Beauregard’s most shining characteristic was certainly not attention to detail; in fact, he was a famous delegator. He was most interested—often to the point of obsession—in fleshing out elaborate war-ending battle plans. Indeed, he had a flair for strategy, diagnosing upon his arrival at Bowling Green on February 6 that the army was posted in a salient that stuck out invitingly to any enemy who wished to attack its flanks. After a while Johnston sent him away to deal with the force at Columbus—i.e., its evacuation—but even from that distance Beauregard continued to bombard the department commander with plans and strategies for the conquest, or reconquest, of everything up to and including the Ohio River and St. Louis.
Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was among the most flamboyant and intriguing of the Rebel generals, beginning with his colorful name and rich Gallic heritage. In the early part of the war he was idolized throughout the South, known in the press as “the Great Creole,” hero of Fort Sumter, despite the fact that there was little heroism in turning the entire artillery defenses of Charleston, South Carolina, on a nearly helpless detail of Yankees hiding in the fort, which sat like a large duck at the entrance to the Charleston harbor.3
Beauregard was born May 28, 1818, into a family that traced its Gallic lineage back 500 years. He grew up on a thousand-acre sugar plantation 20 miles south of New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish, where French remained the common language and most of the Creole gentry actually still considered themselves French despite the fact that Louisiana had been purchased by the U.S. government in 1803. They tended to regard Americans as boorish parvenus and awaited the day when some new Napoleon would arise and return them to French rule. Meantime, they clung to their Gallic heritage and customs like bats to a cliff, commanding their slaves in French and educating their young men in Paris.
Young Pierre was somehow different from his peers, we are told. His best friend growing up was a slave boy his age named Tombie, whose father, Placide, practiced voodoo and was the plantation’s designated hunter, spending all his days in the woods to put deer, game birds, and waterfowl on the master’s dinner table. Pierre became absorbed by the notion that he would one day be a great hunter, and spent his days with Tombie hunting and fishing in the fertile forests and bayous, using an old “Brown Bess” muzzleloader left behind by the British after their defeat at New Orleans in the War of 1812.
At the age of eight Pierre was sent to a private tutor outside New Orleans where the lessons were taught in French. When he turned 12 his father broke with tradition and, instead of sending him to school in France, enrolled him in what was known as the French School in New York, run by two brothers who had fought as officers under Napoleon. Here Pierre was for the first time confronted with the need to learn English, which he learned quickly but never completely mastered, as his later letters, orders, and other military correspondence clearly demonstrate. The emphasis in class was on mathematics and commerce, but the brothers’ tales of great European battles so enthralled Pierre that he began reading whatever he could find on the Napoleonic Wars and soon left his family aghast by announcing that he wished to make the U.S. Army his career. This would necessitate an appointment to the Military Academy at West Point, which his father reluctantly obtained by way of the Louisiana governor, with whom he was friendly.
Even while the family fretted that Pierre was becoming too Americanized, he removed “Toutant” from his surname by dropping the hyphen, presumably to make himself seem less foreign. When he entered West Point at the age of 16, Beauregard was short but muscular, swarthy, and exceedingly handsome, with wavy black hair and a barbershop mustache. He had a quick mind, a quick temper, and a long memory. No doubt Beauregard took his share of ribbing because of his accent, but he made friends easily with such classmates as George Meade, John Sedgwick, Joe Hooker, and Irvin McDowell, who went on to become Union generals, and Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, and William Hardee, who joined the Confederacy. At the Academy he was known as an excellent equestrian and dedicated scholar of military history with a firm grasp of Jomini and other military authorities. Most especially, he is said to have idolized Napoleon, probably because of his French heritage, which would call into question his generalship during the Battle of Shiloh. He graduated in 1838 number 2 in his class of 45 and joined the engineers, the army’s most exclusive branch. His biographer T. Harry Williams tells a story with significant elements of plausibility about a tragic love affair that Beauregard is said to have had with the daughter of Winfield Scott, soon to be general in chief of the army.
