Longstreet J.C. Gaither

[Stiles/Akin]

An elderly man sat in his parlor, his eyesight too poor to read the newspaper, listening to his son voice the words written by Reverend William Pendleton, Robert E. Lee's head of artillery during The Civil War. The prose was harsh, some would say vicious, as it repeated the charges he, Jubal Early, John Gordon, and others leveled against General Longstreet, accusing him of being insubordinate to the beloved Robert E. Lee and a traitor to the Southern people. "Liars! Liars!" he shouted out, and then, "the light of battle passing once more into his eyes," he stood and defended the General against these outrageous accusations, speaking to no one in particular except his son, who had heard these words before. Even in death, it seemed, Longstreet knew no rest from the controversies that surrounded his tenure as a soldier.

J.C. Gaither, the man's son, stopped him in mid-sentence and asked that he be allowed to read another article, this one written by Helen Dortch Longstreet, the General's widow. In her rebuttal to Reverend Pendleton, Helen alluded to her recently published book in which she attempted to restore the reputation of the man who would come to be known in modern times as Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant. Hearing the benevolence of Longstreet's young widow, the elder Gaither calmed, sat down, and began to cry.​