Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard
St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, 1818 - 1893, New Orleans, Louisiana
During the Mexican War, Beauregard served as an engineer in Winfield Scott's army and distinguished himself in several battles, including Contreras, Churubusco, and Chapultepec. He received brevets as captain and major for his conduct and was promoted to captain in the regular army on 3 March 1853. Beauregard returned to Louisiana after the war and resumed engineering duties there. He married Caroline Deslonde in 1860; she died in 1864. The couple had no children. On 23 January 1861 he became superintendent of West Point but was ordered to vacate the post two days later. Beauregard left the academy two days after the secession of Louisiana, and he resigned his commission on 20 February 1861. Governor Thomas O. Moore of Louisiana passed over Beauregard for commander of the Louisiana state forces but offered him a commission as colonel of engineers. Beauregard declined the commission and enlisted as a private in a volunteer company.
Jefferson Davis appointed Beauregard a brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States of America on 1 March 1861 and placed him in command of the troops at Charleston, South Carolina. There Beauregard supervised the bombardment of Fort Sumter and received the surrender of its garrison on 14 April. The public acclaim Beauregard received led to his assignment to command Confederate forces near Manassas, Virginia. Though outranked by General Joseph E. Johnston, Beauregard was allowed by the latter to direct the disposition of troops for the battle of First Manassas on 21 July. The Creole general performed bravely in the engagement and had a horse shot from under him. He was promoted to full general on 13 August to date from 21 July.
Beauregard was assigned to cooperate with General Albert Sidney Johnston in the western theater in the spring of 1862. He assumed command at Corinth, Mississippi, and concentrated a force of about 40,000 men there as Johnston's line in Kentucky and Tennessee collapsed. Beauregard planned the attack on Major General Ulysses S. Grant's army at Shiloh and served as second in command to Johnston until that general's death late on 6 April. He failed to press the Confederate attack that day but was successful in holding back Federal attacks on 7 April. Falling back to Corinth, the army fortified that place, while the Union army slowly advanced against it. Beauregard ordered the evacuation of the town in late May. The following month he went on sick leave without first receiving approval from Davis, so the latter relieved him of command of the Army of Mississippi. This action exacerbated the deteriorating relationship between the two men, and Beauregard soon became a leader of the western theater generals who opposed Davis's strategy for the war.
On 19 August 1862 Beauregard was named as commander of the Department of South Carolina and Georgia. In this capacity, he supervised the defenses of Charleston and successfully repelled Union land and naval advances through the fall and winter of 1863. He also wrote Principles and Maxims of the Art of War (1863) while in command at Charleston. Beauregard received command of the Department of North Carolina and Cape Fear on 23 April 1864, and he renamed it the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia. He performed admirably in defeating Major General Benjamin F. Butler's Army of the James at Bermuda Hundred, Virginia, in May. The next month Beauregard's forces held back Union attacks on Petersburg until reinforced by troops from General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Beauregard continued to serve under Lee until the fall.
Again Davis sent Beauregard to the western theater, on 17 October naming him commander of the Military Division of the West. He had the responsibility of overseeing all Confederate armies in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas. During the next several months, General John Bell Hood's invasion of Tennessee was crushed near Nashville, and the troops facing Major General William T. Sherman's Union armies in Georgia failed to halt the advance of those forces. Beauregard, in reality, could have done little to change these situations. He assumed command of troops in South Carolina on 16 February 1865 and shortly afterward again came under the command of General Joseph E. Johnston. Beauregard was paroled after the surrender of Johnston's forces to Sherman on 18 April. He then returned to New Orleans.
Beauregard was president of the New Orleans, Jackson & Mississippi Railroad from 1865 to 1870. During that time period, he declined offers by several foreign governments to command their armies. Beauregard became manager of the Louisiana State Lottery Company in February 1877 and recouped the financial losses he had experienced previously. He was appointed commissioner of public works in New Orleans in 1888 and served for several years as adjutant general of Louisiana. Beauregard died in New Orleans, and his body was interred in the Army of Tennessee vault in Metairie Cemetery.
The controversy that swirled around Beauregard during much of his Civil War career has continued to be discussed among historians, who generally acknowledge that he had great potential as a military leader. He never lived up to that potential, in part because of petty jealousies and his own ego. No one has ever questioned his bravery on the battlefield. However, he never seemed to understand fully the realities of the Confederacy's capabilities to wage war. Beauregard correctly recognized the importance of the western theater, but his poor relationship with Davis and other generals hampered his efforts to improve the Confederacy's situation there.
Bibliography
Beauregard's official and personal papers are voluminous. The largest collection of documents is in the Library of Congress, while many of his official papers are in the National Archives. Beauregard's other papers are scattered in a dozen repositories around the country; the most significant collection is at Tulane University in New Orleans. The best biography of Beauregard written to date is T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (1955). An older work by Hamilton Basso, Beauregard: The Great Creole (1933), is highly laudatory. Alfred Roman, The Military Operations of General Beauregard, in the War between the States, 1861 to 1865 (2 vols., 1884), was largely written by Beauregard though attributed to his former chief of staff. Numerous articles have been written about Beauregard; the following are among the most informative: Bruce S. Hass, "Beauregard and the Image of Napoleon," Louisiana History 5 (1964): 179-86; Gerald Patterson, "Gustave," Civil War Times Illustrated 31, no. 3 (July-Aug. 1992): 28-35, 52-54; and Williams, "Beauregard at Shiloh," Civil War History 1 (1955): 17-34. An obituary is in the New Orleans Picayune, 21 Feb. 1893.
Arthur W. Bergeron
Citation:
Arthur W. Bergeron. "Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant";
http://www.anb.org/articles/04/04-01171.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 10:26:57 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
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