And yet as I grew older, the name instilled a certain curiosity about the Confederacy, the flag, and above all P.G.T. himself. Flag supporters rarely invoke Beauregard's name, and never seem to dwell on the man, though the lionization of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders increases by the year. I recently discovered that there's a reason for this. The details of Beauregard's life point to a great irony: if General Beauregard were alive today, he'd be in the front ranks of those trying to get rid of the Southern Cross.

To the extent he is remembered at all, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard is the "Hero of Fort Sumter" and the man who led Confederate forces to victory in the First Battle of Manassas. Early in the Civil War there was no more romantic figure among Confederate officers than Beauregard, a vainglorious French Creole from New Orleans. He won the nickname "Little Napoleon," chiefly because of his French heritage and his obsession with Napoleonic warfare, though his diminutive stature and general comportment suggest that the name was more broadly fitting—Beauregard exhibited every Gallic tendency save the impulse to surrender.

The bombardment of Fort Sumter was in fact not much of a battle. The squat brick fortress that commands Charleston Harbor was manned by fewer than a hundred Union soldiers and not yet completed when Beauregard demanded its surrender, in April of 1861. When its chief officer refused, Beauregard initiated the first action of the war, in the early morning of April 12. The fight ended without a single death—save that of one Confederate horse (not Beauregard's)—when Sumter's commander capitulated, thirty-four hours later.

Overnight Beauregard became the Confederacy's first hero, a status that suited his dramatic self-image. In the words of T. Harry Williams, the author of the biography P.G.T. Beauregard, Napoleon in Gray (1955), "He was the South's first paladin," a flamboyant figure who stood out alongside the bearded austerity of his colleagues. Beauregard was rumored to travel with hordes of concubines and wagonloads of champagne; he was known to have been a favorite of Charleston ladies, who smothered him with letters, flowers, flags, and scarves. According to Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic (1998), Beauregard had a servant to wax his moustache daily, and summoned his own cow from New Orleans, claiming that his delicate stomach could abide no other milk. Southerners were smitten with Beauregard's aristocratic mien and aloof distinction, and his legend quickly radiated throughout the Confederacy.

Though his bloodless victory at Sumter was a dubious achievement, as the most celebrated general in the South, Beauregard was next assigned to its most important theater, northern Virginia, to stop the Federal advance on the newly established capital of Richmond. Here he exhibited a tendency that would come to define him. Though a talented military engineer, he had a flair for arriving on the scene with little knowledge of the enemy and dashing off grandiose battle plans that couldn't possibly be put into effect. Dutifully adhering to the Napoleonic principle of concentration of force, he proposed that General Joseph E. Johnston's army in the Shenandoah Valley join his in Manassas to "crush successively and in detail the several columns of the enemy, which I have supposed will move on three or four different lines of operations." He helpfully instructed his President, Jefferson Davis, that his plan "should be acted upon at once." This was despite glaring deficiencies, ranging from the logistical difficulty of combining armies to Beauregard's implication that he, a brigadier general—and not his senior, Johnston—would command the force. Davis swiftly rejected the plan.