… in 1864, Confederate General James E. Longstreet was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness. Many of his troops thought him dead, but he recovered. The Library of Congress tells us more:
Although his right arm was paralyzed by the injury at the bloody Battle of the Wilderness, Longstreet resumed his command in November 1864, but, by that time, Lee’s army was embroiled in the siege of Petersburg. Longstreet remained by Lee’s side to the end, surrendering with him at Appomattox.
General Longstreet, who remained the friend and admirer of both his West Point classmates General Ulysses Grant and General Robert E. Lee, became an active member of the Republican Party after the end of the war.
As a supporter of the Reconstruction Acts and of Grant’s Administration, Longstreet was appointed surveyor of customs for the Port of New Orleans, and later served as U.S. Marshal in Georgia and, for a brief time, as the U.S. Minister to Turkey. His reconciliation to the Union, along with his open criticism of General Lee’s handling of the Battle of Gettysburg, offended many Southerners and made him a controversial figure for the rest of his life.
In retelling the story of his war wounds in his memoirs From Manassas to Appomattox, published in 1896, Longstreet indicated that the post-war controversies had been more personally painful to him than the flesh wound he had suffered:
Bad as was being shot by some of our own troops in the battle of the Wilderness,—that was an honest mistake, one of the accidents of war,—being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.