PGT Beauregard was not a reformed man on race after the Civil War, but the white South would have done better to heed his pragmatic effort to reach an accommodation that treated black civil rights as an accomplished fact.pic.twitter.com/tApgJVMhoJ
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His path after the war was a middle ground between Longstreet & Mosby, who repented & tried to make amends, & people like Forrest who aimed to continue the war by other means & fought against black equal rights. Not an honorable path, but a practical one.
Beauregard actually came fairly close after the war to taking a foreign military command. He had talks, & occasionally even offers, with Brazil, Egypt, Romania, France, & Argentina. The Brazilian job would have put him in the midst of the War of the Triple Alliance.
In strictly military terms, Beauregard's defense of the siege of Charleston looks more impressive when you consider how few of the great sieges between Rome in 1849 & Paris in 1871 were defended successfully. Davis erred by not sending him to defend Vicksburg or Atlanta.
With a few exceptions - Lucknow, Chattanooga, Shanghai - the roll call of great sieges in those years were mostly won by the besiegers: Rome, Sevastopol, Nanjing (x2), Vicksburg, Humaita, Petersburg, Anqing, Delhi, Hakodate, Queretaro, Paris (x2), etc.
Emblematic of Beauregard's career is how he reacted to the deaths of Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis:pic.twitter.com/eCO0LbH264
For me, Beauregard's worst moment in the war came at the second day at Shiloh once he replaced the dead Albert Sidney Johnson, with his listless, bloody blunder of a renewed assault against Grant's forces bolstered by Buell's arrival. Did you think he did worse later in the war?
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