General Joseph E. Johnston's Bum Wrap - And How the Internet Can Set Things Straight…

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.

This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton - Outstanding Read!

This Hallowed Ground

by Bruce Catton

A Review

There are not enough superlatives to do justice to this book.  I read it as a teenager and bought it in a Washington bookstore for my son but ended up reading it again myself.  As many reviewers have noted, if you read only one book about the Civil War, read this. Bruce Catton has a lyrical poetic style that weaves colorful anecdotes with sweeping prose that makes about as much sense as anyone can of the horror of America's bloodiest war by far.
First published in 1955, before the civil rights movement entered into the consciousness of most educated Americans, This Hallowed Ground was remarkably prescient, referring repeatedly to the painful issue not just of slavery but of race and of the inevitable reckoning that would have to come if the "peculiar institution" were abolished once and for all.  Eight years before Martin Luther King was to deliver his "I Have a Dream Speech," Catton could see that almost a century after the Civil War, the United States remained a work in progress.
Catton avoids the pitfalls that trap many historians, such as a compulsion for detail that misses the forest for the trees, or a contemporary interpretation whose bias makes later readers wince.  When Catton drills down to a battlefield, he gives just enough detail to create a vivid word picture but is adept at zooming out and showing us how the battlefield fits in the campaign, and the campaign in the war, and the war in the history of America.  Long before Ken Burns' PBS Civil War series had been conceived (Burns was only 2 when the book was published), Catton peppered his narrative with extracts from letters and diaries of the ordinary men who had a front row seat to this extraordinary history.
Perhaps because of all the shouting going on in American politics today about what it means to be an American and the proper scope and power of the federal government, there was something eerily contemporary about the book's opening. Following arrests made in Baltimore, "when Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney issued a writ of habeas corpus to set one of these free, President Lincoln blandly ignored it... The Supreme Court had indeed been flouted, the Constitution had been stretched, perhaps even broken (depending on one's point of view), scores of people were being held in prison without due process of law... No matter.  Maryland was not going to go out of the Union."  And I could not help think of today's political attack ads when reading that "men who were whipping themselves up to the point where they would refuse to try to get along with one another were, at the same point in time, doing precisely the things that would bind them together forever whether they liked it or not. "  But for all the harsh words, today's acrimony has not spilled over into violence, as it did on the senate floor in the opening scene of the book with the  1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner.  But the compulsion of demonizing one's adversaries remains:  "All of the things that were slipping beyond hope of easy solution - ... varying interpretations of the American dream - all of these somehow might hinge on what was done about Kansas, so that the wrong phrase in an enacting clause could mean earth's best hope lost forever."
If Catton's work had been fiction, it would have been rejected for lack of plausibility.  Given the carnage of the war that was to come, why would volunteers be so eager to fight that "soldiers sent home in Indiana threatened to shoot their colonel"?   
How could it possibly be that the house chosen to host the surrender that would end this terrible war would be that of Wilmer McLean, a Virginian who found his Bull Run home too caught up in the war's opening battle, so moved to Appomattox?  Who knew that Grant not only owned a slave at one point but didn't care all that much about slavery one way or the other until about 1861?  Or that the two generals most instrumental to ending the war were both from Ohio and overlapped at West Point (Grant was a senior when Sherman was a plebe)?  Or that on the very morning that Sherman was to accept the surrender of General Johnston he received a telegram telling him of Lincoln's murder?  And the contrast between General Lee - "tall, gray, one of the handsomest and most imposing man who ever lived, dressed today in his best uniform, his sword belted at his waist" and the man who received his surrender "US Grant, rather scrubby and undersized, wearing his work in close, with mud spattered boots and trousers and a private's rumpled coat with his lieutenant general stars tacked to the shoulders" at a surrender ceremony where Grant had to borrow ink from the Lee and Lee had to borrow paper reflected staging too perfect for a good fiction editor.
His writing pulls you in and keeps you riveted such as with this description of Antietam:

There never was another day like Antietam. It was sheer concentrated violence... it had all of the insane fury of Shiloh with this difference:  at Shiloh the troops were green ... at Antietam the men were veterans and they knew what they were about... so that the dawn to dusk fight above Antietam creek went into the records as the most murderous single day of the entire war.  

