Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard | |
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May 28, 1818 | – February 20, 1893 (aged 74)|
General P G T Beauregard |
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Nickname | The Little Creole, The Little Napoleon, Bory, Felix |
Place of birth | St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana |
Place of death | New Orleans, Louisiana |
Resting place | Tomb of the Army of Tennessee, Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans |
Allegiance | United States of America, Confederate States of America |
Years of service | 1838–61 (USA), 1861–65 (CSA) |
Rank | General (CSA) |
Battles/wars | Mexican-American War
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Other work | Author, civil servant, politician, and inventor |
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (pronounced /ˈboʊrɪgɑrd/) (May 28, 1818 – February 20, 1893), was a Louisiana-born author, civil servant, politician, inventor, and the first prominent general for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.
Beauregard was trained as a civil engineer at the United States Military Academy and served with distinction as an engineer in the Mexican-American War. Following an extremely brief tenure as the superintendent of the Military Academy in 1861, he became the first Confederate brigadier general and commanded the defenses of Charleston, South Carolina, for the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Three months later he was the victor at the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia.
Beauregard commanded armies in the Western Theater, including at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, and the Siege of Corinth in northern Mississippi. He returned to Charleston and defended it from repeated naval and land attacks in 1863. His arguably greatest achievement was saving the city of Petersburg, Virginia, and thus also the Confederate capital of Richmond, from assaults by overwhelmingly superior Union Army forces in June 1864. However, his influence over Confederate strategy was marred by his poor professional relationships with President Jefferson Davis and other senior generals and officials. In April 1865, Beauregard and his commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, convinced Davis and the remaining cabinet members that the war needed to end. Johnston surrendered most of the remaining armies of the Confederacy to Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, including Beauregard and his men.
Following his military career, Beauregard served as a railroad executive and became one of the few wealthy Confederate veterans because of his role in promoting the Louisiana Lottery. Today he is commonly referred to as P.G.T. Beauregard, but during the war he rarely used his first name and signed correspondence as G.T. Beauregard.
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Beauregard was born at the "Contreras" sugar-cane plantation in St. Bernard Parish, about 20 miles outside New Orleans, to a white Creole family, the third child of Jacques Toutant-Beauregard and Helene Judith de Reggio Toutant-Beauregard.[1] He had three brothers and three sisters. Beauregard attended New Orleans schools and then went to a "French school" in New York City; it was during his four years in New York, beginning at age 12, that he first learned to speak English.[2] He trained at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. One of his instructors was Robert Anderson, who would later become the commander of Fort Sumter and surrender to Beauregard at the start of the Civil War. Upon enrolling at West Point Beauregard dropped the hyphen from his surname and treated Toutant as an extra middle name in an attempt to fit in with his classmates; he also rarely used his first name from that point on, preferring "G. T. Beauregard."[3] He graduated second in his class in 1838 and excelled both as an artilleryman and military engineer. His nickname to many of his Army friends was The Little Creole (and also Bory, The Little Frenchman, Felix, and The Little Napoleon).[4]
In 1841, Beauregard married Marie Laure Villeré, the daughter of Jules Villeré, a sugar planter in Plaquemines Parish and a member of one of the most prominent Creole families in southern Louisiana. Marie was a paternal granddaughter of Jacques Villeré, the second governor of Louisiana. The couple had three children: René, Henri, and Laure. Marie died in March 1850, while giving birth to Laure.[5] Ten years later, the widower Beauregard married Caroline Deslonde, the daughter of André Deslonde, a sugar planter from St. James Parish. Caroline was a sister-in-law of John Slidell, a U.S. senator from Louisiana and later a Confederate diplomat. She died in Union-occupied New Orleans in March 1864, having borne Beauregard no children.[6]
During the Mexican-American War, Beauregard served as an engineer under General Winfield Scott. He was brevetted captain for the battles of Contreras and Churubusco and again to major for Chapultepec, where he was wounded in the shoulder and thigh. He was noted for his eloquent performance in a meeting with Scott in which he swayed the opinions of the general officers assembled to change their planned tactics for attacking the fortress of Chapultepec, and was one of the first officers to enter Mexico City. Beauregard considered his contributions in dangerous reconnaissance missions and devising strategy for his superiors to be more significant than those of his engineer colleague, Captain Robert E. Lee, so he was disappointed when Scott did not specially praise him in his report and Lee and other officers received more brevets than he did.[7]
