RATING: INCOMPLETE
Albert Sidney Johnston. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Jefferson Davis judged him the Confederacy’s greatest general before the emergence of Robert E. Lee. Ulysses S. Grant believed him overrated. Through the years, Johnston’s reputation has seesawed, so that it is at least safe to say he is the single most controversial major Confederate commander to emerge from the Civil War.
Much of the controversy can be attributed to the unfinished nature of his career. He died in the middle of his one great battle, but that he died attempting what others would have considered impossible, mounting a bold offensive amid the collapse of an entire theater of war, hints at greatness. On the other hand, his willingness to entrust the execution of his bold and daring plans to others suggests a fatally flawed style of command.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
Black Hawk War, 1832
Texas Revolution and Aftermath, 1836–1840
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
Utah (Mormon) War, 1857–1858
CIVIL WAR
Battle of Shiloh, April 6–7, 1862
The three saddest words in the English language, it is often said, are “might have been.” As with all momentous events of great consequence, the Civil War is filled with might-have-beens, especially with regard to the outcome of the war for the South. Two Confederate commanders have long endured as subjects of intense might-have-been speculation: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston.
Some years after the war, Robert E. Lee himself reportedly voiced his belief that if he “had had Jackson at Gettysburg,” he would “have won the battle, and a complete victory there would have resulted in the establishment of Southern independence.” Jefferson Davis was even more emphatic about what the loss of A. S. Johnston meant. “It was,” he said, “the turning point of our fate; for we had no other hand to take up his work in the West.”
Yet there is a very important difference between Jackson and Johnston. When he fell at Chancellorsville, Stonewall Jackson had proven the potency of his genius, while Johnston, struggling to cover the vast Western Theater with an undermanned, under-equipped army, had just begun to reveal his powers. Davis, as well as many who served under Johnston, were convinced of his sovereign value to the cause, but Ulysses S. Grant, whom Johnston targeted for destruction at Shiloh, wrote in his Personal Memoirs of 1885: “I do not question the personal courage of General Johnston, or his ability, but . . . as a general he was over-estimated.”
Concerning Albert Sidney Johnston at least three facts are beyond dispute. He was assigned a vast and critical mission: to hold for the South the Mississippi Valley and beyond. He died with this mission unfulfilled. And, after his death, his reputation became one of the great speculative controversies of the war.
Albert Sidney Johnston was the son of Kentucky’s ragged frontier. When he was born on February 2, 1803, the Mason County village of Washington had yet to evolve into even a hardscrabble farming community. It was as yet a wilderness cluster of cabins huddling around a stockade fort raised to defend against the Shawnee and other hostiles determined to resist the incursion of white settlement. Men fed their families not with the produce of the earth, but with game on paw, wing, and hoof. It was a place that demanded wit, muscle, courage, will, and a talent for getting by on very little. This made it the ideal environment for breeding the leader of a hard-pressed army of rebellion.
Of course, Albert Sidney’s parents had no intention of raising a family of rebels. John Johnston was a skilled physician, whose own father had distinguished himself fighting in the American Revolution. The doctor was a New Englander by birth, hailing from Salisbury, Connecticut, and was among the many who saw in the West a way of twining his family’s future with the future of the nation. He quickly became prominent in Washington, Kentucky, developing a large practice and earning a seat on the local governing body, the board of trustees.
In this hard place, it proved beyond his medical ability to save his first wife, who succumbed to sickness in 1793. He remarried the following year, to another transplanted New Englander, Abigail Harris, who bore him four children before the birth of her last, Albert Sidney. But it was a hard place, and in the boy’s third year of life, his mother died.
Without a mother, it was his father and his oldest sister who raised him up, kept him safe, and saw to it that he received an education well above the frontier standard. While he attended private school through the college preparatory stage, he was also encouraged to indulge an intensely competitive love of riding and hunting, as well as athletic contests with local boys. He grew into a strapping young man of over six feet in height and was the object of admiration throughout the district. John Johnston sent him off to Transylvania College in Lexington, hoping that he would follow in his footsteps and become a physician. There he met fellow student Jefferson Davis, and there he also grew restless in the study of medicine and asked his father to help him obtain an appointment to West Point.
