One of the last victories by the Plains Indians over the United States, the Battle of Little Bighorn took place in southeastern Montana between June 25 and June 26, 1876. It is largely remembered as “Custer’s Last Stand.” Teton Sioux (Lakota), Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians routed the Seventh Cavalry of the United States, which was under the command of Lt. Col. George A. Custer. The United States responded to its overwhelming defeat with a relentless military pursuit of the Native Americans.
The origins of the battle, which took place on the Greasy Grass River, or the Little Bighorn, lay in the refusal of many Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfeet, and especially Sioux bands (Hunkpapa, Oglala, Miniconjou, Sans Arcs) to be confined to reservations. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie provided the Sioux a permanent reservation, guaranteed them the right to hunt buffalo in the Black Hills west of the Missouri River, and prohibited white settlements on the land. Between 1871 and 1874, however, the United States routinely violated the terms of the treaty. Surveyors charted routes through the hunting lands, and gold seekers and prospectors threatened to invade the territory. Rather than enforcing the provisions of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the United States tried unsuccessfully to purchase the Black Hills from the Sioux.
In late 1875, the free-roaming Sioux were drawn into a war. The conflict served as a pretense to remove them from the unceded territory and open the lands to American settlement and gold prospectors. The United States ceased enforcing the ban limiting the presence of speculators in the Black Hills, and rumors of atrocities committed by Sioux and other native buffalo hunters spread rapidly. Finally, in December 1875, the U. S. War Department ignored the Treaty of Fort Laramie and ordered all of the Sioux Indians to surrender themselves at the Dakota agencies by January 31, 1876. All of those who refused to settle on the Great Sioux Reservation in present-day South Dakota would be deemed hostile and subject to a military response.
The Native Americans, in a coalition formed by Sitting Bull, refused to accept this ultimatum, and the United States declared them hostile. In May 1876, Gen. Alfred H. Terry decided to settle the matter by ordering Custer to disperse or capture the defiant natives. Custer led 12 companies of the Seventh Cavalry, 655 soldiers in all, along with an Indian camp of mostly Sioux (with some Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho) Indians along the south bank of the river.
Upon learning that his forces had been spotted, Custer decided to attack before the warriors had time to vacate the valley. He divided his units and ordered an immediate attack. Custer sent three companies under the command of Maj. Marcus Reno across the upper ford of the river. Capt. Frederick Benteen, who was ordered to make sure that no Indians escaped, took three companies to the left of Reno. Finally, Custer himself led five companies to cross the lower ford and ordered one company to bring up the pack train.
Intended to hit the Sioux warriors from two directions simultaneously, Custer’s plan deteriorated almost immediately. Major Reno crossed the river and faced an enemy significantly stronger than he expected. Recognizing that his forces were outnumbered, Reno ordered his men to retreat from the valley. The retreat turned chaotic and the native warriors killed at least 40 of Reno’s soldiers. Reno’s men then took a defensive position on the east side of the river on the high bluffs.
The estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Sioux warriors, including Crazy Horse, Hump, Two Moon, Gall, and Rain-in-the-Face, turned their full attention to Custer’s forces that were on the northern end of the village. Custer and some of his men retreated to the top of Custer Hill, and within an hour all of Custer’s 212 men were dead. Their bodies were later found in what may have been battle lines. Historians disagree about these final moments, but it remains clear that this was one of the greatest disasters in American military history.
Benteen’s forces came to battle too late and ended up joining Reno four miles away from the battle. The following day, General Terry arrived from the north with reinforcements, and most of the Indian warriors withdrew to the south. It was too late. Army casualties included 263 dead and 59 wounded.
The United States responded to the defeat of Custer with an intensified effort to obtain vengeance, and by 1877 most Sioux bands either surrendered or fled to Canada. The U. S. government forced the natives to cede their claims to the Black Hills, and most Cheyenne and Sioux were confined to the reservations.
Further reading: Paul Goble, Red Hawk’s Account of Custer’s Last Battle: The Battle of the Little Bighorn, 25 June 1876 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Mari Sandoz, The Battle of the Little Bighorn (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1978); James Welch, Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians (New York: Norton, 1994).
