P. G. T. Beauregard

• 1. Introduction

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  P. G. T. Beauregard ordered the first shots of the American Civil War fired from Fort Johnson in the early hours of the 12th of April 1861. A 34-hour bombardment followed, and when the smoke cleared over Charleston Harbor, the general who had once studied under the very officer he just defeated had made himself the most celebrated soldier in the South. He was called "The Hero of Fort Sumter" and "the South's first paladin." But the full story of Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard is stranger and richer than that morning of cannon fire suggests. How did a Louisiana Creole aristocrat trained at West Point become the Confederacy's first general? Why did he spend the rest of his life feuding with the president he served? And what does it mean that the man who started the Civil War later championed Black voting rights in the South?

• 2. A Creole Upbringing

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  Beauregard was born on the 28th of May, 1818, on the "Contreras" sugar-cane plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, roughly twenty miles outside New Orleans. His family was Louisiana Creole, his mother Helene Judith de Reggio descended from a mixed French and Italian line tracing back to Italian noble stock, his father Jacques Toutant-Beauregard of French and German ancestry. French was the only language spoken in the household, and the family practiced Catholicism. He was the third of seven children.

  Among the enslaved people on the plantation, Beauregard formed a particular attachment to a boy named Baptiste, described as tall, strong, and a gifted storyteller. He was also nursed and raised by a woman named Mamie Francoise Similien, who had been born in Saint-Domingue, the country later called Haiti. Their bond endured for decades. During an 1882 interview with a reporter from the New Orleans Times, Similien pointed to a portrait Beauregard gave her during a visit in 1867 and said simply, "that's my son." After Beauregard's grandfather died, the family gave Similien a Creole Cottage in the Faubourg Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.

  At age twelve, Beauregard left Louisiana for a French school in New York City. He spent four years there and learned English for the first time, since French had been his sole language. This period in New York marked the beginning of a longer process of Americanization that would continue at West Point and shape his identity in lasting ways.

• 3. West Point and the Mexican War

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  At the United States Military Academy, Beauregard made a small but telling adjustment: he dropped the hyphen from his surname and began treating Toutant as a middle name, easing his fit among classmates. He also largely stopped using his first name, preferring "G. T. Beauregard" for the rest of his life. One of his instructors was Robert Anderson, the officer who would later command Fort Sumter and surrender it to him. Beauregard graduated second in his class in 1838, excelling in artillery and military engineering. His Army friends gave him a collection of nicknames: "Little Creole," "Bory," "Little Frenchman," "Felix," and "Little Napoleon."

  During the Mexican-American War, Beauregard served as an engineer under General Winfield Scott. He received brevet promotions to captain after the battles of Contreras and Churubusco, and to major after Chapultepec, where he was wounded in both the shoulder and the thigh. At Chapultepec he delivered a persuasive argument in a meeting with Scott that changed the assembled officers' plan of attack. He was among the first officers to enter Mexico City.

  Beauregard returned from Mexico in 1848 convinced that his contributions had outweighed those of his colleague Captain Robert E. Lee. The fact that Lee and others received more brevet promotions than he did left him genuinely aggrieved. That sense of being insufficiently recognized would follow Beauregard throughout his career, colouring every dispute with superiors from Jefferson Davis down.

• 4. Engineer, Inventor, and Politician

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  Between the wars, Beauregard spent twelve years overseeing what the Engineer Department called "the Mississippi and Lake defenses in Louisiana." The work ranged across the Gulf Coast: repairing old forts, constructing new ones on the Florida coast and in Mobile, Alabama, and improving the defenses of Forts St. Philip and Jackson on the Mississippi below New Orleans. He also served on a joint Army-Navy board to improve navigation at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

  He was not only a builder of fortifications. Beauregard patented an invention he called a "self-acting bar excavator," a device for use by ships crossing sandbar obstructions. He was also tinkering with furnaces for boiling sugar during this period, work rooted in his plantation upbringing. President Franklin Pierce, whom Beauregard had actively campaigned for in 1852, appointed him superintending engineer of the U.S. Custom House in New Orleans from 1853 to 1860. The building, a massive granite structure completed in 1848, was sinking unevenly in Louisiana's moist soil, and Beauregard designed a renovation program that successfully stabilized it.

