Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (September 22, 1790 – July 9, 1870) was an American lawyer, minister, journalist, educator, and humorist, known for his book Georgia Scenes.

He graduated from Yale University in 1813, studied law in Litchfield, Connecticut, and was admitted to the bar in Richmond County, Georgia.

He portrayed blacks as a "tribe of self-infuriated madmen, rushing through the country with the Bible in one hand and a torch in the other – preaching peace, and scattering the flames of civil war," and said that they were creating a "system of warfare against Slavery.

In politics Longstreet – a life-long Democrat[6] – belonged to the Jeffersonian school of strict construction and states rights.

Scholar Lewis M. Purifoy notes that [I]n a baccalaureate address to the University of South Carolina graduating class of 1859, [Longstreet] urged the young men of his audience to defend Southern rights to the utmost.

He defended slavery mainly on the ground that freeing [slaves] would be ruinous to Southern society; and the burden of his speech was that the South had suffered long and grievously at the hand of the North.

[7]"I have heard him," writes a person who knew Longstreet, "respond to a serenade, preach a funeral sermon, deliver a college commencement address, and make a harangue over the pyrotechnic glorifications of seceding states.

Following the Civil War, Longstreet continued to be an unrepentant and unreconstructed advocate of white supremacy, and a fierce critic of Reconsruction and the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, despite the fact that his nephew, former Confederate General James Lonstreet, supported both the Republican Party and Grant, an antebellum friend.

[6] Longstreet's daughter Virginia married the future Supreme Court justice Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar in Oxford, Georgia in 1847, while Augustus was president of Emory College.