RATING:
Joseph Eggleston Johnston. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Two classes of men were convinced that Joseph E. Johnston was among the greatest generals of the Civil War: those who served under him and those, including Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, who fought against him. Others, Confederate president Jefferson Davis foremost among them, believed his lack of aggressiveness cost him—and the Confederacy—victory in every campaign he led.
Military historians are divided in opinion. Some hold that, had Johnston received adequate support instead of criticism and interference from Davis, his careful, prudent approach to war-fighting, which substituted maneuver for battle, might have positioned the South to avoid unconditional surrender. Others condemn him in the harshest way they can: by describing him as the Confederate George McClellan.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831
Black Hawk War, 1832
Second Seminole War, 1835–1842
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
Civil War
Joseph E. Johnston was the only general officer of the United States Army to resign his commission and fight for the Confederacy. Fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee, the next highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to resign, was a colonel when Johnston had been a brigadier general. In theory, therefore, Johnston was the Confederacy’s senior ranking officer.
But the Civil War killed theories as prodigally as it killed men. Despite a glorious record of combat, Johnston was U.S. Army quartermaster general—in essence, the chief supply clerk—when he left. It was a fact that President Jefferson Davis used to justify listing him fourth behind the other full generals whose appointments he announced in the autumn of 1861. Samuel Cooper (who would never see combat), Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation to Joseph), and Lee were all senior to him. Thus Joseph E. Johnston entered the Civil War angry and unhappy, feeling the weight of insult and injustice, his working relationship with Davis poisoned from the outset, and his credentials—his very fitness—as a combat commander cast into deep doubt.
Like Robert E. Lee, Joseph Eggleston Johnston was born a son of Old Virginia. Lee was the son of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary War fame, and Johnston the seventh child of Peter Johnston, who had fought under one of Light-Horse Harry’s officers, Major Joseph Eggleston, during the revolution. The boy was born on February 3, 1807, in Longwood House, the seat of Peter Johnston’s Cherry Grove plantation near Farmville.
A prominent planter and a judge, the husband of Mary Valentine Wood Johnston—herself the niece of Patrick (“Give me liberty or give me death”) Henry—Peter Johnston possessed more than enough social prestige and political clout to obtain a nomination for his son’s entry into the U.S. Military Academy in 1825. The young man enrolled, having been given the best of the kind of preparation Old Virginia plantation life could provide: plenty of manly outdoor activity, including hunting (which developed horsemanship and marksmanship), a sense of tradition and stewardship, and a combination of home schooling and lessons at Abingdon Academy that were both elegantly steeped in the classics. Young Joe Johnston’s classmate Robert E. Lee beat him academically at West Point, placing second in the forty-six-member Class of 1829 while Johnston came in at thirteen, but his showing was sufficiently respectable to get him an appointment as second lieutenant in Company C of the 4th U.S. Artillery. And, once in the army, Johnston’s rise was faster than Lee’s. Promoted to brigadier general in 1860, he earned the distinction of being the first West Point graduate to make general officer.
In 1830, Second Lieutenant Johnston was assigned, with Company C, as a coastal artillerist to garrison duty at Fort Columbus, Governors Island, New York. Here he passed an uneventful year before transferring, in August 1831, to Fort Monroe, in southeastern Virginia. He and his company were assigned to reinforce the garrison so that it could resist what was being called Nat Turner’s Rebellion.
Just before sunup on August 22, a slave preacher named Nat Turner led other slaves in an uprising against their master, Joseph Travis, then fanned out into Southampton County, killing every white person unfortunate enough to cross their path. (Among those who narrowly escaped the rampage was fifteen-year-old George Henry Thomas, a Virginian who would fight steadfastly for the Union at Chickamauga, Gettysburg, and elsewhere.) By the time Johnston and Company C arrived at Fort Monroe, Turner had been captured and executed, but his “rebellion” had been the realization of every slave owner’s nightmare. Although his family owned slaves, Johnston professed a moral revulsion to slavery, yet he was retained with the rest of Company C at Fort Monroe largely to ensure that any further uprising could be quickly contained and suppressed. The assignment, in any event, proved to be a pleasant interlude, especially since he was reunited with Lee, with whom he renewed and strengthened the friendship begun at West Point.
