Joseph E. Johnston

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Eggleston Johnston died of pneumonia on the 21st of March, 1891, one month after refusing to put on his hat in the rain at a funeral. The funeral belonged to William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general who had spent the better part of a year trying to destroy Johnston's army. Johnston stood bareheaded in the cold New York drizzle as a pallbearer, and when someone urged him to cover his head, he said simply: "If I were in his place, and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat."

  That moment tells you almost everything about Johnston. A man of strict personal honor who lost more campaigns than he won. A general praised by Grant and Sherman long after the war, yet regarded by his own president, Jefferson Davis, as unfit to command. A Virginian who rose to the top of the United States Army and then resigned to fight against it, and who spent the last decades of his life relitigating the choices that defined him.

  Who was Johnston, and why did his relationship with Davis poison so much of what he tried to accomplish? What does it mean that the largest surrender of the Civil War fell to him, not to Lee? And how did a man who began life in a house called Longwood, near Farmville, Virginia, end up as a friend to the very general he spent four grinding years trying to stop?

• 2. Virginia Roots and West Point

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  Longwood House, near Farmville, Virginia, is where Johnston was born on the 3rd of February, 1807. His grandfather Peter had emigrated from Scotland to Virginia in 1726, and the family carried deep roots in Virginia public life. Johnston's father was a judge; his brother Charles served as a U.S. congressman; his nephew John Warfield Johnston became a U.S. senator. Through his mother, Johnston was a grandnephew of Patrick Henry.

  He entered the United States Military Academy in 1825, nominated by John C. Calhoun, then Secretary of War. At West Point, Johnston was not the top student. He graduated in 1829 ranking 13th out of 46 cadets, though he earned relatively few disciplinary demerits. In that same class, finishing 2nd, was Robert E. Lee. The two men would spend the next three decades as colleagues, rivals, and eventually adversaries in a war neither had chosen.

  One distinction mattered enormously to Johnston throughout his life: he became the first West Point graduate to be promoted to general officer in the regular army, reaching a higher rank than Lee before the Civil War began. That fact sat at the center of a grievance that would color almost everything Johnston did once he put on Confederate gray.

• 3. Bullets and Brevet Ranks

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  Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the U.S. Army, once observed with dry affection that Johnston was a great soldier with "an unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in nearly every engagement." The record supports the joke.

  Johnston had already resigned from the Army in March 1837 to work as a civilian engineer, but a violent skirmish on the 12th of January, 1838, pulled him back in. At Jupiter, Florida, sailors who had gone ashore were ambushed during the Second Seminole War. Johnston later counted "no less than 30 bullet holes" in his clothing from that fight, and a bullet that creased his scalp left a scar he carried the rest of his life. He returned to military service that April, and on the 7th of July he received both a commission as first lieutenant and a brevet promotion to captain, rewarded for his actions at Jupiter Inlet and his exploration of the Florida Everglades.

  The Mexican-American War gave Johnston fresh opportunities to be wounded and decorated. Scott personally chose him to carry the surrender demand to the governor of Veracruz. Before the Battle of Cerro Gordo, Johnston was hit by grapeshot while conducting reconnaissance. He recovered, rejoined the army at Puebla, and then served as second in command of the U.S. Regiment of Voltigeurs during the advance on Mexico City. He was wounded again at Chapultepec, distinguished himself at Contreras and Churubusco, and ended the war holding the brevet rank of colonel, though his permanent rank reverted to captain once the fighting stopped.

  The greatest anguish of the war was personal, not physical. When Robert E. Lee informed Johnston that a Mexican artillery shell had killed his nephew Preston Johnston at Contreras, both officers wept. Johnston grieved for the remainder of his life.

• 4. The Ranking Dispute

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  Jefferson Davis was already a thorn in Johnston's side before the Civil War. In the 1850s, Johnston had written to the War Department asking to be returned to a combat regiment with his wartime brevet rank of colonel. Davis, then Secretary of War and an acquaintance from West Point, rejected the idea. He did, however, give Johnston a posting as lieutenant colonel in the 1st U.S. Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the 1st of March, 1855, where Johnston participated in operations against the Sioux in the Wyoming Territory and in the Bleeding Kansas violence over slavery.

