Hill's division initially formed part of James Longstreet's command, but after an argument between Hill and Longstreet, which nearly resulted in a duel, Hill was transferred to Stonewall Jackson's Second Corps.

Despite his wartime differences with Longstreet, McLaws initially defended Longstreet in the post-war attempts by Jubal Early and others to smear his reputation.

Knudsen maintains that because Longstreet became a " reconstructed rebel ", embraced equal rights for blacks, unification of the nation, and reconstruction, he became the target of those who wanted to maintain racist policies and otherwise could not accept the verdict of the battlefield.

Meade knew that Lee had been weakened by the departure of Longstreet and wanted to take advantage.

* 1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Wauhatchie – Forces under Union General Ulysses S. Grant repel a Confederate attack led by General James Longstreet.

** American Civil War – Battle of Wauhatchie: Forces under Union General Ulysses S. Grant ward-off a Confederate attack led by General James Longstreet.

* November 16 – American Civil War – Battle of Campbell's Station: Near Knoxville, Tennessee, Confederate troops led by General James Longstreet unsuccessfully attack Union forces under General Ambrose Burnside.

* November 17 – American Civil War – The Siege of Knoxville begins: Confederate forces led by General James Longstreet place Knoxville, Tennessee under siege ( the 2-week-long siege and 1 failed attack are unsuccessful ).

Longstreet followed up with a surprise flanking attack from an unfinished railroad bed that drove Hancock's men back to the Brock Road, but the momentum was lost when Longstreet was wounded by his own men.

Longstreet demurred against three suggestions from Lee, urging him to attack, recommending instead that a reconnaissance in force be conducted to survey the ground in front of him.

Since Lee moved Longstreet to Fredericksburg early, it allowed Longstreet to take the time to dig in portions of his line, methodically site artillery, and set up a kill zone over the axis of advance he thought the Union attack would come.

Meeting with Lee, Longstreet was concerned about the strength of the Union defensive position and advocated a strategic movement around the left flank of the enemy, to " secure good ground between him and his capital ," which would presumably compel the Union commander, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, to attack defensive positions erected by the Confederates.

Lee's plan for July 2 called for Longstreet to attack the Union's left flank, which would be followed up by Hill's attack on Cemetery Ridge near the center, while Ewell demonstrated on the Union right.

Longstreet was not ready to attack as early as Lee envisioned.

Postbellum criticism of Longstreet claims that he was ordered by Lee to attack in the early morning and that his delays were a significant contributor to the loss of the battle.

Although Longstreet's motivations have long been clouded by the vitriol of the Lost Cause partisans ( see Legacy ), many historians agree that Longstreet did not aggressively pursue Lee's orders to launch an attack as early as possible.

" Military historians Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones wrote, " Unenthusiastic about the attack, Longstreet consumed so much time in properly assembling and aligning the corps that the assault did not commence until 4 p. m. During all the time that passed, Meade continued to move in troops to bring about a more and more complete concentration ; by 6 p. m. he had achieved numerical superiority and had his left well covered.

It would have been impossible to have commenced an attack much earlier than it occurred, and it is doubtful that the Confederacy could have placed the attack in any more secure hands than General Longstreet.

) Shortly after issuing orders for the attack, around sunrise, Longstreet was joined at his headquarters by Lee, who was dismayed at this turn of events.

The commanding general had intended for Longstreet to attack the Union left early in the morning in a manner similar to the attack of July 2, using Pickett's newly arrived division, in concert with a resumed attack by Ewell on Culp's Hill.

Since his plans for an early-morning coordinated attack were now infeasible, Lee instead ordered Longstreet to coordinate a massive assault on the center of the Union line, employing the division of George Pickett and brigades from A. P.

On September 20, 1863, Longstreet lined up eight brigades in a deep column against a narrow front, an attack very similar to future German tank tactics in World War II.