In May 1832, Johnston and his company were sent to Illinois, where they were committed to service in the Black Hawk War. As in the case of Nat Turner’s rampage, the army was tasked with putting the lid on another “uprising,” this one led by a Sauk chief, Black Hawk, who refused to accept eviction from his tribe’s traditional hunting grounds east of the Mississippi River and had clashed violently with new settlers along its banks. Johnston was excited by the prospect of the mission, which put him under the command of fellow Virginian Major General Winfield Scott, but neither Johnston nor anyone else in Scott’s command ever faced Black Hawk and his warriors in battle. The entire force was swept by cholera, which killed about half of Scott’s thousand-man command by the time it had gotten as far as Chicago. With only about two hundred “effectives,” including Johnston, Scott pressed on to the Mississippi River, only to learn that Black Hawk and his band had been defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe in August. Having traveled some two thousand miles, barely escaping dread disease, Johnston returned to Fort Monroe.
He remained in this pleasant, placid service until 1836, when General Scott personally requested his service on his staff as he fought the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) in Florida. There were heated skirmishes—Johnston’s first taste of combat—but most of the campaign consisted of futile tramps through miserable swampland in pursuit of an ever elusive enemy.
In 1837, a treaty was signed with the Seminoles, who agreed to withdraw from their ancestral homes in Florida and resettle in Indian Country (modern Oklahoma and parts of adjacent states). With this, the fighting ended, and Johnston, seeing little future in the peacetime military, resigned his commission in March to start a career as a civilian engineer.
His West Point training stood him in good stead as he studied civil engineering, and by the end of 1837, he was employed as a contract topographic engineer aboard a small U.S. Navy survey craft commanded by Lieutenant William Pope McArthur. The peace brought by the treaty with the Seminoles proved fleeting, and, on January 12, 1838, at Jupiter, Florida, Seminole warriors set upon Johnston and the survey party he led. In the exchange of fire that followed, Johnston would later claim to have accumulated some thirty bullet holes in his clothing, and one bullet deeply creased his scalp, excavating a scar he would carry for life. One sailor in the survey party later reported that the “coolness, courage, and judgment” Johnston “displayed at the most critical and trying emergency was the theme of praise with everyone who beheld him.” Indeed, Johnston seems to have been exhilarated by this close brush with violent death. Although he was earning far more as a civilian engineer than as a military officer, he immediately resolved to return to the army.
In April, Johnston traveled to Washington, D.C., where he was commissioned a first lieutenant of topographic engineers on July 7. On that very day, he received an additional brevet to captain in recognition of his valor—though as a civilian—at Jupiter.
In 1841, Johnston was assigned as an engineer on the Texas–United States boundary survey, then returned to the East as the head of a coastal survey. While surveying near Baltimore, he met Lydia McLane, the daughter of Louis McLane, who had been a congressman and a senator from Delaware and had served in Andrew Jackson’s Cabinet as secretary of the treasury and secretary of state. Although she was fifteen years his junior, Johnston courted her, and they married in July 1845.
At the outbreak of the war with Mexico in April 1846, Johnston wasted no time requesting a combat assignment. General Scott welcomed him to the engineer staff of his Southern Army, which was preparing for its spectacular amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland march to Mexico City. His fellow engineer officers were P. G. T. Beauregard, George B. McClellan, and the ranking member, Robert E. Lee. Once the Veracruz campaign was under way, Scott assigned Johnston to command a regiment known by the Napoleonic name of voltigeurs (literally “vaulters,” called such in Napoleon’s armies because they were trained to vault onto the rump of cavalry horses and ride double with cavalrymen in order to move quickly on the battlefield). In Scott’s army, the voltigeurs were elite reconnaissance-skirmishers who operated far in advance of the main force. They were tasked with ascertaining enemy troop dispositions and, when possible, engaging and holding the enemy until the main force could arrive. In recognition of their elite status, they were issued special gray uniforms to distinguish them from blue-clad conventional troops.
