Customer Reviews

P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (Southern Biography Series)

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This book must be the definitive biography on General Beauregard. I was highly impressed. William's uses 4 to 6 different sources for each quote and incident. This book tells more about Beauregard than many Civil War Buffs know. William's goes into the Beauregard and Davis feud that lasted not only the entire war, but to their dying days.
I feel it is unfortunate that the feud prevented Davis from employing Beauregard, rather than putting inferior Generals in Beauregards place.
Beauregard seems to be quite the inventor, with a sharp intellect. ( Beauregard once proposed the Confederate Army use Rockets with explosive war heads, a design he had figured out. The Confederate Government thought that idea was too radical, total nonsense, and disregarded it)
William's believes Beauregard performed his best battle in Petersburg 1864, and uses ample sources, and references to make that conclusion, which I agree with.
I've often thought Beauregard would have made a better President than Jefferson Davis, it seems that William's has this belief also.
I must say that William's seems to be a little hard on Davis, I don't know if all of that is justified, though I'm sure some certainly is.
I don't believe there is a better biographical book on P.G.T. Beauregard.

The staying power of this book is made obvious in the fact that it was first published in 1955 and it is still in print today. T. Harry Williams is an excellent historian and writer, having won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography on Huey Long. He has written often on the Civil War, including two books on Abraham Lincoln. This is an important work on the "perplexing" Confederate general Beauregard, as combative with his fellow officers as he was with the enemy on the field.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a Creole born near New Orleans in 1818, attended West Point and was assigned to the Engineers. He served in the Mexican War, was promoted twice, and after the war was stationed in New Orleans where he made navigational improvements to the Mississippi River. He was made superintendent of West Point in 1861, but after only a month he threw his hat in with the Southern cause and joined the Confederacy, being assigned to Charleston. He ordered the firing on Ft. Sumter that began the conflict and later that year led the Confederate forces at Manassas.

A hero at Bull Run, he was promoted to full general and joined Albert Johnston in Tennessee. Over the course of the war he saw action at Shiloh, the Bermuda Hundred, Petersburg, and finally in the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, where he was when the war ended. After the war he was offered command of army forces in Rumania and Egypt, but decided to stay in Louisiana where he became a successful businessman as president of a Southern railroad company and adjutant general of the state. A great deal of his spare time was spent arguing in articles and books his role in the war and his criticisms of other rebel leaders. He died in 1893.

Beauregard was a competent general, but prone to what we might call today "micromanaging": his war plans could become so detailed that they were almost impossible to carry out. He held Jefferson Davis in very low regard and was also highly critical of Joseph Johnston. Williams's book is very impressive and captures this strange man well. Williams believes that Beauregard might have become a superb general if given the time to develop, but the Civil War offered no such growing room. This is an excellent Civil War biography. Highly recommended.

This is a very good book on a very deserving subject. Beauregard often gets overlooked, he was never as beloved as Lee or Stonewall Jackson, but he was capable, the man had a sharp mind and Lee understood this, even if Jefferson Davis did not. The book gives a fascinating look at this intriguing man, though being of Creole heritage I do wish the author had spent more time on Beauregards early life, he came from a first line Creole family and he was a top student at West Point, where he disinguished himself well. This is really the definitive book on Beauregard, highly recommended.

..........but dull is not one of them. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard remains one one of the South's most controversial Generals, either a genius or simply one more mediocre officer in a long line. But, either way, Beauregard had STYLE. He remains, along with Lee and Forrest, the most recognizable Confederate Officer. In fact, he was a sharp, and tough, combat officer, never defeated in battle. No one questions the Creole's intellect; let no one question his courage, either.

Beauregard is, in some ways the Civil War's comic relief...witness his continuing attempt, two years into the war, to collect on a claim for travel back from West Point just prior to the war. I have made the same statement about Judah Benjamin, and there are parallels: Louisiana background, a French Catholic and a Jew, outsiders in a land run by British Anglicans. The two most financially successful Confederates after the war, Beauregard and Benjamin refused to stay defeated. They had STYLE, you see.

PGT Beauregard came from a successful family, did well at West Point [second in his class, as was Lee], and was assigned to the Engineers, the reward for academic success. The war in Mexico soon followed, where Lieutenant Beauregard, along with Captains Robert E. Lee and Joe Johnston, helped pave General Scott's way into Mexico City. After Mexico...Charleston, where his bar-excavator made the harbor usable, and his native New Orleans, where his engineering skill made possible the building of a Customshouse, which he ran for seven years. Appointed Suprintendent at West Point, he lasted a week, relieved because of his obvious Southern sympathy in the coming conflict [this is the origin of the travel claim mentioned above].