" Longstreet helped save the Confederate Army from defeat in his first battle back with Lee's army, the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, where he launched a powerful flanking attack along the Orange Plank Road against the Union II Corps and nearly drove it from the field.

In April, Longstreet besieged Union forces in the city of Suffolk, Virginia, a minor operation, but one that was very important to Lee's army, still stationed in war-devastated central Virginia.

Burnside evaded him at the Battle of Campbell's Station and settled into entrenchments around the city, which Longstreet besieged unsuccessfully.

Longstreet commanded a force of 3, 600 Metropolitan Police, city policemen, and African-American militia troops, armed with two Gatling guns and a battery of artillery.

Burnside skillfully outmaneuvered Longstreet at the Battle of Campbell's Station and was able to reach his entrenchments and safety in Knoxville, where he was briefly besieged until the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Fort Sanders outside the city.

Burnside's former command, the IX Corps, was transferred to the Virginia Peninsula, a movement that prompted the Confederates to detach troops from Lee's army under Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, a decision that would be consequential in the upcoming campaign.

He was the fifth child and third son of James Longstreet ( 1783-1833 ), of Dutch descent and Mary Ann Dent ( 1793-1855 ) of English descent, originally from New Jersey and Maryland respectively, who owned a cotton plantation close to where the village of Gainesville would be founded in northeastern Georgia.

After the war and his recovery from the Chapultepec wound, Longstreet and his new wife served on frontier duty in Texas, primarily at Fort Martin Scott near Fredericksburg and Fort Bliss in El Paso.

Longstreet was not enthusiastic about secession from the Union, but he had learned from his uncle Augustus about the doctrine of states ' rights early in his life and had seen his uncle's passion for it.

In the early spring of 1863, Longstreet suggested to Lee that his corps be detached from the Army of Northern Virginia and sent to reinforce the Army of Tennessee, where Gen. Braxton Bragg was being challenged in Middle Tennessee by Union Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, Longstreet's roommate at West Point.

However, this operation caused Longstreet and 15, 000 men of the First Corps to be absent from the Battle of Chancellorsville in May.

Despite Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville, Longstreet once again came under criticism, claiming that he could have marched his men back from Suffolk in time to join Lee.

However, from the Chancellorsville and Suffolk scenario, Longstreet brought forward the beginnings of a new Confederate strategy.

( Longstreet, despite his use of scouting parties, was apparently unaware that a considerable body of troops from the Union VI Corps was in position to block this move.

What Lee found was that no one had ordered Pickett's division forward from its bivouac in the rear and that Longstreet had been planning an independent operation without consulting with him.

In one of the most daunting logistical efforts of the Confederacy, Longstreet, with the divisions of Lafayette McLaws and John Hood, a brigade from George Pickett's division, and Porter Alexander's 26-gun artillery battalion, traveled over 16 railroads on a route through the Carolinas to reach Bragg in northern Georgia.

By chance, a mistaken order from General Rosecrans caused a gap to appear in the Union line and Longstreet took additional advantage of it to increase his chances of success.

Bragg retained his position, relieving or reassigning the generals who had testified against him, and retaliated against Longstreet by reducing his command to only those units that he brought with him from Virginia.

Despite the dysfunctional command climate under Bragg, and the lack of support from the War Department and President Davis concerning Bragg's removal, Longstreet did the best he could to continue to seek options in the Chattanooga Campaign.

Longstreet was wounded during the assault — accidentally shot by his own men only about away from the place where Jackson suffered the same fate a year earlier.

In 1880 Hayes appointed Longstreet as his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and later he served from 1897 to 1904, under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, as U. S. Commissioner of Railroads, succeeding Wade Hampton III.

After Louise's death, and after bearing criticism of his war record from other Confederates for decades, Longstreet refuted most of their arguments in his memoirs entitled From Manassas to Appomattox, a labor of five years that was published in 1896.

* Military biography of James Longstreet from the Cullum biographies