry markets and elections. Classical schooling and wide reading prepared him for higher study, and he soon turned toward the law, a profession that promised both intellectual challenge and an avenue into public life.

Law and Public Career
Admitted to the bar as a young man, Longstreet practiced in Georgia with effectiveness and ambition. He won a reputation for keen cross-examination, nimble argument, and a wry sense of the comic that played well before juries. He briefly held judicial office in the state, gaining firsthand experience with the frictions of a rapidly expanding society, land disputes, commercial claims, and the violent quarrels of an honor-driven culture. The bar led naturally to newspaper writing and political commentary. In editorial offices and on courthouse steps he developed the plainspoken style that would later animate his literary sketches, and he acquired a circle of friends and sparring partners in law and politics whose debates honed his convictions about states' rights and social order.

Writer and Humorist
Longstreet's most enduring contribution to American letters is Georgia Scenes, a collection of sketches first published in the 1830s. Issued anonymously at the time, the book preserves the voices and settings of the rural South in a series of vignettes about court days, horse races, musters, and neighborhood frolics. He delighted in back-fence talk, tall tales, and the swagger of country heroes and frauds, catching the idiom of ordinary speakers while exposing pretension. The work helped found a tradition of Southwestern and Southern humor that later writers would emulate, and it reached readers far beyond Georgia, including fellow men of letters who recognized its blend of satire, ethnography, and performance. Though humorous in mode, the sketches also reveal Longstreet's lawyerly eye for character, motive, and the way local customs govern everyday justice.

Religion and Politics
A committed Methodist layman who also preached, Longstreet took an active part in the denominational life of the South. He defended the authority of local conferences and, during the sectional crisis within the Methodist Church, stood with Southern leaders such as Bishop James O. Andrew. The same convictions that drew him to the autonomy of church conferences undergirded his public arguments for states' rights. Like many white Southern intellectuals of his generation, he accepted and defended slavery, a stance he articulated from the pulpit and in print. His writings and addresses urged social discipline and paternalistic stewardship while resisting Northern criticism, positions that would indelibly mark his historical reputation.

College Leadership
In midlife Longstreet moved decisively into academic administration. He led Emory College in Georgia during a formative period, working with Methodist educators who included figures such as Ignatius A. Few and George F. Pierce. He brought to the presidency a lawyer's decisiveness, a minister's didactic bent, and a writer's instinct for shaping public sentiment. His tenure emphasized moral instruction, rhetorical training, and the cultivation of habits of self-command that he believed necessary for civic life. After Emory, he accepted brief leadership of Centenary College in Louisiana, then moved to the University of Mississippi, and later to South Carolina College. Across these posts he sought to stabilize finances, recruit faculty, and defend rigorous discipline. He was a visible and sometimes polarizing president, praised for energy and eloquence but criticized by those who opposed his sectional commitments.

Civil War and Later Years
As the nation fractured, Longstreet publicly favored secession, aligning his addresses with Southern political leaders. At South Carolina College he presided amid increasing militancy among students and alumni, and the coming of war dissolved the collegiate routines he had tried to protect. He returned to Mississippi during the conflict and its aftermath, witnessing the ruin and uncertainty that followed. Despite age and the privations of the era, he continued to write and to counsel former students and colleagues. He died in the South in 1870, closing a life that had spanned the early republic, the rise of sectional parties, and the destruction of the old order he had long defended.

Family and Personal Relations
Family connections reinforced Longstreet's public life. His daughter, Virginia Longstreet, married Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a rising Mississippi lawyer and educator who later became a prominent national statesman. The bond between Longstreet and Lamar shaped the intellectual life of Oxford, Mississippi, where the University of Mississippi anchored a community of lawyers, ministers, and professors. Through marriage and mentorship, Longstreet's household became a gathering place for discussion of law, literature, and politics. Within Methodist circles he worked alongside Bishop James O. Andrew and knew the ambitions and tensions of church leadership; within college governance he collaborated with and sometimes contested powerful trustees and legislators who alternately embraced and resisted his agenda.

Legacy
Longstreet's legacy is entwined with the contradictions of his time. As a humorist, he preserved regional speech and custom with a vividness that influenced decades of Southern writing. As a teacher and college president, he helped institutionalize higher learning in the Deep South, insisting that rhetoric, logic, and moral philosophy form the backbone of a gentleman's education. As a churchman and public intellectual, he promoted positions on slavery and secession that cannot be disentangled from the oppression they sustained. The people around him, his inventive father William Longstreet, the Methodist leaders with whom he stood, and his son-in-law L. Q. C. Lamar, who carried debates from Oxford to the national stage, situate him squarely within the networks by which the nineteenth-century South educated its elite and justified its social order. Remembered for Georgia Scenes and for his long stewardship of Southern colleges, he remains a figure both formative and fraught, a lawyer-educator whose pen captured the liveliness of everyday life even as his politics helped set the conditions for national fracture.

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