Came the war....Beauregard served the whole way, East and West...the firing on Fort Sumter, hero of First Manassas...then, exile. Beauregard, like Joe Johnston, ran up against the high-strung temper of Jefferson Davis. One of Davis' profound weaknesses was an inability to work with people he did not like, and the Confederacy suffered. Unjustly blamed for the "lost opportunity" of Shiloh [as we should have listened to Longstreet at Gettysburg, we should have listened to Beauregard at Shiloh], the General was sent to run the defense of Charleston [the Yankees never did take the harbor], and later assisted with Lee's defense of Petersburg, and Hardee's evacuation of Savannah. Thru it all, the Creole dreamed big dreams of ultimate conquest. Some were impractical, but...obviously what we did didn't work.

Someone once said of General Longstreet that he really died April 9, 1865, though his heart continued to beat another 40 years. Where Longstreet became an apostate for writing that the South needed to build a bridge and get over it, Beauregard didn't write, he simply crossed the bridge to wealth, power, and position in the New South. He was criticized for getting rich, but he had a family to support. Whatever his faults, he loved his family [another parallel with Benjamin, but where Benjamin went to England to get rich, Beauregard stayed in Louisiana]. Beauregard wrote his memoirs, but in an unusual twist on the usual procedure, he had a ghost writer take credit. He made money building railroads, and a ton of money with the Louisiana Lottery. The chapter on the Lottery is hilarious, and worth the price of the book. The powers behind the Lottery wanted a Confederate General to be the figurehead boss, and Beauregard, along with Jubal Early, was glad to take their money.

This wonderful book is the only decent biography of the Creole we have; one gets the impression that Williams dislikes his subject, but he was such a great, fair, honest, balanced writer that the General's greatness shines thru. PGT could be a difficult little man, but he was also a decent man [he paid to bury General Hood and his wife and daughter in 1879, then helped with financing the care of his surviving kids], and a genius [see the article he wrote in 1866 on the need for a battlefield night vision system]. For anyone with any kind of interest in our Civil War, this is an essential study.

Overall Williams has written a decent biography of one of the South's most colorful Generals. He does a good job with life after the Civil War and a good job describing Beauragards role at Shiloh and Charleston.

Unfortunately Williams really just skimmed through Beauragards life before the Civil War. The reader gets almost nothing concerning Beauragard at West Point, Mexico, and in the 1850's. At Mexico no real detail is given to any of the battles Beauragard participated in. We get some basics about him at Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, and Mexico City but Williams just doesn't go into detail enough.

I thought he could have done better with the conflict with Davis but overall he hit the most important points. I liked how Williams made clear that Beauragard wasn't a bad general, but neither was he a great general either. I think Williams did good at keeping relatively unbiased concerning Napoleaon in Gray.

Overall it is worth the read but it could have been better.

This was originally published in 1955, so it is somewhat dated. However, this is nonetheless a very nice biography of Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, one of the small handful of "Full Generals" in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

He was a complex, perplexing, and talented person. His pride led him to end up wasting a lot of time (and burning bridges) that accomplished little. For instance, his feud with President Jefferson Davis. He grew up admiring Napoleon (he was Creole, and spoke French for the first part of his life), and often developed battle plans during the Civil War that were Napoleonic in scope--and probably utterly impractical.

The biography does a nice job of laying out his early life and beginning to identify some of the personality traits that would be significant later on. His army career is well detailed, from West Point, to his engineering duties, to his important role in the Mexican War (he was one of a group of young officers, including Robert E. Lee, who were General Winfield Scott's eyes and ears).

Then, his role in the Civil War. The book does a nice job of chronicling some of his major successes--his leadership of the defense of Charleston, his key role in preventing Benjamin Butler and, later, Ulysses Grant from easily taking Petersburg. But there is also his ambiguous legacy from First Manassas (he was the operational commander and deserves credit, but his poorly configured orders, his wild-eyes strategic ideas, etc. raise one's eye brows), to Shiloh (an impractical attack plan), etc.

Thus, there were some great successes (Petersburg and Charleston), some ambiguous successes (First Manassas), a losing battle (Shiloh), and lots of political warfare with his government and other military officials.

His lot after the Civil War? He did well! The book does a nice job of describing his later career.

All in all, despite its age, this is a fair biography of a complex person. It is pretty critical of him at some points, but gives credit where it is obviously due. If interested in this fascinating figure, this is not a bad starting point. . . .