In the opening phases of the Veracruz campaign, at the head of the voltigeurs, Johnston was wounded twice in combat but recovered in time to participate in the principal battles en route to Mexico City, including Contreras (August 19–20, 1847), Churubusco (August 20), Molino del Rey (September 8), and Chapultepec (September 12–13), where he was wounded by musket fire no fewer than three times as he led his men up the slope of this hill topped by a fortified “castle” on the outskirts of Mexico City. Having already been brevetted to lieutenant colonel for his earlier valor, Johnston was specially cited by General Scott as a “great soldier,” the general wryly adding that he had the “unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in nearly every engagement.”
His multiple woundings did nothing to sate Johnston’s appetite for violent combat, and when, after the war, he returned to military engineering, this time as chief topographical engineer of the Department of Texas from 1848 to 1853, he found the tedium at times intolerable. Seeking more action, he transferred from the engineers to the cavalry in 1855, only to ponder resigning his commission in 1857 as his friend McClellan had done.
But he stuck it out. In 1858, he was transferred to Washington, then served for a time in California, returning to Washington, where, in 1860, he was promoted to brigadier general and named Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army on June 28. His ambition was to use this new position, in which he was responsible for managing much of the military budget, as a springboard to becoming the senior officer of the entire army. With this ambition uppermost in his mind, he did his best to try to ignore the developing secession crisis. Whatever was happening throughout the South, he resolved to do his duty to the United States and its army as long as he wore the uniform. He was hardly what the press at the time called a “fire eater”—a vehement advocate of secession. He despised slavery, and he rejected the argument many Southerners were making, that the right to secede from the Union was implied by the Constitution. In any case, whether it was a right or not, he opposed secession. Yet he came to the conclusion, as did Robert E. Lee and other sons of Old Virginia, that Virginia was his “country” and that he owed his loyalty first and last to it. He determined that he would share the fate of his state, whatever it might be.
Winfield Scott, his old commanding officer, a fellow Virginian, begged Johnston to remain loyal to the U.S. Army. When he saw that he was not getting through, that Johnston did not intend to allow his army loyalty to trump his allegiance to Virginia, Scott turned to Lydia McLane Johnston, who was a Baltimorean, not a Virginian. When she explained to General Scott that her husband would never “stay in an army that is about to invade his native land,” Scott took a fallback position, asking her to persuade him to leave the U.S. Army if he must but not to join “theirs.” In fact, Lydia Johnston believed that Jefferson Davis would “ruin” her husband, but she knew it was hopeless to try to persuade him not to rally to the defense of his “country,” his Virginia. As soon as the state seceded on April 17, 1861, he presented his resignation to General Scott, leaving behind him in Washington virtually all that he owned, save for the sword his father had carried in the American Revolution.
Johnston arrived in Richmond on April 25 and called on Governor John Letcher to offer his services. Letcher told him that Robert E. Lee had arrived just four days earlier, at which time he appointed him commander of the state’s troops. After quickly consulting Lee, he offered Johnston command of state troops in and around Richmond. It was, Johnston recognized, a vital assignment, since Richmond, though not yet the capital of the Confederacy, was the capital of the South’s principal state and a key industrial and transportation center. As such, it was sure to be a prime target for Union attack. What is more, the city’s defenses were chaotic, and the situation cried out for someone to take charge. Johnston possessed the powerful command presence required to pull everyone into line.
While he threw himself into the work of military organization in Richmond, Johnston waited for the results of the Virginia Convention, which would decide on the final membership of the state army’s officer corps. Two weeks after his arrival in Richmond, Johnston was disappointed to learn that the convention had decided that Lee would be the only major general. When Letcher rushed to offer Johnston an appointment as brigadier general, he turned it down. Although he had left the U.S. Army to defend his home state, he now offered his services to the Provisional Confederate Army. It was not a decision based on Confederate nationalism but on a perceived command opportunity. Although the Confederate army offered nothing higher than the brigadier rank, Johnston understood that the Congress was about to pass a resolution elevating all brigadiers to full generals. He accepted the lower rank with the understanding that it would soon be raised.
After Johnston was formally commissioned on May 14, President Davis dispatched him to relieve Thomas J. Jackson as commanding officer at Harpers Ferry. Fifty-four-year-old Joseph E. Johnston was a distinguished and distinguished-looking officer, famed for combining valor with calm dignity and a compelling, charismatic personal presence. Davis hoped that he was just the man to work miracles at Harpers Ferry, but the president was about to learn that Johnston was not in the miracle business. Two days after arriving at his new command, he sent Davis a message declaring his opinion that Harpers Ferry could not be held against an enemy attack, at least not with the relatively small force he had available.