Beauregard returned from Mexico in 1848, where for the next 12 years he was in charge of what the Engineer Department called "the Mississippi and Lake defenses in Louisiana." Despite this title, much of his engineering work was done elsewhere, repairing old forts and building new ones on the Florida coast and in Mobile, Alabama. He also improved the defenses of Forts St. Philip and Jackson on the Mississippi River below New Orleans. He worked on a board of Army and Navy engineers to improve the navigation of the shipping channels at the mouth of the Mississippi, and patented an invention he called a "self-acting bar excavator" to be used by ships in crossing bars of sand and clay. While still in the Army, he actively campaigned for the election of Franklin Pierce, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1852, and a former general in the Mexican War who had been impressed by Beauregard's performance at Mexico City. Pierce appointed Beauregard superintending engineer of the New Orleans Federal customs house, a huge granite building that had been built in 1848, but was sinking unevenly in the moist soil of Louisiana. Beauregard held this position from 1853 to 1860 and was able to stabilize the structure successfully.[8]
During his service in New Orleans, Beauregard became dissatisfied with life as a peacetime officer and informed the U.S. Army Engineer Department late in 1856 that he was going to join the filibuster William Walker, who had seized control of Nicaragua and who had offered him the rank of second-in-command of his army. Senior officers, including general-in-chief Winfield Scott, convinced Beauregard to change his mind. He briefly entered politics himself as a reform candidate for mayor of New Orleans in 1858, promoted by both the Whig and Democratic parties to challenge the Know Nothing party candidate. Beauregard was narrowly defeated.[9]
Employing the political influence of his brother-in-law, John Slidell, Beauregard obtained an appointment to be superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy starting on January 23, 1861, but his orders were revoked and he relinquished the office after only five days when Louisiana seceded from the Union. He protested to the War Department that they had cast "improper reflection upon [his] reputation or position in the Corps of Engineers" by forcing him out before any hostilities began. He also attempted to claim a mileage payment of $165 from the U.S. government for his return trip from West Point to New Orleans, which the government refused to pay.[10]
Beauregard traveled by steamship from New York to New Orleans and immediately began giving military advice to the local authorities, including further strengthening of Forts St. Philip and Jackson, which guarded the Mississippi approaches to New Orleans. He hoped to be named commander of the state army, but he was disappointed to find that the state legislature appointed Braxton Bragg to that position. Bragg, aware that Beauregard might resent him, offered a rank of colonel, but Beauregard instead enrolled as a private in the Orleans Guards, a battalion of Creole aristocrats. At the same time, he communicated with Slidell and the newly chosen President Davis, angling for a senior position in the new Confederate States Army. Rumors that Beauregard would be placed in charge of the entire Army infuriated Bragg. Davis, concerned about the political situation regarding the Federal presence at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, selected Beauregard to take command of Charleston's defenses, the perfect combination of military engineer and charismatic Southern leader.[11] Beauregard became the first Confederate general officer, appointed a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States on March 1, 1861.[4] (He was promoted on July 21 to be one of the eventual seven full generals in the Confederate Army; his date of rank made him the fifth most senior general, behind Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and Joseph E. Johnston.)[12]
Arriving in Charleston on March 3, 1861, Beauregard met with Governor Pickens and inspected the defenses of the harbor, which he found to be in disarray, displaying "a great deal in the way of zeal and energy... but little professional knowledge and experience."[13] Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter wrote to Washington that his former West Point student would guarantee that South Carolina's actions would be exercised with "skill and sound judgment." Beauregard wrote to the Confederate capital of Montgomery, Alabama, that Anderson was a "most gallant officer" and sent several cases of fine brandy and whiskey and boxes of cigars to Anderson and his officers at Sumter. Anderson ordered that the gifts be returned.[14]
Political tensions mounted by early April and Beauregard demanded that Sumter surrender before a planned Union expedition to reprovision the fort could arrive. Early in the morning of April 12, negotiations with Anderson had failed and aides of Beauregard, who had been sent to deal with Anderson personally, ordered the first shots of the American Civil War to be fired from nearby Fort Johnson. The bombardment of Fort Sumter lasted for 34 hours. Subjected to thousands of rounds of artillery fire from batteries ringing the harbor, Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter on April 14. Biographer T. Harry Williams described the extravagant praise from throughout the Confederacy that Beauregard received for his victory: "He was the South's first paladin".[15]