—Andrew K. Frank
Longstreet, James (1821-1904) Confederate general Confederate general James Longstreet was born January 8, 1821, in Edgefield District, South Carolina. He grew up in Georgia, on his father’s farm near Gainesville and at Westover, his uncle’s Augusta cotton plantation. After his father died in 1833 and his mother moved to Alabama, the boy remained with his uncle, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a lawyer, STATES’ RIGHTS advocate, and prominent Georgia intellectual. With an appointment from Alabama Longstreet entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1838. Among his classmates were ULYSSES S. Grant, Lafayette McLaws, and George E. Pickett. Longstreet first experienced battle in the Mexican-American War and was seriously wounded at Chapultepec. After the war, he married Maria Louisa “Louise” Garland, daughter of Bvt. Brig. Gen. John Garland.
With the coming of the CiViL War Longstreet opposed SECESSION. In 1861, however, he resigned his commission and traveled to Richmond from his western post to offer his services to the South. Despite having no connection to the state, he received command of a brigade of Virginia volunteers. While Longstreet’s lack of identification with a single state would later be a political liability, in July 1861, he led his brigade well at Blackburn’s Ford, winning the confidence of Gen. JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON and promotion to major general.
Longstreet suffered personal tragedy in January 1862, when three of his four living children died in Richmond of scarlet fever (two others had previously died in infancy). He performed inconsistently during the spring campaigns of 1862, skillfully commanding a rearguard action at Williamsburg on May 5 but badly bungling an attack at Seven Pines on May 31. After Seven Pines, Gen. Robert E. Lee replaced the seriously wounded Johnston as commander of what was now the Army of Northern Virginia. During the Seven Days’ Battle, Longstreet impressed Lee with his hard fighting, and in July he became Lee’s second in command. At the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August, Longstreet counseled Lee to adopt defensive battle tactics, demonstrating the wisdom of this advice with a devastating flank assault on the attacking Federals. At the Battle of Antietam in September, Longstreet fought tenaciously, earning promotion to lieutenant general and formal command of the First Corps.
The Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 confirmed the advantage of holding a good defensive position. Longstreet’s entrenched corps took the brunt of the Union army’s futile assault on Marye’s Heights while suffering only minimal casualties. Briefly commanding two detached divisions in early 1863, Longstreet rejoined Lee’s army after its May victory at the Battle of Chancel-lorsville. Lee reorganized his troops into three corps following Gen. Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson’s death. Longstreet commanded the first, Gen. Richard S. Ewell the second, and Gen. Ambrose P. Hill the new third corps. In May, Longstreet (who thought the key to Confederate victory lay in the western theater) agreed with Lee’s plan to invade Pennsylvania, but he urged Lee to adopt defensive tactics should a battle occur. In late June, when Lee’s army came in contact with Union forces (commanded by Gen. George Gordon Meade) near Gettysburg, Lee ignored his advice.
On July 1 Ewell’s II Corps forced the I Corps and XI Corps of the Army of the Potomac to retreat south through the town. While the disorganized Union troops waited on Cemetery Hill for reinforcements, Ewell and his subordinate, Gen. Jubal A. Early, hesitated to press their numerical advantage by attacking the hill. When Longstreet arrived on the field, he noted the strong position held by the newly reinforced Union troops and advised Lee to occupy a defensive position and force Meade to assume the offensive. To Longstreet’s dismay, Lee indicated his intention to attack the Union army at Gettysburg the following day. Lee ordered Longstreet to use the two divisions that he had on the field to attack the Union’s left on the morning of July 2. Confederate reconnaissance proved unreliable, however, and to avoid detection by the enemy Longstreet led his troops on a time-consuming countermarch. His attack, which was to have occurred simultaneously with an assault on the Union’s right flank, did not begin until late afternoon. By that time, the Union army had extended its line south of Cemetery Ridge, and Longstreet found himself directing a frontal rather than a flank attack. His two divisions took the low ground in front of the Union position, inflicting serious damage on the Union Third Corps. Longstreet blamed his failure to occupy the high ground on lack of reinforcements and poor coordination with Lee’s other two corps.
