Shiloh, 1862 (20 page)

Johnston was born in Kentucky in 1803, the son of a physician, and studied at Lexington’s Transylvania College, along with Jefferson Davis, who was two years behind him. Both men received appointments to the U.S. Military Academy, and Davis developed
a strong admiration for Johnston during those years. In 1826 he graduated eighth in his class and served in the 1832 Black Hawk War as chief of staff for Gen. Henry Atkinson. In 1829 he had married Henrietta Preston, who soon contracted tuberculosis, and in 1834 Johnston left the army to care for her. After she died in 1836, he went to Texas and took up farming but enlisted in the Texas army during that republic’s war for independence from Mexico. His exploits became renowned. People retold the story of how Johnston waded into a fight between a mountain lion and a pack of hunting dogs, clubbing the lion to death with the butt and barrel of his rifle. He rose quickly in the ranks and became adjutant general, and later commander, of the Republic of Texas Army.

This nearly cost him his life, as it seemed to be a common practice in the Texas of those days for a man seeking command of the army to issue a challenge to his opposition, just for the hell of it. Such a man was one Felix Huston, a Texan via Mississippi, who had come to the struggling republic with 500 men, staking his fame and fortune on the outcome of the new independent country. When Sidney Johnston was named head of the Texas army, Huston promptly challenged him to a duel on trumped-up grounds, which Johnston—who despised the practice—accepted and named the time as 7 a.m. the following day, February 7, 1837.

No proper dueling pistols could be found so it was decided to use Huston’s giant horse pistols with foot-long barrels. The men met at the appointed time on a plain beside the Lavaca River where Johnston’s second lodged a formal complaint that Johnston had never used such weapons before, but Johnston “waived the objection.”

The duel was a very strange affair. If a man fired a pistol in a duel using hair-trigger weapons, often the sound of the report would
cause his opponent’s finger to twitch enough to set off his own pistol. Thus, relying on “his sense of moral superiority,” as his son put it many years later in a biography of his father, Johnston quickly fired first into the air, causing Huston—who was said to be an excellent duelist—to reflexively shoot wild.

At any exchange Huston could have declared that he was “satisfied,” but he chose not to do so, and the bizarre dance of death continued five times, with Johnston discharging his pistol quickly into the air and five times Huston’s shots going wild. On the sixth time, however, Huston finally caught on and shot Johnston in the pelvis, a wound from which doctors on hand declared he could not recover. Huston then approached the stricken Johnston and, of all things, apologized, before slinking back to his quarters for breakfast. It took Johnston many months to heal, but in defiance of the surgeons’ forecast he was once more able to resume his role as commander of the Texas army.

In 1843 he married Eliza Griffin and began a new family, settling on his plantation called China Grove. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, Johnston commanded the First Texas Rifle Volunteers under Gen. Zachary Taylor and fought at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. After the war he returned to his cotton plantation until, in 1849, Taylor, by then President of the United States, appointed him as paymaster to the U.S. Army with the rank of major. In 1855 Johnston was appointed colonel of the soon-to-be-famed Second U.S. Cavalry, which fought in numerous Indian campaigns in Texas and the Great Plains. The regiment became remarkable for the number of its officers who would become prominent in the Civil War, including Robert E. Lee, who was Johnston’s second in command; future Confederate generals William J.
Hardee, Earl Van Dorn, Edmund Kirby Smith, Fitzhugh Lee, and John Bell Hood; and the future Union generals George H. Thomas and George Stoneman.

In 1857 Johnston commanded a force to chastise the Mormons in Utah Territory, who were reported to have set up a religious government and were practicing polygamy in defiance of U.S. law. Beginning in 1847 some 30,000 Mormons had migrated to areas around the Great Salt Lake after being abused and run out of various towns in Illinois and Missouri. The newly organized Republican Party ranked polygamy along with slavery as an immoral and illegal sin and pressured the government to step in. Johnston managed to subdue the Mormons without serious bloodshed, for which he received a promotion to brigadier general and was appointed command of the Department of the Pacific, based at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

Abraham Lincoln had been elected President when Johnston and his family sailed for California in December 1860. Talk of secession was already in the air, but he had hardly unpacked when news arrived that Texas had seceded. Johnston deplored the notion of disunion, but, as in the great majority of cases where Southern loyalties were torn, he remained steadfast with his adopted state, which in those times usually commanded a higher allegiance than did the national government in Washington, D.C.
¹
On May 3, 1861, his resignation from the U.S. Army was officially accepted.

Ordinarily Johnston and his family would have sailed for New York, but that was complicated by the war. His older son, William Preston, sent a letter warning that if he arrived in New York
he would probably be arrested. Indeed, Albert Sidney Johnston was an influential and coveted officer, a fact everyone understood, from the President on down. The adjutant general had suggested to Winfield Scott that Johnston be promoted to major general as an inducement to remain with the Union, which was immediately approved by Lincoln, and a letter containing the promotion was mailed, but not in time for Johnston’s resignation.