Beauregard was summoned to the new Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and he received a hero's welcome at each of the railroad stations along the route. He was given command of the "Alexandria Line"[16] of defenses against an impending Federal offensive that was being organized by Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell (one of Beauregard's West Point classmates) against the Confederate railroad junction at Manassas. Beauregard devised strategies to concentrate the forces of (full) General Joseph E. Johnston from the Shenandoah Valley with his own, aiming not only to defend his position, but to initiate an offensive against McDowell and Washington. Despite his seniority in rank, Johnston acquiesced to Beauregard's plan that essentially gave the Creole control of the impending battle. President Davis considered many of Beauregard's plans to be impractical for an army as inexperienced as the Confederates could field in 1861; throughout the war, Davis and Beauregard would argue about Beauregard's "Napoleonic" tendencies to devise grand strategies based on formal military principles, but with little regard to such practicalities as logistics, intelligence, relative military strengths, and politics.[17]
The First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) began early on June 21, 1861, with an element of surprise for both armies—both McDowell and Beauregard planned to envelop their opponent with an attack from their right flank.[18] McDowell struck first, crossing Bull Run and threatening Beauregard's left flank. For a while, Beauregard persisted in moving his troops for an attack on his right flank (McDowell's left, toward Centreville), but Johnston urged him to travel with him to the threatened flank at Henry House Hill, which was weakly defended. Seeing the strength of the Union attack at that point, Beauregard insisted that Johnston leave the area of immediate action and coordinate the overall battle from a position 1.5 miles to the rear. Beauregard rallied the troops, riding among the men, brandishing regimental colors, and giving inspirational speeches. The Confederate line held.[19]
As Johnston's final troops arrived from the Shenandoah Valley, the Confederates launched a counterattack that routed the Union Army, sending it streaming back toward Washington in disorder. Historian William C. Davis credits Johnston with the majority of the tactical decisions that led to the victory, judging that "Beauregard acted chiefly as a dime novel general, leading the charge of an individual regiment, riding along the line to cheer the troops, accepting the huzzas of the soldiers and complementing them in turn. The closest he came to a major tactical decision was his fleeting intention to withdraw from the Henry Hill line when he briefly mistook [the advance of Johnston's reinforcements for the arrival of fresh Union troops]."[20] Nevertheless, Beauregard, the more romantic figure, received the bulk of the acclaim from the press and general public. On June 23, Johnston recommended to President Davis that Beauregard be promoted to full general. Davis approved and Beauregard's date of rank was established as the date of his victory, June 21.[21]
After Bull Run, Beauregard advocated the use of a standardized battle flag other than the "Stars and Bars" national flag in order to avoid visual confusion with the U.S. flag. He worked with Johnston and William Porcher Miles in creating and producing the Confederate Battle Flag. Confederate ladies visiting Beauregard's army contributed silk material from their dresses to create the first three flags, for Beauregard, Johnston, and Earl Van Dorn; thus, the first flags contained more feminine pink than martial red.[22] Throughout his career he worked to systematize the use of this flag and helped to make it the most popular symbol of the Confederacy.[23]
As the Army went into winter quarters, Beauregard caused considerable friction with the Confederate high command. He strongly advocated an invasion of Maryland to threaten the flank and rear of Washington. With his plan rebuffed as impractical, he requested reassignment to New Orleans, which he assumed would be under Union attack in the near future, but his request was denied. He quarreled with Commissary General Lucius B. Northrop (a personal friend of Davis's) about the inadequate supplies available to his army. He issued public statements challenging the ability of the Confederate Secretary of War to give commands to a full general. And he enraged President Davis when his report about Bull Run was printed in the newspaper, which suggested that Davis's interference with Beauregard's plans prevented the pursuit and full destruction of McDowell's army and the capture of Washington.[24]