Over Longstreet’s objections, Lee decided to launch a frontal assault against the Union position on July 3. Long-street reluctantly directed the attack, which consisted of a ferocious artillery bombardment followed by a massed infantry assault, and claimed later that he would have prevented it if he had been able to do so. “Pickett’s Charge” was a disaster for the CoNfEDERATE army, which lost more men and officers than it could replace.
After Gettysburg, Longstreet maneuvered himself into a western command in Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of the Tennessee and directed a rout of the Union forces at the Battle of Chickamauga on September 20, ironically employing a frontal assault. The Federals retreated to Chattanooga, where Longstreet’s misjudgment of the tactical situation at the Battle of Lookout Mountain allowed the Federals to reopen their supply lines. His relationship with Bragg deteriorating, Longstreet detached his corps and laid siege to Knoxville, remaining there until April 1864.
In East Tennessee he became embroiled in bitter internecine disputes over his choice to succeed Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, who had been wounded at Chickamauga, and his decision to relieve Maj. Gen. McLaws for poor conduct. Searching for a way to alter the Confederacy’s grim prospects, he unsuccessfully proposed an invasion of Kentucky as a means of demoralizing the North and boosting opposition to President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. Longstreet returned to Virginia at Lee’s request and was accidentally shot by his own troops in the Battle of the Wilderness on May 6. He resumed his command in October after recuperating in Georgia from serious throat and shoulder wounds. Longstreet remained in Virginia during the rest of the Civil War and was with Lee at Appomattox Court House.
Controversy marked Longstreet’s postwar years. In 1865 he moved to New Orleans with his family (which included four children born after 1863) and successfully entered the insurance and railroad businesses. He soon infuriated Confederate veterans by publishing his recommendation that they cooperate with federal Reconstruction policies. In a move that branded him forever as a scalawag traitor to the South, Longstreet reacted to his critics’ outrage by joining the Republican Party.
Lee’s death in 1870 made the unpopular Longstreet vulnerable to false accusations. In 1872 ex-Confederate general Jubal Early launched a self-serving campaign to blame Longstreet for Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. In Early’s distorted history, Lee had intended Longstreet to attack at dawn on July 2, and by failing to do so Longstreet had cost the Confederacy the battle and the Civil War. Longstreet’s belligerent attempts to clear his name backfired, and his criticism of Lee’s offensive battlefield tactics prompted Lee’s former staff officers—who had refuted the dawn attack accusation—to charge that Longstreet’s failings at
Gettysburg included deliberate slowness on July 2 and insubordination on July 3.
The “Gettysburg Series,” published in Early’s Southern Historical Society Papers in the late 1870s, sealed Long-street’s lasting reputation as scapegoat and traitor, as did his acceptance of Republican patronage. Longstreet’s five articles for the Century magazine Civil War series criticized Jackson and Lee and inflated his own military accomplishments. A pariah in the South, he became a sought-after speaker at Northern VETERANS reunions.
Longstreet’s memoirs, published in 1894, represented his final, futile attempt to settle scores and right the wrongs he had endured. In 1897, retired and aged 76, the widowed Longstreet married a second wife, the vivacious Helen Dortch, who was less than half his age. He died on January 2, 1904, in Gainesville, Georgia. His devoted young widow spent her remaining 58 years attempting to restore his reputation.
See also GETTYSBURG, Battle of.
Further reading: H. J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad, James Longstreet: Lee's War Horse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (1896; reprint, Secaucus, N. J.: Blue & Grey Press, 1984); Jeffry D. Wert, General James Longstreet, The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
—Amy J. Kinsel
Lookout Mountain, Battle of (November 24, 1863) The Battle of Lookout Mountain, also known as the “Battle above the Clouds,” was one of two (the other was the Battle of Missionary Ridge) resounding Union victories that occurred within a day of each other and that helped secure Tennessee for the Union. Gen. ULYSSES S. Grant had come to Chattanooga with the intent of breaking the Confederate siege of that city. His ultimate success in the Battle of Chattanooga prompted President Abraham Lincoln to invite him to Washington, D. C., to take command of all Union armies and marked an important turning point in the war for the North.
