page_title: P. G. T. Beauregard
section_title: Civil rights
hierarchical_section_title: P. G. T. Beauregard / Civil rights
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait woodcut of USA Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard.
context_page_description: Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was a Confederate general officer who started the American Civil War by leading the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Today, he is commonly referred to as P. G. T. Beauregard, but he rarely used his first name as an adult. He signed correspondence as G. T. Beauregard.
  Trained in military and civil engineering at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, Beauregard served with distinction as an engineer officer in the Mexican–American War. Following a brief appointment as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy in 1861, and after Louisiana seceded, he resigned from the United States Army and became the first brigadier general in the Confederate States Army. He commanded the defenses of Charleston, South Carolina, at the start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Three months later he won the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia.
  Beauregard commanded armies in the Western Theater, including at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, and the Siege of Corinth in northern Mississippi. He returned to Charleston and defended it in 1863 from repeated naval and land attacks by Union forces.
context_section_description: Immediately after the Civil War, after being insulted and ridiculed in his own community, losing the right to vote, and becoming outraged in learning that properties he owned before the war just outside of the city limits of Memphis had been confiscated by the Freedman's bureau and developed into houses for blacks and a schoolhouse, he wrote letters to his friend John Slidell about his opinion on the emancipated black population. He wrote that the colored people were inferior, ignorant, and indolent. He predicted "that in seventy-five years the colored race would disappear from America along with the Indians and the buffalo" and a more historically-accurate one in which blacks would be controlled by the whites politically; blacks had not yet voted in the South, and it did not appear to him that they would.
  In the following years, Beauregard's inflamed opinion of blacks changed; in March 1867 Radical Republicans enforced black suffrage, as many Southerners became excited and resistant, and Beauregard wrote a widely published public letter that advised Southerners to accept the new situation. He said that the South could either submit or resist and that sensibly resistance is futile. He saw that through the colored right to vote and cooperation, the excesses of Radical Republican reconstruction like the burden of heavy taxation could be overcome and create a better future for the South. His pragmatic change in opinion is illustrated when he wrote that "the Negro is Southern born; with a little education and some property qualifications he can be made to take sufficient interest in the affairs and prosperity of the South to insure an intelligent vote."
  In 1868, while Beauregard was vacationing at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, he was invited by Robert E. Lee to a resort along with other famous Confederates as well as William S. Rosecrans, a former Union general and politician. The purpose of the meeting was to combat the charge by the Republicans that the mostly-Democratic Southerners could not be trusted to deal justly with blacks. The result of the meeting was documentation signed by the parties present, including Beauregard, stating that the South would accept the results of the war and emancipation and that they felt kindly towards blacks but that there was opposition to their exercising of political power.
  Rosecrans gave an interview upon returning to the north and described Lee's efforts as somewhat weak but that Lee was a sincere man. When asked if Beauregard were weak, Rosecrans responded, "By the side of Lee, certainly. Take him alone, however, and he strikes you as quick, ready and incisive—well, a man of the world, a good business character, a smart active Frenchman. But with Lee he dwindles. Lee says shut the door, and Beauregard shuts the door." The interviewer asked if the Southern generals would really allow blacks to vote. Rosecrans responded by saying, "Lee will not, probably, but Beauregard will. He is in favor of it and so expressed himself to me." 
  In 1872, the Reform Party formed in Louisiana and was made up of conservative New Orleans businessmen, advocating an economical state government and recognition of black civil and political rights, and held the position that black political power was a reality and should be accepted. Beauregard was one of the leading members of the group. The Reform party attempted to coordinate its efforts on a state level with the Democratic party in order to elect a non-Republican governor. Beauregard, however, had different preferences for presidential candidates. He endorsed in a public letter the Liberal Republican nominee Horace Greeley, who at the time was running against Ulysses S. Grant. Beauregard "called for peace, reconciliation, a forgetting of old issues, and a union of conservative-minded people to remove corruption and extravagance from the government."
  In 1873, the Reform Party created a detailed and specific plan to induce cooperation between the races in a political union. The plan called for the creation of the Louisiana Unification Movement. Approv
caption: Beauregard, civil rights advocate
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