He enrolled in 1822 (Davis would follow two years later) and earned a reputation for satisfactory if not exceptional academic performance. Far more outstanding was his soldierly bearing, the warmth of the friendships he formed, and the sense he created among the other cadets that he was a natural and irresistible leader. He possessed, as if inborn, what soldiers call “command presence,” and while a few others overtook him academically (he would graduate eighth in the forty-one-cadet Class of 1826), it was he who was selected as adjutant in his fourth year, the highest honor a cadet can attain.
Even before he had entered West Point, Johnston excelled at mathematics, and this, coupled with his high class standing, should have propelled him into an assignment in the artillery, second only to the Corps of Engineers in attracting the top academy graduates. But he chose the infantry instead, believing this branch would give him wider scope as a tactician—another of his classroom passions—and, even more important, would offer greater opportunity for higher and more rapid advancement. So strong was this belief that he even turned down an invitation to join Winfield Scott’s personal staff.
Having made his decision, he was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Infantry. To his chagrin, for the next eight years he did not budge from his initial commissioned rank. Such was the nature of the diminutive U.S. Army at peace.
Johnston served in New York for a time before being transferred to Jefferson Barracks at St. Louis, Missouri. He soon met Henrietta Preston, a Louisville belle and the daughter of William Preston, veteran of the American Revolution and prominent in Louisville society and politics; his son, also named William, would become a general in the Confederate forces. The couple married on January 20, 1829, which must have brought some relief to the monotony of garrison life, but it was not until the outbreak of the Black Hawk War in 1832 that a genuine career breakthrough seemed to be in the offing.
Assigned as chief of staff, aide-de-camp, and assistant adjutant general to Brevet Brigadier General Henry Atkinson, commander of a regiment sent to put down Black Hawk’s “uprising,” Johnston yearned for combat. As the general and the regiment prepared for transportation by steamboat up the Mississippi, the young staff officer gained valuable hands-on experience in support and logistics. The trip itself, however, was uneventful, and neither Johnston nor the rest of the regiment would participate in active combat. They arrived at the confluence of the Bad Axe and Mississippi Rivers in time to observe elements of the U.S. Army and local militia massacre members of Black Hawk’s “British Band” who sought nothing more than to surrender. For Johnston, it was a disheartening, disturbing, and depressing maiden battle.
Discouraged with army life, deeply in debt, seeing no realistic hope for promotion, and learning that his wife had fallen ill with consumption, Johnston resigned his commission in 1834 to return to Kentucky and look after her. It proved to be a prolonged death watch. Henrietta Preston succumbed to her disease in 1836. Their son, William Preston Johnston, would come of age in time to serve as a colonel in the Confederate Army.
To the widower, debt ridden and devoid of prospects, life looked bleak. He sought escape in revolutionary Texas, enlisting later in the year as a private in the Texas army. The Texas Revolution had been won with Santa Anna’s defeat at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, but the Mexican government repudiated the treaty signed under duress and made noises about its intention to reconquer the Lone Star Republic. Within a month of his arrival in Texas, Johnston was embraced by President Sam Houston, who jumped him in rank from private to major and appointed him his personal aide-de-camp. On August 5, 1836, he was promoted to colonel and named adjutant general of the Republic of Texas Army, and on January 31, 1837, Houston named him the army’s senior brigadier general, with overall command of the entire force.
The promotion vaulted Johnston over Brigadier General Felix Huston, who accused him of attempting to “ruin his reputation” by accepting the appointment. Honor and duty were uppermost in Johnston’s hierarchy of values, but he did not believe in fighting duels to defend the former, yet, in this case, he believed that the latter—duty—dictated that he accept the challenge. Failing to do so, he feared, would sacrifice credibility with his troops and, with it, his authority to command. The two men met with pistols on the “field of honor” at dawn on February 7, 1837. Accounts vary as to precisely what happened. According to some, Johnston refused to fire on Huston, who, having no such scruples himself, aimed, shot, and hit Johnston in the right hip. Others insist that both men fired repeatedly, exchanging as many as four shots without any finding its mark. On the fifth shot, Johnston was hit in the right hip (some accounts describe it as the pelvis), the round apparently passing through and through without striking bone. It is unclear whether Johnston recovered sufficiently and in time to assume active command as senior brigadier general, but on December 22, 1838, the second president of the Republic of Texas, Mirabeau B. Lamar, appointed him secretary of war.