Having become a political liability in Virginia, Beauregard was transferred to Tennessee to become second-in-command to General Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation to Joseph E. Johnston) in his Army of Mississippi, effective March 14, 1862. The two generals planned the concentration of Confederate forces to oppose the advance of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant before he could combine his army with that of Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell in a thrust up the Tennessee River toward Corinth, Mississippi. In the Battle of Shiloh, which began April 6, 1862, the Confederates launched a surprise attack against Grant's Army of the Tennessee and nearly defeated it. Once again a more senior general named Johnston deferred to the junior Beauregard in planning the attack. The massive frontal assault was marred by Beauregard's improper organization of forces—successive attacks by corps in lines 3 miles long, rather than assigning each corps a discrete portion of the line for a side-by-side assault. This arrangement caused intermingling of units and confusion of command and failed to concentrate mass at the appropriate place on the line to affect the overall objectives of the attack. In midafternoon, Johnston, who was near the front of the battle action, was mortally wounded. Beauregard, positioned in the rear of the army to send reinforcements forward, assumed command. As darkness fell, he chose to call off the attack against Grant's final defensive line, which had contracted into a tight semicircle with their backs to the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing.[25]
Beauregard's decision was one of the most controversial of the Civil War and numerous veterans and historians have wondered what might have happened if the assault had gone forward into the night. Beauregard assumed that the battle was essentially won and his men could finish off Grant in the morning. Furthermore, the terrain to be crossed (a steep ravine containing a creek named Dill Branch) was extremely difficult and Grant's defensive line was heavy with massed artillery. Unbeknownst to Beauregard, Buell's Army of the Ohio arrived in the night and he and Grant launched a massive counterattack on April 7. Overwhelmed, the Confederates retreated to Corinth.[26]
Grant was temporarily disgraced by his surprise and near defeat, causing his superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, to assume field command of the combined armies. Halleck cautiously and slowly approached Beauregard's fortifications at Corinth in an operation that has become derisively known as the Siege of Corinth. However, Beauregard did not allow the army to be besieged, withdrawing from Corinth on May 29 to Tupelo, Mississippi. He was able to deceive Halleck into thinking the Confederates were about to attack; he ran empty trains back and forth through the town while whistles blew and troops cheered as if massive reinforcements were arriving. Beauregard undertook the retreat because of the overwhelming force that faced him and because contaminated water supplies in Corinth were causing significant casualties in his army—in April and May, the Confederates lost almost as many men to death by disease in Corinth as had been killed in battle at Shiloh. Nevertheless, leaving the critical rail junction at Corinth without a fight was another controversial decision. And when Beauregard chose to go on medical leave from his army without requesting permission in advance, President Davis relieved him of command, replacing him with Gen. Braxton Bragg.[27]
At Beauregard's request, his allies in the Confederate Congress petitioned President Davis to restore his command in the West, but Davis remained angry at Beauregard's unauthorized absence. He told the petitioners that the general should have stayed at his post even if he had to be carried around in a litter and, "If the whole world were to ask me to restore General Beauregard to the command which I have already given to General Bragg, I would refuse it."[28] Beauregard was ordered to Charleston and took command of coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida,[29] replacing John C. Pemberton, who was transferred to command the defenses of Vicksburg, Mississippi.[30]
Beauregard was not happy with his new assignment, believing that he deserved command of one of the great Confederate field armies, but he performed his duties successfully, preventing the capture of Charleston by Union naval and land attempts in 1863. On April 7, 1863, Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, led an ironclad attack against Fort Sumter that was repulsed by the highly accurate artillery fire from Beauregard's forces. In July through September 1863, land forces under Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore launched a series of attacks on Fort Wagner on Morris Island and other fortifications at the mouth of the harbor, while Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren attempted to destroy Fort Sumter. Because the latter operation failed, the successful seizure of Morris Island was not effective in threatening Charleston.[31]
During this period, Beauregard was active in promoting innovative naval defense strategies, such as early experimentation with submarines, naval mines (called "torpedoes" in the Civil War), and with a small vessel called a torpedo-ram, a swift boat with a torpedo on a pole projecting from its bow under water, which would sneak up on an enemy vessel and impale it underneath the water line. He was also busy devising strategies for other generals in the Confederacy. He proposed that some of the state governors meet with Union governors of the Western states (what are called the Midwest states today) for a peace conference. The Davis administration rejected the idea, but it caused considerable political maneuvering by Davis's enemies in the Congress. He proposed a grand strategy—submitted anonymously through his political allies so that it was not tainted by his reputation—to reinforce the Western armies at the expense of Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia, destroy the Federal army in Tennessee, which would induce Ulysses S. Grant to relieve pressure on Vicksburg and maneuver his army into a place where it could be destroyed. The Confederate Army would continue to Ohio, and induce the Western states to ally with the Confederacy. Meanwhile, a fleet of torpedo-rams built in England could be used to recapture New Orleans, ending the war. There is no record that his plan was ever officially presented to the government.[32]
