With a name like Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818-1893), Beauregard could only have come from Louisiana. He could only have been Creole. Dashing, aristocratic, glamorous, and reminiscent of Napoleon, P.G.T. Beauregard was the Confederacy’s first hero. Raised on a French-speaking St. Bernard Parish plantation and educated at West Point, he commanded the Confederate forces at Charleston who fired the shots on Fort Sumter. He commanded the Confederate forces at the first Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War. He was not more important as a Confederate general only because he argued with Jefferson Davis.
Library of Congress
He was responsible for the adoption of the still-troubling Confederate battle flag. Because the Confederate national flag, now largely forgotten, was too similar to the flag of the Union, troops couldn’t tell them apart in battle.
Beauregard’s statue was removed May 17, 2017, a bit more than 100 years after its erection in 1915. It’s hard for me to work up much feeling about the statue’s removal. It was a lovely piece, created by a relatively important American sculptor (who also sculpted the Lee monument), Alexander Doyle. Maybe the erection of the statue had something to do with white power, but by 1915 the segregation of the South was old news and unquestioned, and Beauregard probably deserves some leeway for being a native son.
What interests me most about P.G.T. Beauregard is not his statue, and not his military accomplishments and failings, but that he was, along with fellow-Confederate General Jubal Early, the post-bellum front-man for the Louisiana Lottery. In our America a state lottery is a mildly questionable means of raising funds for a public purpose, questionable largely because it regressively raises funds to fund stuff like education that should otherwise be funded without resort to film-flam. The 19th Century Louisiana lottery got that first part right: it regressively raised funds from the poor. But the second part, the funding of a public purpose, the lottery didn’t quite manage. It was a private enterprise chartered by the state that paid the state $40,000 annually. $40,000. Mostly it paid off millions to its organizers, and paid Generals Early and Beauregard a decent livelihood to sit on a New Orleans’ stage to lend credence to the lottery drawing. When reformers threatened the lottery, the lottery corporation bribed the Louisiana legislature into writing its continued existence into the Louisiana state constitution.
The lottery was a power in Louisiana politics until 1890 when Congress banned sending lottery solicitations through the U.S. Mail. Most of the participation in the lottery came through mail solicitation, not only in Louisiana but nationally, so the enforcement of the Congressional ban effectively ended the lottery (though it survived for a few more years from Honduras). What it could have done with the internet.
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