Biographies may, due to a series of reasons, become dull and hard to read through even if you are really interested in the particular character. This is absolutely NOT the case with this great book! General Beauregard's life path was fascinating on its own, and would provide a nice reading material even through a weak biographer. Now, T. Harry Williams is certainly among the greatest biographers of all times. These two ingredients make of this book a little treasure! The reader will not only be able to fully understand the General's personality, but will also travel with him to Mexico in the 1840's and get a full, detailed picture of the American operations there; s/he will also follow the development of the young army engineer just before the war, and, during the struggle, visit both the Eastern and Western theatres, understand precisely how the coastal defences in SC were conducted, etc. The general fought in his ardent and rather extravagant, 'Napoleonic' way to free his country, but his days do not finish with the final collapse of the Confederacy: railroad management and lotteries are on the way. Highly entertaining, highly recommended!

I bought this Williams bio of Beauregard some years ago but never read it until after my wife and I took a vacation to Charleston, SC. While exploring the city on foot, we came across a monument to Beauregard where the inscription from "a grateful people" thanked him for successfully protecting their city from Union occupation. This struck me as warm words for someone who is unfavorably caricatured by most Civil War writers. Once back home, I made a point to read it right away.

Everyone who is well read on the Civil War knows the outline and most of the important details of Beauregard's record as a C.S.A. general. I don't think Williams surprises us much in that area. However, I did learn from Williams something about Beauregard's service in Mexico that I believe explains a lot.

While Scott and his general officers wanted to take Mexico City from the south, Beauregard thought a western approach, via Chapultepec, to be the correct action. Beauregard's winning over of Scott and his staff to Beauregard's own plan, and the subsequent success of that plan undoubtedly gave impetus to the delusions of grandeur and outlandish strategic ideas for which Beauregard is so well known in the Civil War.

PGT Beauregard was an interesting personality. In most general Civil War publications, the North and South both had generals who were in and out of favor with their superiors during the course of the war. Beauregard was one of those, though he was mostly on the outs.

Yet he was one of only 8 full generals of the Confederacy. Interestingly, he held six independent commands and for a while he commanded the Army of Tennessee, one of the two principal field armies.

His defense of Charleston was very good. The city was never taken by Federal frontal assault. It took Sherman's overland campaign to force Charleston's abandonment but each and every seaborne assault was rebuffed. So he must have been a capable general.

But if he was capable, maybe even good at his craft, why wasn't he better utilized as a tool for Southern Independence? And if he was not useful to Jeff Davis during much of the war, why was he rushed back to service once Grant crossed the James? The answer is simple: Lee needed help and needed the best the South had available as the Civil War's end game played itself out.

This is the stuff Mr. Williams' book is made of. As on all occasions where significant events take place, power politics was present and Jeff Davis just may have failed to recognize his Ulysses S. Grant.

T. Harry Williams P. G T. Beauregard covers the life of one of the more interesting confederate generals during the Civil War. The Creole General or the Napoleon in Gray was a widely regarded celebrity that lives on in the annals of history that include Lee, Johnston, and Davis. Beauregard was never truly in command of independent field but served under and planned key battles for Shiloh, Manassas and the siege of Sumter. From his WestPoint training and experience in the Mexican American War he was ready like many of his contemporaries for command in the Civil War. He was a firm believer in the principles espoused by Jomini and Napoleon regarding concentration although he would often fail to utilize these due to his inability for logistics. Beauregard would be one of the primary commanders for Manassas and Sumter in the east before being transferred to the west under Albert Sidney Johnston to plan Shiloh and establish the base at Cornith, Mississippi.
His disagreements with Jefferson Davis would relegate him to the sidelines preparing the defense of Charleston against siege which he would do admirably well. He was eventually transferred to Petersburg where he would command a defensive line ably against overwhelming odds until being sent back West again after disagreeing with Lee. Jefferson Davis would leave Beauregard without a direct field command in charge of two armies that were already finished. The great master of concentration was not prepared for the new way of war being fought by Sherman and was hopelessly outmatched as was his superior Joe Johnston to prepare for the fight against Sherman. Finally after the surrender of Lee, Beauregard and Johnston would arrange the surrender to Sherman of the last major confederate army in the field while Davis continued his flight.
After the war Beauregard went back to Louisiana, where he was one of the few confederate generals to to make a living, as a railroad engineer and eventually ran the states Lottery system. Overall Williams does an excellent job of telling the story of this flamboyant general. He covers the high points and the low points fairly giving credit that has often been overlooked. Beauregard was rated as a second tier general since he never had a command but he participated in almost all of the major Confederate victories throughout the war and established some of the tightest fortifications that the Union had to overcome. His knowledge helped the confederacy extend its life longer than it would without him. Well worth the time for those who are looking to expand their Civil War knowledge.