Joseph E. Johnston

Biography

Joseph Eggleston Johnston was born near Farmville, Virginia, in 1807. He entered the United States Military Academy in 1825 on the nomination of John C. Calhoun and graduated in 1829, in the same class as Robert E. Lee. He served in the Seminole Wars and was badly wounded in the Mexican-American War, and in 1860 he was appointed Quartermaster General of the Army with the rank of brigadier general.

When Virginia seceded in 1861 he resigned, the highest-ranking regular officer to do so, and joined the Confederate army. He was the senior Confederate commander at First Bull Run in July 1861 and led the army defending Richmond until he was badly wounded at Seven Pines in 1862 and replaced by Lee. His relations with Jefferson Davis were bitter throughout the war. Placed over the Department of the West, he failed to relieve Vicksburg in 1863, and as commander of the Army of Tennessee he fell back before Sherman in the Atlanta campaign until Davis removed him on 17 July 1864.

Restored to command in February 1865, he could not stop Sherman in the Carolinas. After Lee's surrender he negotiated with Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina, and in April 1865 surrendered the largest remaining Confederate force of the war.

After the war Johnston was president of a small Alabama railroad, ran an insurance agency in Savannah and published a memoir critical of Davis in 1874. He served one term as a Democratic congressman from Virginia from 1879 to 1881 and was later a federal commissioner of railroads under Grover Cleveland. He was an honorary pallbearer at Sherman's funeral in February 1891 and died of pneumonia a month later.