P. G. T. Beauregard

Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, born May 28, 1818, and died February 20, 1893, was an American military officer. He is remembered as the Confederate general who fired the opening shots of the American Civil War at the Battle of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Though commonly called P. G. T. Beauregard today, he dropped his first name as an adult and signed his letters as G. T. Beauregard.

He trained in military and civil engineering at West Point and served with distinction as an engineer in the Mexican-American War. After a short stint as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy in 1861, and following Louisiana’s secession, he resigned from the U.S. Army and became the Confederacy’s first brigadier general. He commanded Charleston, South Carolina’s defenses at the war’s start during the Fort Sumter attack on April 12, 1861. Three months later, he helped secure victory at the First Battle of Manassas near Bull Run Creek.

Beauregard held major commands in the Western Theater, leading armies at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee and the Siege of Corinth in northern Mississippi, both in 1862. He returned to Charleston and defended it in 1863 against repeated Union naval and land assaults. He is best known for defending Petersburg, Virginia, an industrial city, from Union forces in June 1864, which delayed the fall of the Confederate capital, Richmond, until April 1865.

His influence on Confederate strategy was limited by poor professional relationships with President Jefferson Davis and other senior officials. In April 1865, Beauregard and his commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, convinced Davis and the remaining cabinet that the war had to end. Johnston surrendered most of the remaining Confederate armies, including Beauregard and his men, to Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman.

After the war, Beauregard returned to Louisiana. There, he advocated for Black civil rights, including suffrage, as a strategy to vote out Radical Republicans. He worked as a railroad executive and grew wealthy promoting the Louisiana Lottery.

Beauregard was born at the Contreras sugar-cane plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, about 20 miles outside New Orleans, into a Louisiana Creole family. He was the third child of Hélène Judith de Reggio—of mixed French and Italian ancestry, descended from Francesco Maria de Reggio, an Italian noble whose family had moved first to France and then to Louisiana—and her husband, Jacques Toutant-Beauregard, of French and German descent. He had three brothers and three sisters. Like most Louisiana Creoles, his family spoke French and practiced Catholicism.

He had several Creole of color cousins and uncles; that side of the family came from a marriage between Marguerite Pantalon, daughter of a prominent New Orleans Creole of color family, and one of Beauregard’s uncles, Martin Barthelemy Toutant Beauregard. As a child, he befriended and played with slave boys his own age, especially his favorite, a tall, strong storyteller named Baptiste. Beauregard was often seen following and frolicking beside Baptiste. He was nursed by a slave woman from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) named Mamie Françoise Similien. She and Beauregard were very close, often hugging and kissing. Similien was held in the highest esteem by the family; after Pierre’s grandfather died, the Beauregards gave her a Creole cottage in the Faubourg Treme of New Orleans. Pierre visited her often. In an 1882 interview with a New Orleans Times reporter, while sharing stories of Pierre’s youth, Mamie pointed to a personal portrait he had given her during a visit in 1867 and said, “that’s my son.”

Beauregard grew up in a large one-story house, not like the later plantation palaces but a mansion of aristocracy for its time. He hunted and rode in the woods and fields around the plantation and paddled his boat in its waterways. He attended private schools in New Orleans and then a “French school” in New York City. During four years in New York, starting at age 12, he learned English, as French had been his first and only language in Louisiana.

In 1841, he married Marie Antoinette Laure Villeré (1823–1850), daughter of a Louisiana sugarcane planter. They had three children: Rene (1843–1910), Henri (1845–1915), and Laure (1850–1884). Marie died giving birth to Laure, their only daughter. In 1860, Beauregard married Caroline Deslonde (1831–1864), who died in New Orleans after a long illness. He was related to inventor and firearms engineer Jean Alexandre LeMat, who had married Beauregard’s cousin Justine Sophie LePretre in 1849.

Beauregard attended West Point. One of his instructors was Robert Anderson, the future commander of Fort Sumter, who surrendered to Beauregard at the war’s start. Upon enrolling, Beauregard dropped the hyphen from his surname and treated Toutant as a middle name to fit in with classmates. From then on, he rarely used his first name, preferring “G. T. Beauregard”; these changes were part of his Americanization. He graduated second in his class in 1838 and excelled as both an artilleryman and military engineer. His Army friends gave him many nicknames: “Little Creole,” “Bory,” “Little Frenchman,” “Felix,” and “Little Napoleon.”

In February 1845, Beauregard returned to Louisiana and moved into the French Quarter of New Orleans, living in a prominent Creole of color neighborhood on St. Louis Street.