War & Peace Quote by James Longstreet

“Finding the battle broken” is an exquisitely evasive phrase for a sentence that points straight at the Confederacy’s most mythologized catastrophe. Longstreet is talking about Gettysburg, and more specifically the failed assault known as Pickett’s Charge. But notice how the line refuses the sensational language that later memory would crave. No “slaughter,” no “disaster,” no “futility.” Just a cool, almost clerical diagnosis: the battle has “broken,” the enemy is “still reinforcing,” so the troops are “called off.”

That restraint is the tell. Longstreet wasn’t merely reporting; he was positioning. In the postwar struggle over Gettysburg’s blame, he became a favored villain of Lost Cause partisans. This sentence works as a quiet counterattack: it frames the retreat as rational command judgment in the face of a dynamic battlefield, not a failure of nerve or loyalty. By stressing that the Union was reinforcing, Longstreet is also insisting on a key asymmetry: the Confederates were expending irreplaceable manpower against an opponent who could feed the line as the attack unfolded.

Even the grammar performs triage. “General Pickett” is named, but the agency is constrained: he “finding” a condition, then “called” off. Cause-and-effect, not emotion-and-ego. Longstreet’s intent is to normalize withdrawal as competence, to make retreat sound like the only adult option once the assault’s momentum collapsed. Underneath the flat tone is a veteran’s refusal to gild defeat - and a politician’s instinct to draft history as exculpation.