  His political ambitions surfaced in 1858 when he ran as a reform candidate for mayor of New Orleans, backed by both the Whig and Democratic parties to challenge the Know Nothing candidate. He lost narrowly. Three years later, through the political influence of his brother-in-law John Slidell, Beauregard was appointed superintendent of West Point on the 23rd of January, 1861. Louisiana's secession ended the appointment after only five days. He protested to the War Department that forcing him out before any hostilities began cast "improper reflection upon his reputation or position in the Corps of Engineers."

• 5. Fort Sumter and First Manassas

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  Arriving in Charleston on the 3rd of March, 1861, Beauregard found the harbor defenses in disarray. His former instructor Robert Anderson, now holding Fort Sumter for the Union, wrote to Washington that Beauregard would handle South Carolina's actions with "skill and sound judgment." Beauregard reciprocated, calling Anderson "a most gallant officer" and sending him cases of fine brandy, whiskey, and cigars. Anderson returned the gifts.

  By early April, Beauregard demanded that Anderson surrender before a Union resupply expedition could arrive. When negotiations failed on the morning of April 12, he ordered the firing to begin. The bombardment lasted 34 hours before Anderson surrendered on April 14. The acclaim that followed was overwhelming; biographer T. Harry Williams wrote that Beauregard received "extravagant praise from throughout the Confederacy" for the victory.

  He had become the Confederacy's first general officer on the 1st of March, 1861, appointed as a brigadier general. Four months later, on July 21, he was promoted to full general, one of only seven men to hold that rank in the Confederate Army. His date of rank placed him fifth in seniority, behind Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and Joseph E. Johnston.

  At First Manassas, fought on the 21st of July, 1861, Beauregard's early performance was marked by confusion. Historian Frank E. Vandiver wrote that he "verged on hysteria most of the early hours," issuing a dizzying array of contradictory orders. Historian William C. Davis credited Johnston with most of the tactical decisions. Nevertheless, the Confederate victory sent the Union Army streaming in disorder toward Washington, and the press and public gave Beauregard the bulk of the credit. On July 23, Johnston recommended his promotion, and Davis approved it with the date of the battle as the date of rank.

• 6. Shiloh, Corinth, and Davis

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  Transferred west on the 14th of March, 1862, to serve as second-in-command to General Albert Sidney Johnston in the Army of Mississippi, Beauregard helped plan a surprise strike against Ulysses S. Grant before Grant could link up with Don Carlos Buell's army. Bad weather delayed the march from Corinth by several days, and when Union scouts made contact with Confederate troops, Beauregard argued the element of surprise was lost and recommended calling off the attack. Johnston disagreed and pushed forward.

  The Battle of Shiloh opened on the 6th of April 1862, and the surprise worked despite the days of warning signs. The attack was organized in successive lines of corps stretching three miles long, a formation Beauregard had designed; it caused units to intermingle and command to fragment across the entire front. In the afternoon, Johnston was mortally wounded near the front lines, and Beauregard, stationed at the rear, assumed command of the entire Western department. As darkness fell, he chose to halt the assault short of Grant's contracted final defensive line at Pittsburg Landing. That night, Buell's Army of the Ohio began arriving, and on April 7, a massive Union counterattack drove the Confederates back to Corinth.

  The decision to stop on the evening of April 6 became one of the most debated calls of the entire war. Beauregard knew the ground between the armies included a steep ravine containing a creek called Dill Branch, and that Grant's line bristled with artillery and gunboat support from the Tennessee River. He believed the battle was essentially won and could be finished in the morning. He was unaware of Buell's arrival.