As the story goes, the year he graduated Beauregard fell in love and became engaged to 17-year-old Virginia Scott, but the Scotts disapproved because they believed her too young to marry. Mrs. Scott proceeded to take her daughter on a five-year grand tour, but each had promised to write the other. However, as time passed no letters were received by either party, and Beauregard, “offended and embittered,” in 1841 married someone else. While in France, the heartbroken Virginia converted to Catholicism, and upon returning to America she entered a convent in Virginia where, in 1845, at the age of 24, she found herself on her deathbed. From there she summoned Beauregard to tell him that she, too, had become embittered after he apparently dropped her, only to learn recently that her mother had intercepted all the letters and destroyed them.
However long Beauregard remained “offended and embittered,” he did marry the beautiful sister of his friend Charles Villerè, a member of one of the most prominent Creole families in New Orleans, upon whose plantation downriver at Chalmette the Battle of New Orleans was fought. Marie Laure Villerè Beauregard bore him two sons before dying in 1850 during childbirth.
Beauregard’s army engineering career was mainly in Louisiana overseeing forts and other military structures. He once challenged a fellow officer to a duel over what he considered insulting language in a letter regarding a most trivial matter, thereby demonstrating what, according to some, was a lingering vestige of Mediterranean hot-headedness. As with the duel of Thomas Grafton, Beauregard’s affair was broken up by police before it could come to pass, which was a lucky thing, since the man he challenged, Lt. John C. Henshaw, had chosen shotguns and buckshot at 30 yards—and if a second shot became necessary the range would decrease to 25 yards, and so on.
Beauregard served with distinction under Winfield Scott in the Mexican War, was wounded several times, and showed intense personal valor, fortitude, and military acumen, becoming one of the first U.S. soldiers to enter Mexico City. After the war he resumed engineering duties, but, like many officers of the period, he began to tire of the army because of the low pay and slow promotions. He toyed with the idea of joining the filibustering4 expedition of William Walker, the freebooting soldier of fortune from Nashville who had recently taken over the government of Nicaragua. When Walker offered Beauregard a job as his second in command, one of his army superiors talked him out of it. This, too, proved a fortuitous intervention, for when Walker and his cronies attempted to filibuster Honduras they found themselves on the wrong side of a firing squad.
On the eve of civil war Beauregard married one of the Deslonde sisters of St. James Parish, who was also the sister-in-law of John Slidell, the distinguished U.S. senator from Louisiana. By then, Beauregard had enrolled his two boys at the Louisiana Military Academy at Baton Rouge, where William T. Sherman was the superintendent. With the presidential election of 1860 approaching, and the South threatening to secede if Lincoln was elected, Beauregard wrote to Sherman giving his opinion that this crisis, like those that had preceded it, would somehow blow over.
It did not, of course, blow over, and within weeks of Lincoln’s election, as the Southern states began voting to leave the Union, Sherman resigned his position as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy, and Beauregard, by then an avowed secessionist, became, of all things, superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Considering the precarious political situation, this astonishing event can be explained only by the likelihood that
Beauregard believed the superintendency of West Point would be a feather in his cap when it came time for being assigned rank in the Confederate army.
In any event, his superiors quickly realized the mistake they had made, and, even though his appointment had come courtesy of his powerful brother-in-law Senator Slidell, Beauregard’s stay at West Point was a remarkably short one. The very day after he took over, in fact, word arrived from Washington that his orders were rescinded, and he returned to New Orleans, only to discover upon arrival that Louisianans had voted to secede. He immediately resigned his commission in the U.S. Army, expecting to be made head of the Louisiana state military, but that honor fell to Braxton Bragg, a former army officer who had become a planter in the state. Beauregard considered this such an affront that he enlisted himself as a private in a battalion called the Orleans Guards that was composed of Creole high society.
