Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Baldwin_Longstreet

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (September 22, 1790-July 9, 1870) was an American lawyer, minster, educator, and humorist, known for his book Georgia Scenes.

Biography

Longstreet was born in Augusta, Georgia, a son of the inventor William Longstreet. He graduated at Yale University in 1813, studied law in Litchfield, Connecticut, and was admitted to the bar in Richmond County, Georgia. He soon moved and rose to eminence as a lawyer in Greensboro, Georgia. He represented Greene County in the state legislature in 1821, and in 1822 became a district judge in Ocmulgee. After several years as a judge, he declined re-election and resumed his legal practice in Augusta, did editorial work, and established the Sentinel, which soon merged with the Chronicle (1838). In 1838, he became a Methodist minister. During this period of his ministry, the town was visited with yellow fever, but he remained at his post, ministering to the sick and dying.

In 1839, he was made president of Emory College. After nine years he accepted the presidency of Centenary College, Louisiana, then of the University of Mississippi, where he stayed for six years, after which he resigned, and became a planter, but in 1857 became president of South Carolina College. Just before the Civil War, he returned to his old presidency in Mississippi.

In politics he belonged to the Jeffersonian school of strict construction and states rights. He made speeches on all occasions through his life. “I have heard him,” writes one who knew him, “respond to a serenade, preach a funeral sermon, deliver a college commencement address, and make a harangue over the pyrotechnic glorifications of seceding states. He could never be scared up without a speech.”

During his years as a Southern Methodist minister Longstreet preached a doctrine of secession and defended slavery. He was conspicuous in the discussions that led to a rupture of his church. Scholar Lewis M. Purifoy notes that "Augustus B. Longstreet, in a baccalaureate address to the University of South Carolina graduating class of 1859, urged the young men of his audience to defend Southern rights to the utmost. While they should not strive to break up the Union, they should not ‘make a dishonorable surrender of the thousandth part of the mill more to save it.’ He defended slavery mainly on the ground that freeing [slaves] would be ruinous to Southern society; and the burden of his speech was that the South had suffered long and grievously at the hand of the North. Longstreet assured the class that secession would not lead to war, but, if it should, a united South would win.

At an early age, he began to write for the press, and his pen was never idle. His chief periodical contributions are to be found in The Methodist Quarterly, The Southern Literary Messenger, The Southern Field and Fireside, The Magnolia, and The Orion, and include “Letters to Clergymen of the Northern Methodist Church” and “Letters from Georgia to Massachusetts.” His fame is based, however, on a single book, of which he was the author: Georgia Scenes (1835), originally published in newspapers, then gathered into a volume at the South, and finally issued in 1840 in New York. It featured realistic sketches of Southern humor. It is said that he disavowed the second edition (1867) and tried to destroy the first.

Augustus was a mentor for his nephew James Longstreet, and was a long time friend and associate of John C. Calhoun. He died in Oxford, Mississippi and is buried in section one of St. Peter's Cemetery.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=15898160&ref=wvr

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet served as president of four southern colleges, including the University of Mississippi, and was the author of Georgia Scenes (1835), the first major work of southwestern humor. Born on 22 September 1790 in Augusta, Georgia, to Hannah Randolph Longstreet and William Longstreet, he studied at Rev. Moses Waddel’s academy in Willington, South Carolina, and at Yale, where he graduated with honors. After reading law in Litchfield, Connecticut, he was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1815 and became a circuit-riding attorney for a seven-county district. Longstreet and Frances Eliza Parke, whom he married on 3 March 1817, had eight children, only two of whom survived to adulthood.

A states’ rights activist, Longstreet was well known as an assemblyman, criminal trial lawyer, circuit court judge, political satirist, and newspaper owner-editor. Although his popular comic collection Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, &c. in the First Half Century of the Republic (1835) was published anonymously, Longstreet was quickly identified as the author. His articulate narrators, Lyman Hall and Abraham Baldwin (both named after Georgia politicians), tell tall tales of men’s horse-trading and women’s gossip, incorporating the sometimes vulgar voices of rural Georgians. Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Georgia Scenes enthusiastically in the Southern Literary Messenger, and a fashion developed for the vernacular dialogue and robust physicality of the southwestern humor genre, which took its name from the Old Southwest, a region extending from Georgia to Mississippi and Arkansas. Antebellum practitioners included Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Johnson Jones Hooper, and even a Mississippi governor, Alexander G. McNutt. Mark Twain and contemporary humorists such as Clyde Edgerton and Mississippi’s Barry Hannah have continued the literary tradition.

Longstreet never completed his plans to publish a second volume of comic sketches. He became a Methodist preacher in 1838 and was subsequently elected president of the Methodist-sponsored Emory College in Atlanta, where he also taught and wrote proslavery pamphlets. In the years before the Civil War, Longstreet also served as a professor and chief administrator at Centenary College in Louisiana, the University of Mississippi, and South Carolina College.

Between 1849 and 1856, while serving as chancellor at the University of Mississippi, he wrote on political and theological subjects and worked on Master William Mitten; or, A Youth of Brilliant Talents, Who Was Ruined by Bad Luck (1864), a moralistic novel that never achieved the fame of his early humorous fiction. Longstreet’s son-in-law, L. Q. C. Lamar, chaired the committee that drafted Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession; Confederate general James Longstreet was Longstreet’s nephew. Through much of the Civil War, Judge Longstreet and his wife lived as refugees in Elon, Alabama, but they subsequently returned to Oxford, home of both of their daughters. Longstreet published essays in the Nineteenth Century in 1869 and 1870 and was working on a treatise about biblical interpretation when he died on 9 July 1870. The Longstreet-Lamar House on Oxford’s North 14th Street has been restored as a national historic landmark.