It was hardly what Davis or the Congress wanted to hear.
Johnston’s recommendation was to pull back from Harpers Ferry—let the Union have it—and instead use the freed-up resources to defend the Shenandoah Valley whenever and wherever required. Without a shot having been fired, Johnston was already proposing retreat. It rankled. However, in the end, Davis and his War Department agreed to allow him to pull back as far as Winchester, which he did behind a skillfully deployed cavalry screen that prevented Union forces from seeing where he had gone.
The maneuver would prove emblematic of Johnston’s strategic thinking. It would also ignite a debate about his fitness for command that would endure throughout the war.
For traditional military thinkers, like Davis, nothing was more important than holding and defending territory. Johnston, in contrast, believed that preserving the ability of an army to maneuver preserved its ability to fight, to do damage to the enemy army. Instead of tying down an army to a particular place, Johnston was willing to trade territory for maneuverability. From the beginning, he believed that defeating the Union states in straight-up warfare was impossible. The North had more people, more industry, more money. If, however, the South could stay in the fight, bleeding the North, the Confederacy just might outlast the Union will to continue the war. It was the lesson of the American Revolution, his father’s war. General Washington had well known that the puny Continental Army could not hope to defeat the military forces of the British nation, but if it could stay in the fight, it stood a chance of stretching the war will of British people and politicians just beyond the breaking point.
The question was this: Did Johnston’s vision of the nature of the Civil War demonstrate a truly advanced grasp of big-picture strategy? Or was he just insufficiently aggressive to defend the “sacred soil” of the Confederacy and bring the fight to the enemy?
Letting go of Harpers Ferry and consolidating in and around Winchester gave Johnston the room he needed to maneuver what was now called the Army of Shenandoah. The very first major battle of the war, at Manassas Junction near Bull Run Creek, would prove the wisdom of Johnston’s approach. By regarding territory as something to be occupied and relinquished at will, so that forces could be concentrated wherever and whenever needed, Johnston was able to rush his army to reinforce P. G. T. Beauregard when it became clear that Union general Irvin McDowell was leading an attack against Manassas Junction. Consistent with his practical approach to combat, Johnston, though senior to Beauregard, turned over to him the major responsibility for planning the battle because he reasoned that Beauregard, already on the scene, knew the terrain better than he. When execution of the plan threatened to come apart, however, Beauregard threw overall field command back to Johnston while he concentrated on rallying, guiding, and generally exhorting the troops. In the end, this approach brought a major victory for the Confederacy and an even bigger humiliation for the Union. It also meant, however, that Beauregard grabbed the lion’s share of the credit for the victory since he appeared onstage, as it were, while Johnston worked behind the scenes.
Federal cavalry at Sudley Springs after the First Battle of Bull Run. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Both Beauregard and Johnston resisted pursuing McDowell’s routed forces into Washington—and Jefferson Davis held them both responsible for what he deemed their lack of aggressiveness. Both generals would endure strained relations with Davis throughout the rest of the war, but while the conflict between Davis and Beauregard tended to be a matter of personality, that between Davis and Johnston was always over strategy. In both instances, the result was destructive for the Confederate war effort. As for the judgment of history on the First Battle of Bull Run, most historians believe that Beauregard and Johnston did squander an opportunity to do much more damage to McDowell’s army and to terrorize Washington in the bargain. There is, however, wide difference in opinion about just how costly aggressive exploitation of the Bull Run victory would have been.
Had he a freer hand, Jefferson Davis would likely have formally censured Johnston rather than merely criticized him for failing to follow up on the result of First Bull Run. But he dared not be too critical of a general who was tremendously popular with the people, his fellow officers, and the men under his command. Thus, in August, as Johnston himself had predicted, he was elevated to full general. That was the work of the Congress, and Davis did nothing to stop it; however, in the promotion list he submitted to Congress, he listed Johnston fourth, behind Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee, and ahead of only Beauregard. As the first senior officer (and only general officer) to resign from the U.S. Army to join the Confederate forces, Johnston believed he should also be ranked as the senior officer in the Confederate army. He never forgave Davis for what he considered a supreme insult, and this added significantly to the ill will that existed between the men.