The appointment thrilled Johnston. It looked certain that Mexico was about to make good on its threat to invade Texas with the object of reclaiming it, and some five thousand Mexican troops had assembled on the border at Matamoros and Saltillo. After leading a campaign against hostile Indians in northern Texas in 1839, Johnston organized the border defenses. But early in 1840, the Mexican government recalled its troops from the border, and President Lamar indicated his unwillingness to further press any Texas grievance against Mexico. Frustrated, bored, and seeing as little opportunity in the Texas army as he had had in the U.S. Army, Johnston resigned as secretary of war in February 1840 and was back in Kentucky by May.
Johnston had managed to put together a small amount of money during his time in Texas, which he now used to finance a Kentucky land speculation scheme. It quickly blew up in his face, and, once again, he found himself heavily burdened by debt. His cares were somewhat relieved by a budding romance with Eliza Griffin, the twenty-three-year-old cousin of his late wife, “a dazzling beauty of the Spanish type,” according to a friend of Johnston’s, and an accomplished singer and painter. They married in October 1843.
The couple struggled, living mostly on Eliza’s funds, with Johnston growing increasingly desperate until, once again, war offered a way out. When Mexican forces attacked Zachary Taylor’s army on the Texas border in April 1846, Johnston’s first thought was to renew his commission in the Army of the Republic of Texas. Discovering that it had been voided with the annexation of Texas to the United States, he sought a new commission in the regular U.S. Army. Unable to obtain this, he secured a commission as colonel of the 1st Texas Rifle Volunteers, which were subsequently attached to Taylor’s forces.
He assumed command in time to see action in the Battle of Monterrey (September 21–24, 1846), but the six-month enlistments of his short-term volunteers were set to expire just before then. Although he persuaded a handful of his men to remain and fight under him, he was essentially a colonel without a command. At the last minute, he wrangled an appointment as inspector general of volunteers and, in this capacity, saw action at Monterrey and at Buena Vista (February 22–23, 1847). At Monterrey, he distinguished himself in spectacular fashion. Without a command of his own, save for the handful of volunteers who had chosen to fight by his side, Johnston was free to employ himself on the field wherever he saw fit. Noting that an Ohio regiment was in danger of being routed by Mexican lancers, Johnston rallied many of the retreating men, who had taken refuge in a corn-field. Re-forming them into an effective line of fire, he personally led a counterattack against the pursuing lancers, driving them back. Joseph Hooker, a captain in the war with Mexico and destined to be a Union general, gave Johnston credit for saving “our division . . . from a cruel slaughter. . . . The coolness and magnificent presence . . . displayed . . . left an impression on my mind that I have never forgotten.” Jefferson Davis, commanding the Mississippi Rifles at Monterrey, praised Johnston’s “quick perception and decision” and called them the characteristics of “military genius.”
Despite his brilliance at Monterrey and, later, at Buena Vista, Johnston was not commissioned in the regular army, and he left Mexico when his term of service in the volunteers expired. He settled with his wife in Brazoria County, Texas, on a plantation he called China Grove, which he struggled to coax into profitable productivity. Once again, however, penury and despair encroached, so that when his former commanding officer, Zachary Taylor, having been elected president of the United States in November 1848, offered him a regular U.S. Army commission as a major in December 1849, he took it. He took it, even though the position—paymaster—was hardly one he relished. His assignment was to service the far-flung military outposts on the Indian frontier of Texas. It was dangerous work, and it was grueling. During each of the five years he held the post of paymaster, he traveled more than four thousand miles, transporting, accounting for, and distributing pay.
Battle of Buena Vista during the U.S.-Mexican War as painted by Carl Nebel and published in The War between the United States and Mexico, Illustrated (1851).
In 1855, Jefferson Davis, serving as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, arranged for Johnston to be named commanding colonel of the newly authorized 2nd U.S. Cavalry with Robert E. Lee as his second in command. Indeed, for this elite regiment, Davis cherry-picked Southern officers he believed would break with the U.S. Army in the event of a civil war. In effect, Davis was laying the foundation on which an army of rebellion might be quickly raised.
In 1856, Johnston was also named commanding officer of the Department of Texas, and the following year he was tasked with leading a contingent of 2,500 troops from Texas to suppress a Mormon uprising in Utah after the so-called Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormon zealots had killed 123 non-Mormon settlers. Against all expectation, Johnston proved to be a model of restraint in dealing with the Mormons and, without further bloodshed, was instrumental in establishing, pursuant to President James Buchanan’s orders, a non-Mormon government that restored federal authority in the territory. In recognition of his service, he received a brevet promotion to brigadier general late in 1857. Some even believed his display of diplomacy warranted something more, and his name was bandied about as a possible nominee for president on the Democratic ticket for 1860. Protesting that others were “more capable and more fit” for the office, he put a quick end to the talk.
