Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (born September 22, 1790 in Augusta , Georgia ; died July 9, 1870 in Oxford , Mississippi ) was an American lawyer, publicist, and writer. He is best known for his Georgia Scenes (1840), humorous sketches of everyday life in the southern states .

Life

Longstreet, son of the inventor and industrial pioneer William Longstreet and his wife Hannah Randolph, attended several elementary schools in Georgia until he received a comprehensive classical education from 1806-1810 at Willington Academy , the boys' school run by Moses Waddel for the sons of the southern elite . In 1811 he began studying at Yale University , which he completed in 1813 with a bachelor's degree, then law at Litchfield Law School in Connecticut. After his license to practice medicine, he returned to his home state of Georgia in 1814 and practiced as a lawyer. In 1817 he married Frances Eliza Parker, with whom he would have eight children, but only two of them survived childhood. In 1821 he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, then in 1822 was appointed district judge in one of the state's five judicial districts.

Longstreet soon began to work as a journalist. In 1834 he acquired the magazine State Rights' Sentinel , which he made the mouthpiece of his political convictions, but also of his literary ambitions in the following years. In the 1830s he also turned increasingly to religion and was ordained a Methodist pastor in 1838 and in 1839 President of the Oxford Methodist College at Emory University in Atlanta. In the following decades he was president of several universities in the American southern states, such as the Centenary College in the state of Louisiana , the University of Mississippi (1848-1856) in Oxford and the South Carolina College (1857-61).

As a preacher, publicist and university politician , Longstreet emerged as an avid advocate of the legality of slavery and the political interests of the American South in the escalating conflict over the slave and secession issue. He was influenced not least by John C. Calhoun , who had been a close friend of his since his youth. As early as the nullification crisis of 1833, Longstreet supported Calhoun with his political comments in his Sentinel , and in the meantime, as a plantation owner in the 1820s, he also kept slaves himself. In his farewell speech in 1859, he impressed on the bachelor's degree from the University of South Carolina that they had to defend the rights of the southern states to the utmost, even at the cost of a high blood toll, since the south would otherwise be defenseless to the greedy northern states and the liberation of the Slaves would bring about the foundations of the southern social order - at the outbreak of war in 1861, however, he tried to calm the minds, said in his essay Shall South Carolina Begin the War? for a diplomatic solution to the conflict and, as President of the University of South Carolina, complained about the cessation of teaching in view of the general mobilization. His nephew James Longstreet made a name for himself as one of the most capable generals in the Confederate Army during the war .

During the war, Longstreet temporarily worked as a military chaplain . His home in Oxford, Mississippi, was burned down by Northern troops; Longstreet spent most of the wartime in Georgia. After the war he settled again in Oxford, where he died in 1870 at the age of eighty.

Literary work

His merits as a writer are based on his Georgia Scenes , observations of everyday life in his state of Georgia. They appeared from 1833 first as newspaper columns in local newspapers in Georgia, first in the Southern Recorder , then in Longstreet's own Sentinel . In 1835 nineteen of the Scenes appeared for the first time in book form. In 1840 they were published by the New York publisher Harper & Brothers and Longstreet was also known to a wide audience in the northern states. The volume was also enthusiastically received by literary critics; Worth mentioning here is Edgar Allan Poe , who discussed the Georgia Scenes very benevolently in the March 1836 edition of Southern Literary Messenger . Numerous new editions appeared well into the 20th century.

Illustration from the second Harper & Brothers edition of the Georgia Scenes (1850)

The Georgia Scenes are typical and shaped the style of the so-called Southwestern Humor , a specific southern humor that has a lasting impact on the literary tradition of the region. In Longstreet's lifetime, authors such as George Washington Harris , Henry Clay Lewis , Thomas Bangs Thorpe and Joseph Beckham Cobb emulated him , but the tradition of Southern Humor is also present in the work of Mark Twain and William Faulkner . Longstreet offered realistic sketches, especially for the uneducated rural population - the slaves as well as the white trash - but overdrawn these portraits with tall tales , excessively exaggerated “robber pistols” to create a rather humorous whole, despite some common and atrocities such as court fights, trials of courage and deceit .

Furthermore, Longstreet published in 1859, initially in a series in the magazine Southern Field and Fireside, the educational novel Master William Mitten, A Youth of Brilliant Talents Who Was Ruined By Bad Luck , which, however, found hardly any readers; It was first published in book form in 1864. Longstreet also processed autobiographical material here. There is an impressive portrait of his former schoolmaster Moses Waddel.

Works

• Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, & c. in the First Half Century of the Republic (1835; digitized from the University of North Carolina )
  • David Rachel's (ed.): Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes Completed: A Scholarly Text. University of Georgia Press, Athens 1998. (Critical and Revised Edition)
• Master William Mitten, A Youth of Brilliant Talents Who was Ruined By Bad Luck (1864; digitized from the University of North Carolina )

Secondary literature

• John Donald Wade: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. A Study of the Development of Culture in the South. Macmillan, New York 1924.
• Kimball King: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. Twayne, Boston 1984.
• Scott Romine: The Narrative Forms of Southern Community. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1999.

Web links

• Augustus Baldwin Longstreet in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Biography (English)