After the defeat of Northern forces at the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, Union general William S. RoSECRANS had withdrawn his demoralized soldiers to Chattanooga. Meanwhile, Rosecrans’s opponent at Chickamauga, Braxton Bragg, moved his men onto the heights that rose above the city of Chattanooga, from Lookout Mountain on the southwest to Missionary Ridge to the east. In Rosecrans’s view Chattanooga was beginning to look “more like a prison than a prize.” Bragg had effectively encircled the Yankees and cut off their supply lines.
Battle of Lookout Mountain, November 24, 1863 (Library of Congress)
Shortly thereafter, Lincoln replaced the incompetent Rosecrans with Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas, whose bravery at Chickamauga had earned him the title “Rock of Chickamauga.” Thomas swore to Grant that he and his men would hold Chattanooga “until we starve,” and they very nearly did. Grant, who had been put in control of the new Division of the Mississippi in October 1863, called for reinforcements and moved to break the Confederate siege of Chattanooga. By mid-November 1863 Gen. William T. Sherman had brought 17,000 men from the Army of the Tennessee and Gen. Joseph Hooker had brought 20,000 men from the Army of the Potomac to supplement the 35,000 men in Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland.
It was clear to Grant and his subordinates that the siege on Chattanooga would have to be broken, and quickly, or the Federals would be forced to surrender. It was also clear that the Confederate position on rugged Lookout Mountain would have to be taken for Union troops to have any chance at breaking the siege. This appeared to be an impossible task, however. The formidable heights of Lookout Mountain, rising some 1,100 feet above the valley, were filled with what seemed like thousands of well-entrenched Confederates, with supporting units nearby.
On the evening of November 23 Union troops began massing underneath Lookout Mountain. Confederate major general Carter L. Stevenson wrote in code to his commander, Bragg, that he doubted his small division (numbering 2,694 on the mountain, plus cavalry and cannon) had the strength to hold off an assault. Unknown to the Confederates, the Union had broken their special code. The Union’s leaders realized that the number of Confederates holding Lookout Mountain was not nearly as great as they had imagined.
With this information Grant launched an attack upon the Confederate position on Lookout Mountain on November 24. At 8:00 A. M. Gen. Hooker directed the forces, consisting of one division from each of the Union armies taking part in the Chattanooga campaign, up the mountain. Repeated Union assaults were successful in driving the Confederates from the lofty summit, with the last Southern units withdrawing by 8:00 p. M.
An unusual feature of the battle was that a swirling mist of fog and clouds obscured much of the fighting during the day from the thousands of soldiers watching intently from the valley below. Only occasional flashes of red light penetrating the thick cover gave indication of an ongoing battle. When the clouds finally broke, Union soldiers cheered when they saw the retreating Confederates.
Early the next morning, Union soldiers swiftly climbed the now-vacant summit and planted the Stars and Stripes on the top. Union general Montgomery C. Meigs, who watched the action from Grant’s headquarters, declared Hooker’s attack the “Battle above the Clouds.” Few who were there ever forgot the eerie experience, including Grant, who later wrote, “The Battle of Lookout Mountain is one of the romances of the war. There was no such battle and no action even worthy to be called a battle on Lookout Mountain. It is all poetry.”
Casualty (killed, wounded, and captured) figures for both sides were never given precisely, only the total numbers for the Chattanooga campaign. Out of 64,165 Confederates, losses were 6,667; Union casualties were 5,824 out of 56,359 engaged.
Further reading: Peter Cozzens, The Ship-wreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Jerry Korn, The Fight for Chattanooga: Chickamauga to Missionary Ridge (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1985); James Lee McDonough, Chattanooga: Death Grip on the Confederacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).
—Ruth A. Behling
World History