Johnston commanded the Department of Utah from 1858 to 1860, returned briefly to Kentucky, and then, on December 21, 1860, sailed to California to assume his new command as head of the Department of the Pacific. As war clouds gathered, he sorted out his loyalties. Opposed to secession, he was nevertheless a believer in the rightness of slavery, and he decided that any attempt to end the “peculiar institution” by federal force constituted tyranny and invasion. Still, when Southern sympathizers called on him at his San Francisco headquarters to ask for his cooperation in capturing strategic facilities if and when war erupted, Johnston replied that he intended to “defend the property of the United States with every resource at my command, and with the last drop of blood in my body.” Similarly, when Governor John Downey of California questioned him about his intentions, Johnston replied that he had “spent the greater part of his life” in service to his country and “while I hold her commission I shall serve her honorably and faithfully. I shall protect her public property, and not a cartridge or percussion-cap shall pass to any enemy while I am here as her representative.”
In the end, it was General-in-Chief Winfield Scott who made the first move to sever Johnston from the army. Although he believed Johnston was an honorable man, he knew which way his cultural and political allegiances leaned, and he sent Brigadier General Edwin Sumner to relieve Johnston as commander of the Department of the Pacific, ordering him to leave California and to report to Washington. Instead of following that order, however, Johnston resigned his commission shortly after news reached him that Texas had seceded from the Union on February 1, 1861. He moved to Los Angeles and took up residence with some relatives. Remaining there until May, when the War Department officially accepted his resignation, Johnston fled likely arrest by local Union officials, enlisted as a private in the pro-Confederate Los Angeles Mounted Rifles, and rode with them to Texas and the Confederate Territory of Arizona, which he reached on July 4, 1861. From here, he set out on the long journey east to Richmond, Virginia, arriving about September 1, 1861.
Welcoming Johnston to the capital, President Davis informed him that he had been named one of the first five full generals in the Provisional Army of the Confederacy and held rank second only to Samuel Cooper. His assignment, Davis told him, was to command Military Department Number 2—the Western Department—which encompassed Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and western Mississippi.
The daunting mission that faced him was to raise, organize, and command the Army of Mississippi, which was charged with the defense of Confederate territory stretching from the Mississippi River to Kentucky and the Allegheny Mountains. To do this, he was allotted no more than twenty thousand troops, about half of whom lacked weapons, save for whatever rifles and shotguns they might themselves own. As one of his aides put it, Johnston “had no army.” After pressing President Davis for support, he received reinforcements led by Braxton Bragg, but the total number of troops available to Johnston never exceeded fifty thousand. When he asked for more, Davis instructed an aide to reply that nothing could be done for him and that he had to “rely on his own resources.”
As if a shortage of manpower and equipment were not a sufficient handicap to performing what was, in fact, a hopeless mission, Johnston was instructed not to openly violate Kentucky’s avowed neutrality. This meant that all-important river defenses had to be placed within Tennessee, so that the two key forts, Henry (on the Tennessee River) and Donelson (on the Cumberland) were far from ideally sited. Vulnerable, the forts were lost in February 1862—Fort Henry on the 6th and Fort Donelson on the 16th. Although Johnston had had little choice about placement of the forts and was also compelled to build them hastily, he was showered with blame for their fall and for the consequences of their fall—the withdrawal of Confederate forces from Kentucky and middle Tennessee, and the loss of Nashville to Union occupation on February 25.
To demands from the press and some politicians that he fire Johnston, Jefferson Davis replied, “If he is not a general, we had better give up the war, for we have no generals.” For his part, Johnston accepted the blame for the reversals in the West, writing to the president that the “test of merit in my profession with the people is success. It is a hard rule, but I think it is right.”
Johnston accepted blame for the fall of the river forts, but he refused to concede that his theater had been lost. His plan was to rapidly consolidate as much of his forces from around the theater as he possibly could, to accomplish this before the enemy could consolidate his own, and to make a surprise attack on whatever portion of the Union forces presented itself as vulnerable. At this point he was joined by P. G. T. Beauregard, with whom he concentrated his forces at Corinth, Mississippi. Ascertaining that Grant was camped at Pittsburg Landing on the west bank of the Tennessee River near a place called Shiloh, Johnston resolved to mount a massive surprise attack before Grant’s Army of the Tennessee could be joined by Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio.