Sherman's march to the sea is described in a way that rivals the far more biased and regional fiction of Margaret Mitchell:  "Smoke filled the sky like a gigantic ominous signal as Sherman's army pulled clear of the city [of Atlanta] and started for the sea… And so began the strangest, most fateful campaign of the entire war, like nothing that happened before or afterward. These federals were not moving out to find and destroy an armed enemy; the only foe that could give them a fight, Hood's army, was hundreds of miles off to the rear, and everybody knew it. They were not being asked to hurry; 15 miles a day was much less than these long legged marchers could easily make, and everybody knew that too. Their mission was to wreck an economy and to destroy a faith – the economy that supported the thin fading fabric of the Confederacy, the faith that believed the Confederacy to be an enduring creation and trusted in its power to protect and avenge."  The men were "conscious agents of this destruction; men who trampled out the terrible vintage of the grapes of wrath, led by an implacable general who was more and more coming to see a monstrous but logical destiny in his mission… For Sherman was not fighting and opposing army now; he was fighting an idea, knocking down the last shredded notion that the Southern Confederacy could exist as an independent nation, moving steadily and relentlessly not toward a climactic engagement but simply toward the end of the war."
The final days and aftermath of the Civil War are such well-trodden ground that it is surprising that no author before or since has really topped Catton's riveting description of the end:

Until this Palm Sunday of 1865 the word Appomattox had no meaning. It was a harsh name left over from Indian days, it belonged to a river and to a country town, and it had no overtones. But after this day, it would be one of the haunted possessions of the American people, a great and unique word that would echo in the national memory with infinite tragedy and infinite promise, recalling a moment in which sunset and sunrise came together in a street glow that was half twilight and half dawn.

Like a brilliant movie director, Catton pans his camera over the horrific cost and inevitable consequences of the Civil War in ways that make historical abstractions come alive:

Here and there all over the country where the mounded graves of half a million young men who had been alive and unsuspecting when all of this began. There would be more graves  to dig, and when there was time there would be thin bugle calls to lie in the still air on a handful of dust drifted down on a blanketed form, but most of this was over. A little more killing, a little more marching and burning and breaking and smashing, and then it would be ended.

Ended; yet, in a haunting way, forever unended. It had laid an infinity of loss and grief on the land; it had created a shadowed purple twilight streaked with undying fire which would live on deep in the mind and heart of the nation, as long as any memory of the past retained meaning. Whatever the American people might hereafter do when one way or another take form in color from this experience.

If Catton can be faulted, it is for a certain tendency to repeat but his prose is so lyrical, almost hypnotic, that he can be forgiven.  He also shares the compulsion of all historians to assign meaning to events, even if some things, perhaps most things, just happen.   Historians probably would not be historians if they did not discount the role of randomness, meaningless, and blind chance.  But I find myself so mesmerized by Catton's authoritative writing - at times he seems to have known the protagonists personally - that I find myself wanting to believe his sweeping, all-explanatory narrative.  

Military and Terrorism Deaths Under Republican and Democratic Presidents

5 February 2012

In 2006, I calculated that you are 19.7 times as likely to die in combat if you serve a Republican Commander-in-Chief versus and Democratic one, using data from 1980 to the present and adjusting military death rates (including terrorism and combat) for the fluctuating size of the military (which actually diluted the deaths under Reagan but increased them marginally under Bush).   Comparing this violent death rate per 100,000 military per year by presidential party of President made it clear that Republican presidents, despite all their cowboy bluster (or perhaps because of it) are far more likely to get you killed.  Some of my friends in uniform argued that that in itself is not sign of a failure, that the objective is to win wars, not only preserve lives, and there is a necessary utilitarian trade-off, but this puts Republicans on even weaker ground since it is hard to call the catastrophe that unfolded in Afghanistan and Iraq as victories for anyone, certainly not us since no critical national security issues required that level of carnage, and the Iraq war in particular was an elective, aggressive war started on false pretenses that failed to accomplish its stated objective (you cannot disarm someone of WMD he does not have). 
Tonight I decided to update those numbers, but to use a simpler methodology.   Using publicly available data reported by the Pentagon and compiled by the Congressional Research Office and icasualties.org I did a year-by-year tally of all military and terrorism deaths and created running totals and averages for the party of the president that year. 
Since 1980, 8,353 Americans have died in combat or from international terrorism under Republicans.
1,601 Americans died under Democratic presidents, most in the past few years in the two wars started by a Republican, but in fairness I tallied these deaths in the Democratic column, since arguably President Obama could have more aggressively ended the disaster in Iraq and not escalated Afghanistan.

Since there have been more years of Republican administrations during this time period, I divided the total deaths by party by the number of years in office and a remarkable difference remained:

This final chart is a bit difficult to follow, but simply takes all of the Republican years, in order, then creates a cumulative total by year, then does the same for Democrats.  This allows you to see that after 10 years of Democratic presidents, the total number of deaths was almost undetectable, but after 10 years of Republican presidents, the the better part of 1,000 Americans had died in war or terrorism (illustrating that this difference preceded 9-11 and is not simply a function of Republicans being in office longer (so having more time to have Americans die violently on their watch).  You can also use this graph to imagine - were these trends of the last 30+ years to continue, how many more Americans might be alive today if we had only Democratic administrations or if presidents of either party would read their Presidential Daily Briefs, never put troops in harm's way to look tough or win an election (Reagan sending Marines into Beirut in 1983 or Bush invading Iraq in 2003 come to mind), and have a rational foreign policy that is not so dependent on violence and the projection of violence.