Some twenty years ago General Longstreet’s home and everything it contained, save the people, vanished in flames. After that he lived in one of the out-houses, a small frame cottage such as any carpenter might build and any countryman might own.
Some years ago Hamlin Garland visited Gainesville for the purpose of calling on General Longstreet. After talking with him Mr. Garland wrote a very interesting article about him. He especially marvelled that he should find so great a man, so colossal a character, living in such modest fashion, seemingly almost forgotten by all sections of the country in whose destiny he had played so important a part. He said he found a world-famous general pruning grape-vines on a red hill-side of the picturesque mountain region of Georgia. He was delighted with his versatility, his information, and, most of all, with his glowing love of country and his broad ideas of the future greatness of America.
When the imposing house stood and when he afterwards occupied the cottage, his home was still the boasted “show-place” of Gainesville. He was Gainesville’s grand historic character, her first gentleman, and her best-loved citizen. Whatever resentment towards him because of political views may have been felt in other parts of the country where men were striving to be at the head of state processions, in his little home city there was never a break in the loving and proud esteem in which he was held by his home people.
Here life remained interesting to him to the last. His heart was ever young; when he died he was eighty-three years young. Only a day or two before he was taken away he was planning things that were to take place years in the future. Blindness, deafness, paralysis, the decay of physical faculties, failed to move his dauntless courage or quell his splendid determination.
General Longstreet’s last days were spent in revising his memoirs of the Civil War, as were Grant’s in writing his. The two colossal characters passed away suffering the excruciating pains of the same dread disease,--cancer,--both disdaining death, heroic to the end.
On the eve of the Spanish-American War General Longstreet was invited by the New York _Herald_ to contribute to its columns a paper on the subject of the threatened trouble with Spain.