Soon Beauregard was writing letters to Jefferson Davis and other key Confederate officials offering his military services. Davis responded by ordering Beauregard to take charge of the Rebel forces at Charleston, where the Confederacy was demanding the evacuation of Federal troops from Fort Sumter. A “peace commission” had been sent to Washington to work out an orderly transfer of military installations and other government property located in the seceded states, but the Lincoln Administration refused to meet with them. At last it was determined that negotiations were impossible, and when Lincoln attempted to resupply the fort Beauregard, upon the instructions of Davis and his cabinet, opened fire.
After Sumter fell, Lincoln called for the states to provide volunteer troops to invade the South and put down the rebellion, prompting Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee also to secede. Beauregard was put in command of the forces in northern Virginia defending the so-called Alexandria Line that covered the junction of the Orange and Alexandria and Manassas Gap railroads, located near a stream called Bull Run.
The Federal army, under Irvin McDowell—who had been Beauregard’s West Point classmate, ranked number 23, to Beauregard’s number 2—had crossed the Potomac, taken Alexandria, and occupied Arlington, the immense estate that Robert E. Lee’s wife had inherited from her father. Beauregard deduced that the next move would be for the Federals to attack him and occupy the Manassas railhead, which was vital to transportation to and from Richmond as well as to the rich Shenandoah Valley. He immediately began to fortify as reinforcements poured in from the Southern states.
On July 10 a pretty 16-year-old girl named Bettie Duval appeared in Beauregard’s camp and produced an encoded message hidden in her hair.5 This was courtesy of Mrs. Rose Greenhow, a fixture on the Washington social circuit since the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. The note warned that the Federals would begin their forward movement in less than a week. Mrs. Greenhow obtained intelligence of Union movements by a variety of reliable sources and found ways to communicate them to the Confederates until 1862, when she was arrested and imprisoned by operatives of Allan Pinkerton’s detective service, and soon afterward she was deported to Richmond, Virginia.6 Beauregard had about 22,000 in his army to face 35,000 in McDowell’s, but by sound military supervision he managed to commandeer an additional 8,000 troops under Joseph E. Johnston, who had been holding back more than twice that number of Yankees in the Shenandoah Valley. These men arrived at the eleventh hour on the Manassas Gap railway, just as the Battle of Bull Run was reaching its most pitiless intensity, and soon turned the tide of battle into a disgraceful rout of the Federal army.7
Throughout the South Beauregard’s status as the hero of Fort Sumter became even more exalted as word got around that he had ridden along the lines in heat of battle, raised sword in hand, exhorting the men to hold firm, doffing his hat to them. At one point his horse was shot from under him, but he remounted and continued on, displaying wonderful bravery and leadership, now urging the men to attack. Ladies showered him with gifts and mash notes; newborn babies were named in his honor, as were streets, hotels, and Rebel gunboats. The press named him the Colossus of Manassas. President Davis promoted him a full “general of the army,” right up there with Sidney Johnston, the highest rank possible. Beauregard was on top of the world until he ruined it by making himself obnoxious, mainly by writing inflammatory letters to newspapers.
It was likely a feature of his Mediterranean heritage that Beauregard was excitable, flamboyant, opinionated, and bursting with ideas. To the reserved, self-possessed FFVs8 in Richmond he must have seemed a strange creature—and President Davis was more like them than like him. In any case, Beauregard’s new rank seemed to go to his head, and he began to buttonhole politicians and cabinet members with suggestions, plans, strategies, and proposals for campaigns and bombard them with letters of advice and complaint. It was one of these latter that landed him in trouble with the one man he didn’t need trouble with—Jefferson Davis. T. Harry Williams points out that because both men’s personalities were so volatile “it was inevitable that they would clash.” Perhaps not, if Beauregard had been able to muster a modicum of professional self-restraint. Alas, he could not, and he became embroiled in an unseemly quarrel with Davis that went public and spoiled relations with his commander in chief, one of the few men in the Confederacy who could outhate even Beauregard.