Then, in Los Angeles, where Johnston had gone with his family after resigning, word was spread falsely that he was involved in a treasonous plot to seize arms from the U.S. arsenal and take over California for the Confederacy. This was clearly ridiculous, but the word soon came that federal authorities intended to arrest Johnston in California. This prompted him to put his wife and children aboard a ship, and then, on June 16, join up with a dozen other U.S. officers for a tortuous and harrowing journey by horseback across the southwestern deserts to Texas. Along the way they dodged various U.S. troops who had been ordered to capture them; were revolted by the rotting bodies of stagecoach passengers recently massacred by Apaches; nearly died of thirst; and were awed by the Great Comet of 1861 that suddenly appeared one evening after sunset and sparkled nightly in the skies above their wasteland trek. Johnston saw it as “a good omen.”

Johnston and his party reached civilization at San Antonio, two months and 1,500 miles later, and Johnston continued on by steamship and train to Richmond, which he reached in early September. There he was immediately taken to Jefferson Davis, who remarked afterward, “I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove to be generals, but I knew I had
one
, and that was Sidney Johnston.” Accordingly, Johnston was made one of the two full
generals in the Confederate States Army and named commander of Department 2, the Department of the West. He was 58 years old. The clock had begun to tick.

Now, after only a few months into his command, Sidney Johnston had become the object not only of scorn but of ridicule, yet he remained obdurate. “I observed silence because it seemed to me the best way to serve the cause and the country,” Johnston wrote Jefferson Davis from Decatur, Alabama, on March 18. “The facts [regarding Fort Donelson] were not fully known, discontent prevailed, and criticism or condemnation were more likely to augment than to cure the evil.
²
I refrained, well knowing that heavy censures would fall upon me, but [was] convinced it was better to endure them for the present … What the people want is a battle and a victory. That is the best explanation I can make. I require no vindication. I leave that to the future.”

Heavy censures aside, Johnston had more than enough cause to be alarmed. Two large Federal armies were converging on him, each larger than his own. After evacuating Bowling Green and then Nashville, Johnston seemed to flounder, beset, in the words of the historian T. Harry Williams, by “a fog of mental paralysis induced by the crisis he was facing.”

He seemed unable to understand the loss of his army at Donelson because he had ordered Floyd by telegram beforehand that, if it appeared he could not hold the fort, he must “get [his] troops back
to Nashville.” It did not seem to occur to Johnston that he had sent Floyd and his men into a trap, which Floyd himself had sprung.

Nevertheless, Johnston was with his army in Decatur, having marched it through the middle of Tennessee to the nearest railhead on the Memphis and Charleston, and was boarding it now on the cars for Corinth, Mississippi, 150 miles to the west. Johnston was afterward criticized by many—and continues to be by modern historians—for not putting himself in the Big Picture, that is, for electing to stay with a part of the army at Bowling Green instead of making his headquarters at some more convenient location the better to command it. In other words, these critics charge that Johnston was behaving more like a division or corps commander rather than the commander in chief of a department.

There is something to be said for these criticisms, since during the four months between the time he first arrived in the department and the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, Johnston had neither distinguished himself nor provided the sort of leadership that inspires men to battle. Possibly this was owing to his advancing age or to the arduous overland journey across the Southwest, but most likely it had to do with the immensity of the task before him. It couldn’t have helped that the supply of military arms and equipment was wanting, as was the supply of men. When Johnston asked Richmond for a number of trained military engineers, he was told there were only four of these people who were unassigned, and one was on court-martial duty! These day-to-day nightmares seemed without end, crowding out the time to plan strategy. What Johnston needed was a superior second in command to handle the mundane issues, but what Richmond sent him instead was General Beauregard, with his Napoleonic complex and outsize imagination for grand strategies.

Beauregard’s most shining characteristic was certainly not attention to detail; in fact, he was a famous delegator. He was most interested—often to the point of obsession—in fleshing out elaborate war-ending battle plans. Indeed, he had a flair for strategy, diagnosing upon his arrival at Bowling Green on February 6 that the army was posted in a salient that stuck out invitingly to any enemy who wished to attack its flanks. After a while Johnston sent him away to deal with the force at Columbus—i.e., its evacuation—but even from that distance Beauregard continued to bombard the department commander with plans and strategies for the conquest, or reconquest, of everything up to and including the Ohio River and St. Louis.

Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was among the most flamboyant and intriguing of the Rebel generals, beginning with his colorful name and rich Gallic heritage. In the early part of the war he was idolized throughout the South, known in the press as “the Great Creole,” hero of Fort Sumter, despite the fact that there was little heroism in turning the entire artillery defenses of Charleston, South Carolina, on a nearly helpless detail of Yankees hiding in the fort, which sat like a large duck at the entrance to the Charleston harbor.
³

Beauregard was born May 28, 1818, into a family that traced its Gallic lineage back 500 years. He grew up on a thousand-acre sugar plantation 20 miles south of New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish,
where French remained the common language and most of the Creole gentry actually
still
considered themselves French despite the fact that Louisiana had been purchased by the U.S. government in 1803. They tended to regard Americans as boorish parvenus and awaited the day when some new Napoleon would arise and return them to French rule. Meantime, they clung to their Gallic heritage and customs like bats to a cliff, commanding their slaves in French and educating their young men in Paris.