A tarnished genius in gray

Civil War fighting began in the early morning of April 12, when Confederate cannons boomed across the harbor at Charleston, S.C., aimed at Fort Sumter and its Northern defenders. The man from south Louisiana who gave the order to fire them that day in 1861 became an overnight hero, and was, at least for a time, known as “the little Napoleon.”
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was trained as a civil engineer at the U.S. Military Academy and first came to notice when he served in the Mexican-American War, during which he was wounded twice. Later, he was named commander at West Point, but served only five days. He immediately resigned when Louisiana seceded to become the first brigadier general in the Confederate army. (He was later promoted to full general, one of only seven Confederates to achieve that rank).
Joining the Southern side was an easy choice for him. Aside from his own upbringing on a plantation below New Orleans, Beauregard had strong ties to influential Louisiana families. In 1841, he married Marie Antoinette Laure Villeré, the daughter of Jules Villeré, a sugar planter from one the state’s most prominent French Creole families. Marie’s grandfather was Jacques Villeré, the second governor of Louisiana. She died in March 1850, while giving birth to their third child.
Ten years later, Beauregard married Marguerite Caroline Deslonde, the daughter of André Deslonde, another prominent planter. Caroline was a sister-in-law of John Slidell, a U.S. Senator and later an important Confederate diplomat.
When he joined the Confederate army, Beauregard was placed in command of the Charleston defenses, and that is how he came to give the fateful order and to win acclaim as “the hero of Fort Sumter,” but it was three months later that he truly became the most revered Southern general. He was acclaimed the hero in the first big fight of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run.
This battle, fought in July 1861, was the largest and bloodiest in United States history up to that time. Northerners had expected an easy victory that would end the Southern insurrection. People from nearby Washington, D.C., rode to the scene to watch Union troops rout the Confederate upstarts.
But the onlookers fled in panic when the fight turned the other way, fearing that Southern troops would march unimpeded into Washington itself. They and their neighbors were suddenly forced to realize (as were Southerners) that there would be no quick, easy end to the conflict.
Although the victory made Beauregard a popular hero, it also sowed the first seeds of political dissent when he openly criticized support given the troops by Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
Beauregard went on to command armies at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee and the Siege of Corinth in Northern Mississippi and, in what some historians consider his greatest achievement, to lead the fight that spared the Confederate capital of Richmond from attack by overwhelmingly superior Union forces. Those were important commands but historians also agree almost unanimously that his continuing troubles with Davis – often caused by Beauregard’s own sharp tongue and volatile temper – kept him from achieving all that he could have.
He was still regarded as a hero when he returned to New Orleans after the war, but his reputation was tarnished a little more by his association with the Louisiana Lottery – ultimately a controversial political and financial failure, but one from which he apparently made a good bit of money.
Still, despite his foibles, his achievements in the war were not forgotten. In 1912, when three new parishes were cut from the sprawling Calcasieu Parish, they were each named for a Confederate hero – Jefferson Davis, for the Southern president; Allen, for Henry Watkins Allen, Confederate governor of Louisiana; and Beauregard, for Louisiana’s Napoleon who was Davis’s sometimes critic, but who was – and is – still recognized for his genius and gallantry.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.