By the morning of July 2, 1863, James Longstreet had been arguing with Robert E. Lee about the same thing for fourteen hours. The Army of Northern Virginia had won an unexpected tactical success on Day 1 north and west of Gettysburg. The Union army had fallen back onto the high ground south of town — the position Buford and Hancock had chosen the day before — and was concentrating overnight. Longstreet's argument to Lee was operational: disengage, march around the Union left, find good defensive ground between Meade and Washington, and force Meade to attack. Lee disagreed. He believed his army could win another tactical victory by attacking the Union flanks, and he ordered Longstreet to attack the Union left — the Round Tops and the southern end of the line — on Day 2. Longstreet did. His assault went in late, partly because he kept finding reasons to delay an attack he had argued against, but when it came it nearly broke the Union line. Hood's Texans and Alabamians went up Little Round Top. Barksdale's Mississippi brigade broke the III Corps salient at the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield. McLaws's division reached the lower slopes of Cemetery Ridge. Hancock fed the 1st Minnesota into the breach to buy ten minutes — they took eighty-two percent casualties in a hundred yards of charge — and the Union line held by an hour and the depth of the brigades Meade still had in reserve. Longstreet's attack on Day 2 was the closest the Confederate army came to winning Gettysburg. Day 3 was Pickett's Charge, which Longstreet again argued against and ordered launched only when Lee insisted — the attack Longstreet would later say he commanded with a heavier heart than any in his life. After the war, Lost Cause writers blamed Longstreet for the Gettysburg defeat. Modern historians count him among the two or three best Confederate corps commanders of the war.

This W. Britain figure depicts Longstreet in the light blue-gray Confederate general's frock coat, the black slouch hat, the elaborate yellow general officer's sash with tasseled ends, the dark trousers and high black field boots, and the Confederate staff officer's sword grounded at his left. The right hand extended forward catches him in the act of directing — Longstreet was famously taciturn but moved formations under fire with the same economy Hancock did on the other side. He was Lee's "Old Warhorse," the corps commander who served beside Lee from the Seven Days through Appomattox with the single interruption of his detachment to the western theater in late 1863. At Chickamauga that September his two divisions broke the Union line in the only major Confederate victory of the Western campaign. On May 6, 1864, in the Wilderness, he was shot in the throat by his own men — friendly fire from a confused North Carolina brigade, almost exactly one year after Jackson had been killed by friendly fire in the same forest. Longstreet survived, returned to corps command before Petersburg, and was at Lee's side at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Pair this figure with General Robert E. Lee, the commanding general Longstreet served beside for the entire war and called "the best soldier I ever knew"; with Lt. Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, the other corps commander who died of friendly fire in the same forest almost exactly one year before Longstreet's own wound; or with Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, the Union II Corps commander whose Cemetery Ridge line Longstreet's Day 2 attack nearly broke and whose center Longstreet's Day 3 attack (Pickett's Charge) failed to break.

Scale: 1/30 (60mm). Matte-painted metal. W. Britain model 31021. From the American Civil War range. Single foot figure, supplied painted and ready for display.