General James Longstreet

James Longstreet was a Confederate general who served as Robert E. Lee's second in command for most of Lee's tenure as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Longstreet fought in many of the most important battles of the conflict and ended the war as a respected figure. In the postwar period, however, controversy erupted over Longstreet's conduct years earlier at the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), and he became a scapegoat for Lee's failures and the central figure in the emergent Lost Cause mythology some white southerners developed to explain the loss of the war.