Red Lodge daily news combined with Carbon County news., 1933-05-31
The Great Creole
BY ELMO SCOTT WATSON

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--7E ORDERED the firing on Fort Sum-
ter and thus furnished the spark
which set off the mighty conhagra-
ton of the greatest civil war In his
TH5f9 tory. But this 'kindliest military
T@NVG engagement In history, conducted
~ N with the utmost good nature, almost
@saSxbDe tenderness, on both sides-a pleas
ant curtain-raiser which gave no
hint of the grimness to follow" was hailed as a
great victory and he became the idol Of a new
nation, the Confederate States of America.
The Confederate congress, In behalf of the
new nation, voted him a resolution Of thanks.
The general assembly of South Carolina, the
scene of his great victory" did the same. Citl-
zens of his native New Orleans raised funds
to buy a golden sword for him. His admirers
In Montgomery, Ala, the Confederate capital,
decided to buy him a new horse and present 1t
to him upon his next visit there. He received
more than $50 letters Of generalization and the
manuscripts of five poems written to him..
Then he was ordered to Richmond to confer
with President Jefferson Davis and his progress
north was q triumphal procession with cheering
crowds and blaring bands at every railroad
junction. Wherever he appeared, the crowds
demanded a speech. Arriving In Richmond, he
"was hustled and showed and kissed and had to
stand with a scarlet, embarrassed face while a
spindly maiden of forty, to whom forty made no
difference, shipped q button from his coat"
Three months later two uniformed mobs
fought a battle near Manassas or Bull Run In
Virginia. The uniformed mob which had
marched south, many Of them carrying lengths
of rope ito lead a Rebel prisoner back to Wash
%ington," went back toward that city In a panic
stricker rout almost unparalleled in history.
Tho uuiformad p1nh uphfah had narohad porfh
each man confident of his ability to whip five
Yankees before breakfast" experienced unex-
pected difficulties in whipping two. But theirs
was the victory, anyway, and after that another
extravaganza of hero worship.
In the South they began naming children
after him. There was talk Of making him Pres
ident of the Confederates States Of America.
He had to keep an extra supply of coat buttons
In his tent-they shipped them off so fast.
As you have probably already guessed, the
object of all this frenzy was Pierre Gustave
Toutant Beauregard, a general In the Confeder-
ate army In 1861.
But" you say, "if he was such a great hero
then, why do we hear so little Of him now?" To
find the answer to that question, turn to q new
biography which has just been published by
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1t Is "Beauregard, the
Great Creole" written by Hamilton Basso, who
has set about the task of ~rescuing from OBJ
security the man once hailed as zone of the
greatest military figures in history"
In the prologue to his biography, Mr.. Basso
says: Occasionally, In the textbooks We came
across his name. But 1t is only rarely, and then
with a scant line or two they are done with him.
"He has fallen into obscurity. even In the
South where once he was loved and honored as
much as Lee. And so, In writing Of him, 1t has
interested me to seek an explanation of his neg
Iect and effacement. The fault, | believe, and
the blame III there Is any blame) Is that of the
traditionalists and the myth-makers-all the
Happy Galahads of the Picturesque"
Mr.. Basso then points out that In 1865 when
the Civil war ended, a ruined, a defeated peo-
pie returned to the daily routine of peace-time
life, a changed life in which 'they had no pres
ent and, so far as they could see, no future. All
that was left inyiolate was the past" And the
PROSTATE South chung desperately to Its men,
cries of the beauty, the chivalry and the romance
that had been In the past.
In the years that followed, myths and legends
began to spring up to form the parts of the
plantation or Southern tradition and a part of
that tradition was that of the Civil war gen.
eral. "Here, fortunately, the myth-makers were
not called upon to exercise their creative In
genuity to any great extent. Their hero was
already made. His name was Robert Edward
Lee. Lee, then, became the legendary hero. He
was the model the others must measure up to.
A few Southern generals, notably Stonewall
Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Jeb
Stuart, bore many points Of resemblance to Lee.
The tradition, therefore, could incorporate them
into Its dogma"
But Beauregard could not be so included.
For one thing, he and Lee were totally unlike
in every respect. Then, too. Beauregard was a
Frenchman and the tradition Is essentially An
gIo-saxon. Add to this the bitter antagonism
that sprang up between President Jefferson