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Thing is, if anything bad happens now, they all blame it on you. I seen it comin’. They can’t blame General Lee. Not no more. So they all take it out on you. You got to watch yourself, General. . . . I saw you take all morning trying to get General Lee to move to the right.

This passage is spoken by Goree, an aide to Longstreet, in July 2, Chapter 5. It foreshadows the fact that Longstreet will eventually be blamed for the loss at Gettysburg. Longstreet’s memoir, which attacks Lee for not moving to the right at Gettysburg, inspires much of this blame. Longstreet soils the memory of one of the most beloved figures in Southern history, and his fellow Southerners scorn him for the rest of his life. Many soldiers in their memoirs refer to Pickett’s Charge as “Longstreet’s Charge.” For decades, Longstreet does indeed take an unfair amount of blame for the loss at Gettysburg. Even after twentieth-century scholars constructed a less biased view of the battle, Longstreet is still a more obscure general than Lee.

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