Early in 1862, Johnston was assigned command of what the Confederates at first called the Army of the Potomac but would soon rename the Army of Northern Virginia. Its mission was to defend Richmond against Major General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign.
Once again, Johnston chose to avoid open battle whenever he could, making a series of strategic withdrawals that sorely tested Davis’s patience and nerve. Johnston allowed McClellan to approach within five miles of the capital. At this point, the Confederate president issued an ultimatum to the Army of Northern Virginia commander. “If you will not give battle,” he wrote, “I will appoint someone to command who will.”
Thus goaded, Johnston counterattacked at the Battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks) on May 31 and June 1, 1862. The result was very costly to both sides: 5,031 killed, wounded, captured, or missing among the Union troops, and 6,134 among the Confederates. Johnston halted McClellan’s advance but also fell back on the outer defensive works of Richmond. Among the Confederate casualties was Johnston, who, on the battle’s second day, was hit by a bullet in the right shoulder and then wounded full-on in the chest by a massive shell fragment, which knocked him off his horse. At first, it seemed certain that the wounds were mortal, as Johnston lapsed into unconsciousness. Surprisingly, he rallied, but it would be six months before he would return to a field command.
Davis, who was present on the field, ministered to the stricken general. Despite their deep disagreement on strategy, he showed genuine concern for the man. Yet he also took the opportunity to appoint Robert E. Lee, a far more aggressive general, in his place. Johnston approved of the appointment, partly because he believed that Lee was extremely capable, but also because he understood that Lee would essentially call for the same strategy he himself had advocated. When Lee asked for reinforcements and Davis eagerly complied, Johnston remarked that his wound had been “fortunate” after all because “concentration” is what he himself had “earnestly recommended, but had not the influence to effect. Lee,” he observed, “had made them do for him what they would not do for me.”
During Johnston’s convalescence from his wounds, he became a close friend of Senator Louis T. Wigfall, a leader of the anti-Davis faction in the Confederate Congress. Clearly, Johnston had decided to work politically against Davis, and Davis knew this; nevertheless—and even with his grave doubts about Johnston’s policy of strategic retreat—he was eager for the general’s return to service. Johnston was a popular hero and still highly regarded throughout the army. Davis believed that he could not afford to lose him, and when he was pressured to give Johnston a major command, he complied, assigning him to direct all forces between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River.
BATTLE OF YORKTOWN IN THE PENINSULA CAMPAINGN - APRIL 5–MAY 4, 1862
Although Johnston reported to his new assignment early in November 1862, he was still weak and would not be fully fit to command for some more months. He established his headquarters in Chattanooga on December 4, but while this put him with Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, the first problem he tackled was Vicksburg, Mississippi. Pointing out to Davis its strategic importance as the fortress by which the Confederacy controlled the Mississippi River, Johnston called for reinforcing Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton’s Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana, whose troops held the town. Davis, however, refused to transfer men from Lee’s theater. Thus, when Grant commenced his siege of unreinforced Vicksburg, Johnston recommended the abandonment of the city, so that Pemberton’s Army of Mississippi could join forces with the Army of Tennessee, outnumber Grant, and drive him off the Vicksburg front. Appalled by the mere suggestion of relinquishing the Confederacy’s “Gibraltar of the West” without so much as a fight, Davis did not bother to argue with Johnston. Instead, he bypassed him, ordering Pemberton to remain in Vicksburg and, from within, hold the city at all costs.
For his part, Johnston saw no reason to sacrifice to a forlorn hope those men still directly under his command. When Grant attacked Jackson, Mississippi, on May 14, 1863, Johnston, massively outnumbered, withdrew from this crucial supply link to Vicksburg. Grant’s troops overran the town and burned it, destroying an important industrial and rail center. The effect on Confederate logistics in the region was obvious. Perhaps even more devastating, however, was the impact on morale, which widely collapsed beyond even Johnston’s ability to rally his troops. Pemberton held on in Vicksburg as long as he could, but the destruction of Jackson made the outcome inevitable. The city fell to Grant on July 4, 1863.