  By June 1860, Johnston had reached the top. When Brig. Gen. Thomas Jesup, the Army's Quartermaster General, died on the 10th of June, Winfield Scott offered Davis's successor as Secretary of War four possible replacements: Johnston, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and Charles F. Smith. Secretary Floyd chose Johnston. He was promoted to brigadier general on the 28th of June, 1860, the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to resign when Virginia declared secession the following year.

  That seniority is what made the Confederate ranking list so explosive. Davis promoted Johnston to full general in August 1861 but backdated the rank only to July 4, placing Johnston behind Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee. Johnston believed that as the senior officer to have left the U.S. Army, he should stand first. He sent Davis an angry letter that Davis found intemperate enough to discuss with his cabinet. The rift never fully healed. It shaped every campaign Johnston commanded for the next four years.

• 5. Bull Run, Peninsula, and the Wound

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  At the First Battle of Bull Run on the 21st of July, 1861, Johnston arrived with his Army of the Shenandoah to reinforce Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. Not knowing the terrain, Johnston deferred tactical planning to Beauregard as a professional courtesy. But at midday, Johnston made an independent judgment: the critical point was Henry House Hill, north of his headquarters at the Lewis house. He announced, "The battle is there. I am going," and rode off, with both generals' staffs following.

  He found a scattered regiment, the 4th Alabama, whose field-grade officers had all been killed, and personally rallied the men. He consoled the despairing Brig. Gen. Barnard Bee and urged him back into the fight. Bee's subsequent exhortation to his troops produced Stonewall Jackson's famous nickname. Beauregard claimed most of the public credit, but Johnston's work behind the scenes was real. Johnston also contributed something more tangible: after Bull Run, he helped Beauregard and William Porcher Miles design the Confederate Battle Flag, and it was Johnston's specific suggestion to make it square.

  The Peninsula Campaign of 1862 ended Johnston's direct command in Virginia. Facing George B. McClellan's army, which outnumbered his own and could draw on naval support from both the James and York Rivers, Johnston wanted to concentrate closer to Richmond. Davis and Lee disagreed. Johnston deployed his forces on the Peninsula, fought a defensive action at Williamsburg on the 5th of May, turned back an amphibious move at Eltham's Landing on the 7th of May, and watched McClellan's army close to within six miles of Richmond.

  On the 31st of May, Johnston attacked at the Battle of Seven Pines. His plan was aggressive, but too intricate; his subordinates misunderstood their orders, and he failed to supervise closely enough to correct the confusion. Near the end of the first day, an artillery shell fragment hit him in the shoulder and chest. G.W. Smith took command for the second day before Davis transferred authority to Robert E. Lee, who then drove McClellan off the Peninsula entirely.

• 6. Vicksburg and the Western Trap

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  Prematurely discharged from the hospital on the 24th of November, 1862, Johnston was assigned command of the Department of the West, which gave him nominal authority over two separate armies in a theater connected by poor rail lines across enormous distances. The arrangement was designed to fail, and it did.

  When Ulysses S. Grant crossed the Mississippi River southwest of Vicksburg in April 1863, the Confederate Secretary of War ordered Johnston to Mississippi on the 9th of May. Johnston told Richmond he was still medically unfit but would obey. He arrived in Jackson on the 13th of May to find two U.S. Army corps bearing down on the city and only 6,000 Confederate troops to hold it. He ordered a fighting evacuation the next day.

  Johnston then urged Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, the commander inside Vicksburg, to abandon the fortified city and combine forces with Johnston's army to outnumber Grant. Pemberton refused; Davis had ordered him to hold Vicksburg above all else. By late May, Johnston had gathered about 24,000 men but pressed Davis for more reinforcements before advancing, worried that stripping troops from elsewhere would cost the Confederacy Tennessee as well. Pemberton's army surrendered on the 4th of July, 1863. With the subsequent fall of Port Hudson, the United States controlled the entire Mississippi River. Davis offered a pointed epitaph for the campaign: a "want of provisions inside and a general outside who would not fight."