It was a bold, even brilliant idea, and its prospects for success were multiplied by Grant’s unsuspecting assumption that Johnston’s forces were in no shape to launch an offensive. If the very idea of the attack at Shiloh vindicates Jefferson Davis’s lofty appraisal of Johnston, the manner in which Johnston executed it reveals his greatest flaw as a commander. It was a failing he shared with no less a figure than Robert E. Lee. Like Lee, Johnston saw his role as strategic, and he accordingly left the tactical execution of his strategy to his subordinates. Like Lee, he avoided issuing direct, detailed orders and instead drew up a strategic outline. He relied on Beauregard to fill in the operational details and make it work.
Beauregard, it turned out, was not up to the assignment.
Ordered to advance on April 2, Beauregard should have executed a swift and stealthy movement that would ensure the preservation of surprise. Instead, lack of detailed planning and follow-through supervision resulted in lines of march that crossed and recrossed one another, creating a snarl of confusion and delay. The attack was supposed to be made on April 4, but the army was not in position until April 5. Both of Johnston’s subordinates, Beauregard and Braxton Bragg, advised their commanding officer to call off the operation. They were convinced that the snags, the noise, the delays had surely been more than enough to alert the Union forces in the area to the army’s presence. Although they calculated that the opposing forces were evenly matched at about fifty thousand men each (Grant actually fielded about forty-two thousand), Beauregard and Bragg assumed that Grant, expecting the attack, had entrenched his forces “to their eyes,” making for an impregnable objective. Moreover, undisciplined troops had consumed five days’ rations in just three. They were hungry and probably in no condition to give their best.
Johnston listened, hearing his generals out, then calmly replied: “I would fight them if they were a million.”
It was not bravado or arbitrary obstinacy that motivated the remark, but a cool, calculated military assessment. This attack, Johnston had concluded, no matter how risky, was the only opportunity he had to save the army and hold on to the Western Department theater.
The attack on Shiloh, April 6, 1862, began with breathtaking success. Grant had taken no defensive precautions whatsoever, and his encampment was soon overrun. Johnston, who had left the detailed planning and execution to Beauregard in the run-up to battle, now appeared everywhere on the battlefield, personally rallying, forming up, and leading troops.
By midday, victory seemed clearly within grasp. That is when Johnston’s troops encountered a pocket of intense, unyielding Union resistance they dubbed the “Hornets’ Nest.” In the initial attack, the Union soldiers had seemed to melt away. Now, at the Hornets’ Nest, wave after Confederate wave broke and fell. Seeing his troops retreat from this redoubt, Johnston dispatched an aide to General John C. Breckin-ridge to re-form his men and get them to return to the attack. Breckinridge personally rode back to Johnston to tell him that, try as he might, he could not get one of his regiments forward.
“Then I will help you,” Johnston quietly replied.
In company with Breckinridge, he rode up to the reluctant regiment and cantered along the line. As he rode slowly by—oblivious to the fire around him—he touched each soldier’s bayonet, as if to anoint their blades. “These,” he said in a voice just loud enough to be heard, “will do the work. . . . Men, they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet.” Reaching the end of the line, he turned in his saddle. “I will lead you,” he said.
And so they all swept forward, fired up, pressing forward behind their general—who, suddenly, reeled in his saddle.
Johnston’s aide, Isham G. Harris, galloped up, catching the general’s shoulder to keep him from falling. Are you wounded? he asked.
“Yes, and I fear seriously.”
Harris and others nearby lowered Albert Sidney Johnston from his horse. Harris frantically felt of his commander, searching for a wound, but he could find none. And yet the general slipped rapidly away. Only after he had died was it discovered that a bullet had entered behind his right knee, severing his popliteal artery. He bled out rapidly into his high cavalry boot, which concealed the wound and the volume of blood it produced. More than likely, given the location of the wound and his position when it was sustained, Johnston had been the victim of friendly fire.
BATTLE OF SHILOH - APRIL 6, 1862
P. G. T. Beauregard was so confident at the end of the day on April 6, 1862, that he reported to Richmond a great victory that had come, tragically, at the loss of the commanding general. In fact, without Johnston to lead, the battle was lost the following day. At the time of his death, Davis considered Albert Sidney Johnston the best general he had. Even after the emergence of Robert E. Lee some two months later in the war, Davis continued to rate Johnston as indispensable. He would attribute the collapse of the Confederate West to his loss.