In November 1863, Grant forced Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee out of Chattanooga and into Georgia. Bragg was relieved at his own request, whereupon Jefferson Davis offered his command to Lee, who refused. Senator Wigfall led the political pressure on Davis to give Johnston the command. Although Johnston already had jurisdiction over the Western Theater, heading up the Army of Tennessee would be a genuine field command, not a desk job.
Johnston was pleased to be in the field again, and he devoted much of the winter of 1863–1864 to preparing the army to confront Major General William T. Sherman’s advance from Chattanooga into Georgia and, in particular, Atlanta. Johnston believed the problem was to devise the most effective way to use his inferior numbers against Sherman’s much larger army. As usual, Davis wanted him to make a do-or-die stand, with the objective of keeping Sherman out of Atlanta at all costs. Also as usual, Johnston wanted to retain mobility instead of commit his forces to the static defense of a place. His principal tactic would be to use a portion of his army as a shield to hold Sherman while he counterattacked, whenever and wherever possible, with the rest of the army. In this way, he hoped to grind away at the enemy while wearing down popular will among Northerners to continue the fight. He reasoned that if he could prevent Sherman from taking Atlanta before Lincoln stood for reelection in November 1864, there was a very good chance that the president would be defeated and that the Democrat who entered the White House in his place would offer an acceptable negotiated end to the bloody conflict.
Given the dwindling resources of the Confederacy, it was perhaps a reasonable strategy, but it would require continual strategic retreat toward Atlanta, and this Davis could not accept. He sent Bragg, whom he had appointed his military advisor, to tell Johnston in no uncertain terms that the mission of the Army of Tennessee was to recapture the state whose name the force bore. Johnston replied that the army was too small and too depleted for that. Thus the stage was set for a strategic debate that continues to this day. Was Johnston’s policy of strategic retreat the best available approach to an all-but-hopeless situation? Or was he simply afraid to commit to aggressive, decisive battle?
As it happened, strategic retreat failed to have the effect Johnston hoped for. As he fell back toward Atlanta, he repeatedly set up strong defensive positions by which he intended to wear Sherman down. But Sherman proved to be a sophisticated tactician, who did not oblige Johnston by battering his forces against the Confederate defenses. Much as Grant did with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Sherman found ways to sideslip and maneuver around the positions Johnston took. To avoid being flanked, Johnston was repeatedly forced to pull up stakes and fall farther back on Atlanta. To be sure, his defensive stands were taking a toll on Sherman, but Johnston was also losing men, and while Sherman could replace his losses, Johnston could not. Moreover, Atlanta, the prize his retreat strategy put at risk, was not, in the end, an expendable piece of “territory.” It was a mighty industrial center and the central rail hub of the entire Confederacy. It was one of the engines that drove the war.
Johnston fought defensively at Dalton, Georgia, evacuating it on May 13 and falling back on Resaca, where he established a strong defensive position. Sherman had nearly one hundred thousand men available, Johnston about sixty thousand. He inflicted perhaps as many as five thousand casualties on Sherman’s superior forces in a battle spanning May 13 to 15, suffering 2,800 killed, wounded, missing, or captured before withdrawing to Adairsville and fighting a brief battle there on May 17 before falling back again. He turned to fight at Cassville on May 20, then retreated, fighting battles at New Hope Church on May 25, Pickett’s Mill on May 27, and Dallas on May 28. Casualties mounted on both sides; then, for the first three weeks of June, the opposing armies maneuvered more than fought.
It was astounding that Johnston had managed to stay in the fight against two-to-one odds. From his point of view, this was an achievement that offered the best hope the Confederacy had for something better than total defeat and unconditional surrender. Davis did not see it this way, however, and Lieutenant General John Bell Hood, one of Johnston’s corps commanders, fed the president’s discontent with a series of letters complaining that Johnston was a defeatist who was keeping his corps from making an impact against Sherman.
Although Johnston won a significant victory against Sherman at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, inflicting three thousand casualties while suffering no more than a thousand himself, his strategic retreat to the mountain had put Sherman just seventeen miles from Atlanta’s center, with Union troops menacing the city from the west as well as the north.