While visiting his forces in Florida, which had just repelled a Union advance at Jacksonville, Beauregard received a telegram that his wife had died on March 2, 1864. She had been left behind in Union-occupied New Orleans and had been seriously ill for a period of two years. A Northern-leaning newspaper in New Orleans printed the opinion that Mrs. Beauregard's condition had been exacerbated by the traitorous actions of her husband. This so fanned negative popular opinion that 6,000 people attended her funeral and Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks provided a steamer to carry her body up river for burial in her native parish. Beauregard wrote that he would like to rescue "her hallowed grave" at the head of an army.[33]
In 1864, he assisted Robert E. Lee in the defense of Richmond. He defeated Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler in the Bermuda Hundred Campaign near Drewry's Bluff. He followed this victory with a desperate defense of Petersburg. His tiny 2,200-man force resisted an assault by 16,000 Federals, known as the Second Battle of Petersburg. He gambled by withdrawing his Bermuda Hundred defenses to reinforce Petersburg. He assumed that Butler would not capitalize on the opening. His gamble succeeded, and he held Petersburg long enough for Lee's army to arrive.
Self-confident in the wake of this victory over Butler, Beauregard proposed to Lee and Davis that he lead a great invasion of the North, which would defeat Grant and Butler and win the war. Instead, probably to remove him as an irritant to Lee in Virginia, Beauregard was appointed commander of Confederate forces in the West. Since all of his forces were engaged elsewhere (in Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi), he had insufficient resources to halt the superior Union forces under Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in their march to the sea. He and Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, in April 1865.
After the war, Beauregard spoke in favor of civil rights and voting for the recently freed slaves. Beauregard was a Democrat who worked to end Republican rule during Reconstruction.
Beauregard's military writings include Principles and Maxims of the Art of War (1863), Report on the Defense of Charleston, and A Commentary on the Campaign and Battle of Manassas (1891). He was the uncredited co-author of The Military Operations of General Beauregard in the War Between the States (1884). He contributed the article "The Battle of Bull Run" to Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in November 1884. During these years, Beauregard and Davis published a series of bitter accusations and counter-accusations retrospectively blaming each other for the Confederate defeat.
General Beauregard declined offers to take command of the armies of Romania (1866) and Egypt (1869). Instead he became involved in promotion of railroads, both as a company director and a consulting engineer. He was the president of the New Orleans, Jackson & Mississippi Railroad from 1865 to 1870, and president of the New Orleans and Carrollton Street Railway, 1866 to 1876, for which he invented a system of cable-powered street railway cars.
Beauregard served in the government of the State of Louisiana, first as adjutant general for the state militia (later National Guard), and then less successfully as manager of the Louisiana Lottery. Though considered personally honest, he failed to reform corruption in the lottery. Perhaps the leading critic of the lottery on moral grounds was Benjamin M. Palmer, longtime pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Orleans, who worked to kill the project.
In 1888, Beauregard was elected as New Orleans' commissioner of public works.
P.G.T. Beauregard died in New Orleans and is interred in the tomb of the Army of Tennessee in the historic Metairie Cemetery there. Beauregard Parish in western Louisiana and Camp Beauregard, a National Guard camp near Pineville in central Louisiana, are named in his honor.
An equestrian monument by Alexander Doyle depicting Beauregard is placed in an intersection where Esplanade Avenue enters City Park in New Orleans called Beauregard Circle. He lived in the building now called the Beauregard-Keyes House in New Orleans.[34]
Military offices | ||
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Preceded by Richard Delafield |
Superintendents of the United States Military Academy 1861 |
Succeeded by Richard Delafield |
Persondata | |
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NAME | Beauregard, P. G. T. |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
SHORT DESCRIPTION | Confederate Army general |
DATE OF BIRTH | |
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DATE OF DEATH | |
PLACE OF DEATH |