May 3, 1962 - Mrs. Helen Dortch Longstreet (pictured right in 1900), widow of James Longstreet (left), the controversial Confederate General, died at Milledgeville State Hospital in Georgia this morning of a heart attack. She was 99 years old. General Longstreet was 76 and his bride was in her thirties when they were married in Atlanta on Sept. 8, 1897. The general, a blunt and pugnacious military leader, had been at the center of one of the Civil War’s most acrimonious conflicts when it was charged that his alleged delay in pressing the attack had been responsible for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg in July 1863. General Longstreet became a Republican after the Civil War and was given good Federal positions by his old West Point friend and then President, Ulysses S. Grant. After her husband’s death in 1904, Mrs. Longstreet was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to succeed her husband as head of the Gainesville post office. The appointment was renewed by President William Howard Taft, but Mrs. Longstreet was dismissed when the Democrats came into power with the election of Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency. She has no immediate survivors.
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