by
Mike Victor
Nov 28, 2016
The Internet has made so many riches available for free and on demand anytime, anywhere.
Like this biography of Joseph Johnston, the confederate general Sherman drove back from Dalton, North Georgia, to the gates of Atlanta, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who never much liked Johnston, fired him in the summer of 64, replacing him with Hood, who launched an aggressive series of attacks collectively known as the Battle of Atlanta.
GENERAL JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON
AGE 83 YEARS
A MEMOIR
OF THE
LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICE
OF
JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON,
ONCE THE QUARTERMASTER GENERAL OF THE ARMY OF THE
UNITED STATES,
AND
A GENERAL IN THE ARMY OF THE CONFEDERATE
STATES OF AMERICA.
EDITED BY
BRADLEY T. JOHNSON,
FORMERLY A SOLDIER IN THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA.
This delightful text is a gushing apology for Johnston, explaining that his careful, methodical retreats were part of a brilliant plan to draw Sherman deep into Georgia then destroy his army, far from his base of operations, tethered only by the thinnest of railroad supply lines. Hood's soft from defense to offense was all part of Johnston's plan that the poor general was fired right before he had a chance to execute it. According to the author (Johnston writing in third person through cover of a biographer?), this plan would have succeeded were it not for the fatal blow to morale that Johnston's firing represented. Oh, and attacking north toward Tennessee not only failed buy destroyed the southern army.
Johnston was no doubt a capable general who managed to face McDowell, McClellan, then Sherman and hold his own at some level, playing the cards he was dealt as well as could be expected, but he was overshadowed by a fellow Virginian and West Point classmate (Class of 1829) who was also born in 1807. This more aggressive classmate replaced him to command the Army of Northern Virginia after Johnston was badly wounded early in the war. His name, of course, was Robert E. Lee.
There is a footnote to all this that falls under the heading "You Can't Make This Stuff Up":
After the war, Johnston's conduct was praised by two unlikely men: Grant and Sherman. Sherman's commentary on his former adversary was so kind that the two men became good friends, such good friends that when Sherman died, Johnston served as pallbearer.
Unfortunately, the weather the day of the funeral was cold and wet and the elderly Johnston (13 years older than Sherman) fell ill and died shortly after the funeral.
In a very strange, indirect sense, Sherman killed his old adversary. Even dead, Sherman was dangerous!
I have excerpted below the text summarizing the campaign against Sherman. Enjoy.
The Georgia Campaign
[p. 115]
Johnston's plan was to strike Sherman as he was [fording the Chattahoochee River north of Atlanta] hoping to crush one of his columns before the other could aid him, and in case of disaster, he had the fortified position of Atlanta, which he had been preparing since June, for just such a contingency.
No one can now say that his whole campaign was not conducted on the best principles and with the highest generalship.
It was unjust in the extreme, to criticise his policy of retreat and fight, of fight and retreat. Lee in Virginia had been pursuing precisely the same plan since May, and had been forced back from the Rapidan to the James with no greater disparity of forces; and his movement met the entire sympathy and approval of the [Confederate] people and of the administration.
THE GEORGIA CAMPAIGN.
But for some inscrutable reason, by some logic even now unaccountable, there was a demand that Johnston should fight. He fought every day for seventy-four days.
That he should stop retreating. He did stop until his army was nearly surrounded.
That he should make a forward movement. That he should move around his adversary and throw himself on his communications.
Just at the point when he was about to declare decisive battle on his own terms, he was ignominiously relieved and Hood placed in command.
His removal was a shock to the military sense of the Confederacy. Lee, subordinate, patient, respectful, as he ever was, remonstrated in writing to the Secretary of War. He spoke openly, as he never spoke before or since, "That if General Johnston was not a soldier, America had never produced one. That if he was not competent to command that army, the Confederacy had no one who was competent." And he was firm in urging that Johnston be reinstated to command. He was relieved September 17, 1864.
Hood cut loose from Atlanta, carried out the programme directed by Bragg to Johnston in the preceding Spring, moved into Tennessee and lost his army.
On February 22, 1865, Johnston was directed by Adjutant-General Cooper to report by telegraph to Lee, at Petersburg, for orders. On the same day Lee ordered him to "Assume command of the Army of Tennessee and all troops in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida; assign General Beauregard to duty under you as you may select. Concentrate all available forces and drive back Sherman." ...
The Army of Tennessee, utterly broken up by the Tennessee Campaign, was coming into North Carolina by regiments and skeleton brigades, and there was hardly a vestige of the organization of an army left. But Johnston did what was possible. He drew together the fragments from Charleston, Wilmington, and wherever they could be laid hold on, and concentrated them near Goldsboro, North Carolina, to delay Sherman and prevent his junction with Grant; while he hoped that Lee might disengage himself from Richmond, join him, and they together might defeat Sherman.
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