The great victory at Manassas was less than a week old when Beauregard wrote a letter to two former aides who had become Confederate congressmen, complaining bitterly that the army could have marched on after the battle and taken Maryland—perhaps even Washington itself—were it not for a want of food from the army’s commissary in Richmond. The letter was read in secret session but produced a ferocious reaction against the Davis administration. Davis made the matter worse by trying to defend himself, and naturally it leaked to the newspapers, whereupon the furor erupted again in an irate cloud of “could have beens” and “should have beens.”
The trouble quickly simmered down, but the damage was done. Beauregard shared command of the army with Joseph E. Johnston, another full general, who was senior in rank, an awkward arrangement since the two were absolute opposites in terms of strategy—Johnston (as he would remain throughout the war) was cautious and defensive minded, whereas Beauregard was itching to launch an offensive and lure the Union army to its doom. (Mrs. Greenhow in Washington kept sending messages—“Come on. Why don’t you come on?” meaning an attack on the U.S. capital.) Beauregard argued that a quick march by the army would easily clear Federal troops out of Maryland south of Baltimore and isolate the capital city, but to no avail. Jefferson Davis remained aloof in Richmond, clinging to his 1,600-mile “barrier” from Virginia to New Mexico and resting on the proclamation he made at the outset of war: “The South wants only to be left alone.” Davis’s idea was to conduct defensive warfare only and avoid any invasion of Northern territory, which might make the conflict appear abroad as a civil war rather than a war of separation, which he believed it was. In fact, recognition by Britain, France, or other European powers remained the linchpin of Davis’s strategy at this stage of the war. Later, of course, he would have to change his mind.
When Davis failed to develop an offensive, Beauregard requested a transfer to New Orleans, which he believed was in danger of being attacked. His request was refused. Beauregard then became involved in a series of acrimonious squabbles with cabinet members, principally Judah Benjamin, the secretary of war. Beauregard dragged Jefferson Davis into this tasteless imbroglio by asking him to overrule his closest subordinates. Instead, Davis tried to console Beauregard, who seemed to be working himself into a perfect swivet as he continued to produce adversarial letters against the administration. It seemed to some that the Creole was deliberately trying to provoke the president of the Confederacy, but more likely, in the vernacular of the day, his Gallic blood simply was up. He was in a pugnacious frame of mind, and if he could not fight a war of weapons against the Yankees, he would fight a war of words against anyone in the administration who opposed his ideas.
On November 3 Beauregard publi
shed a letter in the Richmond Whig, which began, “Centerville, Va. Within the hearing of the Enemy’s Guns.”
The dateline itself was enough to start people snickering. The gist of the letter was that he had no intention of running for president against Davis, but it rambled on against the Davis administration in a pretentious, egotistical manner. Clearly, things could not long continue this way.
When the army went into winter quarters, Beauregard’s eclectic mind and unbridled enthusiasm tackled another kind of military quandary—namely, the problem of distinguishing Rebel troops from Yankees in the smoke and fury of battle. At Manassas there had been instances on both sides of troops firing on themselves, and Beauregard concluded that the armies’ flags looked too much alike. Thus he designed a new “battle flag” for the Confederacy: two crossed blue bars with white stars on a bloodred field.9 The last straw broke in Beauregard’s war of words when he submitted his report on the Battle of Manassas to the Confederate Congress. Again it excoriated the Davis administration, and Davis was understandably irate. By then Beauregard had fallen in with a handful of powerful men who disliked Davis and were seeking ways either to thwart him or get him out of office. Among them were Vice President Alexander Stephens; generals Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, Gustavus W. Smith; and several prominent editors in Richmond and Charleston. Another of these was Robert Toombs of Georgia, an upstanding lawyer and Davis’s secretary of state during the first few months of the war. Toombs was one of the fire-eaters, and like Beauregard had believed from the beginning that the South should have waged an aggressive war against the Union and brought it quickly to its knees, rather than sit pompously behind a defensive line giving the North time to organize its vast resources against the Confederacy.