  At Corinth, facing Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck's overwhelming and cautious advance, Beauregard ran a successful deception: he sent empty trains back and forth through town while whistles blew and soldiers cheered as though massive reinforcements were arriving. He then withdrew on May 29 to Tupelo, Mississippi, having lost almost as many men to disease in Corinth during the siege as had been killed at Shiloh. When he left for unauthorized medical leave, Davis relieved him of command and gave the army to Braxton Bragg. Davis later told Beauregard's allies, "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."

• 7. Charleston, Petersburg, and the War's End

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  Sent back to Charleston to command coastal defenses across South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Beauregard arrived resentful but performed well. On the 7th of April, 1863, Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont led a Union ironclad attack on Fort Sumter that Beauregard's artillery repulsed with precision. Through the summer and fall of 1863, Union land forces under Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore and naval forces under Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren attacked Fort Wagner on Morris Island and attempted to demolish Fort Sumter. Charleston held. During this period Beauregard promoted submarine experimentation, naval mines called "torpedoes," and a small attack vessel called a torpedo-ram, a swift boat fitted with an explosive on a pole projecting under water from its bow.

  On the 18th of April, 1864, Beauregard assumed command of the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia. When Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler launched the Bermuda Hundred Campaign up the James River, Beauregard successfully lobbied to keep his forces intact and bottled Butler's army up so effectively that it ceased to threaten Petersburg or Lee's supply lines. On June 15, his force of roughly 5,400 men, including boys, elderly soldiers, and patients from military hospitals, held off an assault by some 16,000 Union troops in what became known as the Second Battle of Petersburg. He gambled by stripping his Bermuda Hundred defenses, correctly predicting Butler would not advance through the gap. Lee's army arrived in time to hold the city. Historians have called it arguably his finest combat performance.

  The war ended for Beauregard in April 1865. He and his commander Joseph E. Johnston met with President Davis on the 13th of April and argued that continuing the fight was no longer tenable. Johnston surrendered to Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, on the 26th of April, 1865. Beauregard was paroled in Greensboro on the 2nd of May and made his way back to New Orleans.

• 8. After the War

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  Beauregard considered offers to lead the armies of Brazil, Romania, and Egypt after the war, and declined all of them. He cited President Johnson's relatively conciliatory stance toward the South as the reason he stayed home, saying, "I prefer to live here, poor and forgotten, than to be endowed with honor and riches in a foreign country." He took his oath of loyalty before the mayor of New Orleans on the 16th of September, 1865, and received a mass pardon from President Johnson on the 4th of July, 1868. His final civil right, the ability to run for public office, was restored when President Grant signed the relevant bill on the 24th of July, 1876.

  Beauregard's most controversial postwar stance was his advocacy for Black voting rights, a position shaped less by principle than by political calculation. He was a leading voice in the Louisiana Unification Movement, a gathering in June 1873 attended by roughly one hundred prominent Louisianans, divided evenly between the races. The movement called for political equality and opposed segregation, but its primary goal was to win Black votes as a way of breaking Radical Republican control of the state. Historian T. Harry Williams characterized Beauregard's view of freed slaves at this time as one of paternalistic condescension paired with tactical pragmatism. The movement failed.

  His postwar wealth came primarily from the Louisiana Lottery. Recruited in 1877 as a supervisor of the Louisiana State Lottery Company alongside former Confederate general Jubal Early, Beauregard presided over lottery drawings for fifteen years and made numerous public appearances lending the enterprise credibility. When the legislature eventually shut the lottery down, Beauregard had secured his fortune.

  When Jefferson Davis died in 1889, Beauregard was offered the honor of heading the funeral procession. He declined, saying, "We have always been enemies. I cannot pretend I am sorry he is gone. I am no hypocrite." Beauregard himself died in his sleep in New Orleans on the 20th of February, 1893. Edmund Kirby Smith, the last surviving full general of the Confederacy, served as chief mourner at his burial in the vault of the Army of Tennessee in Metairie Cemetery. After his death, Victor E. Rillieux, a Creole of color poet who wrote for contemporary civil rights figures including Ida B. Wells, composed a poem titled "Dernier Tribut" in Beauregard's memory.