A Confederate General in the Ottoman Capital

with Elizabeth Varon

hosted by Chris Gratien

| After the US Civil War, some leaders of the defeated Confederacy followed unusual trajectories, perhaps none more so than James Longstreet, who joined the Republican party to become a proponent of Southern Reconstruction and for a brief period, the Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Varon, author of a new biography of Longstreet, about the rebel-turned-diplomat's brief tenure in the Ottoman capital during the early years of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's reign, and we discuss what Longstreet's experiences reveal about America on the world stage in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We also discuss Prof. Varon's personal connection to post-Ottoman Istanbul, as well as her new research about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who followed in Longstreet's footsteps some years later on a humanitarian mission to the Ottoman Armenians in Anatolia.   

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After the US Civil War, some leaders of the defeated Confederacy followed unusual trajectories, perhaps none more so than James Longstreet, who joined the Republican party to become a proponent of Southern Reconstruction and for a brief period, the Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Varon, author of a new biography of Longstreet, about the rebel-turned-diplomat's brief tenure in the Ottoman capital during the early years of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's reign, and we discuss what Longstreet's experiences reveal about America on the world stage in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We also discuss Prof. Varon's personal connection to post-Ottoman Istanbul, as well as her new research about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who followed in Longstreet's footsteps some years later on a humanitarian mission to the Ottoman Armenians in Anatolia.

Check out our bonus conversation with Elizabeth Varon, hosted by Chris Gratien, Claudrena Harold, and the graduate students of HIST 7001 at University of Virginia

Ottoman History Podcast · "No Prodigies in Our Field": A Conversation with Historian Elizabeth Varon

Contributor Bios

Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of six books, including Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which was reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic. Varon's current project is a biography of humanitarian Clara Barton.

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century. His current project, provisionally titled The Book and the Sword: Civil War and Reconstruction in Late Ottoman Syria, offers a global microhistory of the Tanzimat period, centered on the unsovled murder of an American missionary in the Ottoman Empire.

Credits

Episode No. 581
Release Date: 3 March 2026
Recording Location: University of Virginia
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: Safiye Ayla - Katibim; Azize Tozem and Sari Recep - İstanbul'dan Ayva Da Gelir Nar Gelir; Kara Güneş - İstanbul
Bibliography courtesy of Elizabeth Varon

Further Listening

	Emrah Şahin	517 1/16/22	İtikadın Peşinde: Osmanlı Bürokratları ve Amerikan Misyonerleri
	David Gutman	190 4/11/15	Armenian Migration During the Late Ottoman Period
	Lauren Davis	363 6/22/18	Istanbul and the Ottoman Olfactory Heritage
	Robyn Dora Radway	465 7/5/20	Mementos from Habsburg Life in Ottoman Istanbul
	Philipp Wirtz	260 8/22/16	German Expatriates in Late Ottoman Istanbul

Images

Portrait of James Longstreet seated in Lincoln chair, some time after the end of US Civil War. Source: Library of Congress



Official diplomatic customs document from Longstreet's journey to Turkey. Courtesy of Mollie DeLozier

Further Reading

Secil Akgun, “The Turkish Image in the Reports of American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin (Sept. 1989).

Robert L. Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900 (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1986).

Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell, 2015).

Enrico Del Lago, “Writing the U.S. Civil War into Nineteenth-Century World History,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11 (June 2021).

Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millenialism and Mission to the Middle East (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010),

Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven:  American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2008),

David Prior, ed., Reconstruction in a Globalizing World(New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

Mary Roberts, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015)

Emrah Sahin, Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018).

Jay Sexton, “The Civil War and U.S. World Power,” American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s, ed. Don H. Doyle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 15-33.

Bension Varon, Gifts of Language:  Multilingualism and Turkish-Sephardic Culture (Xlibris, 2016).

Elizabeth R. Varon, “The “Bull-Dog” in Istanbul: James Longstreet’s Revealing Tour as US Minister to Turkey, 1880–81.” Journal of the Civil War Era 13/1 (2023), 56–86.

Tarık Tansu Yiğit, “Reconstructing the American Under the Most Unimaginable Conditions: Civil War Veterans in the 'Arabian Nights,'” Journal of the Civil War Era 11 (December 2021).