Davis once again dispatched Bragg to assess the situation. When he returned to Richmond, he told the president to relieve Johnston without delay. Davis was more than ready, and Hood replaced Johnston on July 17, 1864.
Where Johnston was cagey, always looking to preserve his army so as to remain in the fight, Hood was the bluntest of blunt instruments, impulsive, impatient, aggressive. Sherman was overjoyed when he heard that Hood had replaced Johnston. He knew the fight would be fierce, but he also knew that it would at last be decisive. Hood lost Atlanta to Sherman on September 2, then went on to lose much of the Army of Tennessee fighting at the Battles of Franklin on November 30, 1864, and Nashville on December 15 and 16.
Johnston’s departure from the Army of Tennessee had been sorrowful. Two of his subordinate generals, William Joseph “Old Reliable” Hardee and William Whann Mackall, went so far as to request to be relieved. Davis might have been more than ready to give up on Johnston, but most of the army and a majority of the Southern people were not. When Georgia “howled” under the scourge of Sherman’s March to the Sea, a popular outcry arose for the return of Joe Johnston. Davis could not bring himself to approach the general personally but instead reinstated him via Robert E. Lee, who personally asked his old friend to assume command of what was now called the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, as well as the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia.
Johnston accepted, but vast as the new commands sounded, there was really very little to take charge of. Only the Army of Tennessee, depleted as it had been under Hood, remained a considerable military force. Johnston used it at the Battle of Bentonville, North Carolina, on March 19 to 21, 1865, managing to catch part of Sherman’s army by surprise before he was overwhelmed by superior numbers—Sherman fielded sixty thousand men, Johnston twenty-one thousand—and retreated first to Raleigh and later to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he planned to make a stand.
But there would be no battle. Instead, word having reached him of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Johnston met with Davis and his Cabinet in the bedroom of a quiet Greensboro house as the members of the Confederate government paused in their flight from Richmond. P. G. T. Beauregard was present as well. Davis admitted that the situation was “terrible,” but he expressed his opinion that “we can whip the enemy if our people turn out.”
Johnston held his tongue until Davis prodded him. “My views, sir,” Johnston said at last, “are that our people are tired of war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight.” He told the president that the men of his army were “deserting in large numbers” and in the wake of “Lee’s surrender . . . regard the war as at an end. . . . My small force is melting away like snow before the sun, and I am hopeless of recruiting it.”
Davis solemnly turned to Beauregard. Usually given to rhetorical extravagance, he spoke simply: “I concur in all General Johnston has said.”
Joseph E. Johnston (left) with Robert E. Lee in 1869. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
With this, Johnston secured the president’s permission to negotiate with Sherman, the two meeting at a farm called the Bennett Place outside of Durham. They held three sessions together, on April 17, 18, and 26, 1865, at the conclusion of which Johnston formally surrendered the Army of Tennessee as well as all Confederate forces still active in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In total, it was a much larger force than what Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, nearly ninety thousand soldiers.
With the war over, Johnston moved to Savannah, Georgia, became president of a railroad for a time, then briefly ran an insurance business from 1868 to 1869. In 1874, he published his voluminous Narrative of Military Operations, a strategic and tactical analysis of the war that was intensely critical of Jefferson Davis and those generals who did his bidding. Returning to Virginia in 1877, he bought a house in Richmond and served as president of an express company. Two years later, he entered Congress as a Democrat but decided to retire from politics in 1881 after serving a single term. Fellow Democrat Grover Cleveland appointed him a U.S. commissioner of railroads in 1885, and he served until 1891.
The most frequently wounded general of the Civil War, Johnston proved as indestructible as his battered Army of Tennessee. He outlived Sherman, to whom he was ever grateful for the kindness he had shown his beaten army, feeding and caring for it after the surrender at the Bennett Place, and he proudly served as a pallbearer in Sherman’s funeral procession through the icy rain of February 19, 1891. Throughout the length of the procession, he walked bareheaded, and when a concerned member of the funeral party advised the old man to put on his hat, lest he take ill, Johnston responded, “If I were in his place and he standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat.”
Soon after William Tecumseh Sherman’s funeral, Joseph Eggleston Johnston contracted pneumonia. He died on March 21, 1891.