  Historian Steven E. Woodworth judged that Johnston "willfully misconstrued" his orders during the crisis, reading ambiguities in ways that suited his resentment of Davis. Johnston had never wanted the western theater command in the first place, and the recriminations that followed Vicksburg, traded publicly between Johnston and Davis, made a bitter feud into something approaching mutual contempt.

• 7. The Atlanta Retreat

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  On the 27th of December, 1863, Davis appointed Johnston to command the Army of Tennessee at Dalton, Georgia. The assignment was the result of a bureaucratic chain reaction: Bragg resigned after his defeat at Chattanooga, William J. Hardee refused the post, Davis had poor relations with Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee, reluctant to leave Virginia, eventually shifted his own recommendation from Beauregard to Johnston.

  Sherman began his Atlanta campaign on the 4th of May, 1864. Johnston's response was methodical and, to his critics in Richmond, infuriating. He prepared strong defensive positions at the approaches to Dalton, evacuated that city on the 13th of May, pulled back twelve miles to Resaca, fought briefly, then retreated again on the 15th of May. At Cassville, Johnston planned an attack; an unexpectedly flanking force, of unknown strength, appeared on his right, causing corps commander Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood to halt, and Johnston cancelled the assault. By the 20th of May, his army had fallen back eight more miles to Cartersville.

  Johnston checked Sherman's momentum at New Hope Church on the 25th of May, at Pickett's Mill on the 27th, and at Dallas on the 28th. In June, he repulsed Sherman's frontal assault at Kennesaw Mountain on the 27th. But the arithmetic was merciless. U.S. forces were within seventeen miles of Atlanta; Johnston had ceded more than 110 miles of mountainous terrain in two months.

  Davis sent Bragg to Atlanta in early July to assess the situation. On the 17th of July, 1864, Davis removed Johnston from command, just outside the city. Hood, his replacement, was forced to abandon Atlanta by September. Grant later wrote that Johnston's tactics in the Atlanta campaign were correct: anything that prolonged the war further "would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest."

• 8. Bennett Place and the Aftermath

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  The Congress passed a law in January 1865 authorizing Robert E. Lee as general in chief and recommending Johnston's reinstatement. Davis appointed Lee but refused to restore Johnston. Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and seventeen senators petitioned Lee to use his new authority to appoint Johnston directly, bypassing Davis; Lee declined and instead recommended the appointment to Davis. Davis, in an unpublished memo, wrote that his conviction of Johnston's "unfitness for command" had ripened "slowly and against my inclinations" into something "so settled" that he could never again trust Johnston with a field army.

  Nevertheless, Davis restored Johnston on the 25th of February, 1865. Johnston's new command was a collection of exhausted remnants. The Army of Tennessee, once formidable, had been shattered at Franklin and Nashville; only about 6,600 soldiers made it to South Carolina. Johnston also had roughly 12,000 men under Hardee, Bragg's force at Wilmington, and 6,000 cavalrymen under Wade Hampton.

  On the 19th of March, 1865, Johnston caught the left wing of Sherman's army by surprise at the Battle of Bentonville, gained brief tactical successes, and then was forced to retreat to Raleigh. After Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on the 9th of April, Johnston met Sherman at a small farm called Bennett Place, near present-day Durham, North Carolina. Over three days of talks, on the 17th, 18th, and the 26th of April, Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee along with all remaining Confederate forces still active in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The total came to 89,270 soldiers, the largest surrender of the war. Davis considered it an act of treason.

  Sherman's response to the surrender was to issue ten days' rations to the hungry Confederate soldiers, and horses and mules to ensure a harvest. He ordered corn meal and flour distributed to civilians across the South. Johnston wrote to Sherman that this generosity "reconciles me to what I have previously regarded as the misfortune of my life, that of having you to encounter in the field."

  Johnston published his Narrative of Military Operations in 1874, sharply critical of Davis and several fellow generals. The book sold poorly. His insurance business, however, built a network of more than 120 agents across the Deep South within four years. He served one term in Congress as a Democrat, winning the 1879 election with 58.11 percent of the vote, and was later appointed commissioner of railroads by President Grover Cleveland. He was buried next to his wife in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland; on the monument erected in his honor at Dalton, Georgia, in 1912, the Union generals who praised him most were nowhere named, but their verdict outlasted Davis's.