PGT Beauregard Napoleon in Gray Author:T. Harry Williams General P.G.T. Beauregard's military career in many ways is more significant to the student of the Civil War then the record of any other general, for he was there at every phrase of the war from its beginning to its end. He fired the opening gun of the great drama at Fort Sumter; he commanded the Confederate forces at Manassas; he planned a... more »nd fought the first great battle in the west at Shiloh;he conducted the defense of Charleston from attack by sea, and in the waning months of the war he directed the defense of the southern approaches to Richmond.
Following First Manassas Beauregard became the hero of the South. The people of the Confederacy saw him through a haze of glory and drama that enveloped no other southern general. He was chivalric and arrogant in the best Southern tradition, but he was more. Something in the resounding name of P.G.T. Beauregard, in his Creole Louisiana origin, and in his knightly bearing suggested a more exotic environment than the South of Jefferson Davis. When he spoke and when he acted people thought of Paris and Napoleon and Austerlitz and French legions bursting from the St. Bernard Pass onto the plains of Italy.
To Beauregard war was something that was learned from books and fought in conformity to a fixed pattern. Hisstratic ideas were derived entirely from Jomini and Napoleon, and from his studies of these tow masters he evolved certain principles of war to which he held rigidly. Yet all of his plans of overall strategy and many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors. To them he seemed Gallic, excitable, and unreliable, and his penchant for criticizing others above him kept him in constant difficulties with the Confederate high command.
After the great struggle Beauregard, almost alone of all the prominent Confederate generals, successfully adapted himself to the ways of the New South---and thereby became a forgotten man in the Southern tradition. When the South's defeated people made their embittered myths they constructed them of sacrifice , frustration and poverty. In the Confederate legend there was little room for the prosperous Creole in gay New Orleans who railroads and, of all un-Confederate actions, presided over the drawings of the gigantic gambling combination, the notorious Louisiana lottery.« less