GENERAL JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON
Born at Longwood, Prince Edward County, Virginia, February 3, 1807
Died at Washington, District of Columbia, March 21, 1891
By Robert L. Taylor
When the restless spirit of Johnston took its flight from earth the South bade farewell to as brave a knight as ever shivered a lance “when knighthood was in flower.” His death following so quickly that of William T. Sherman, was a dramatic coincidence. They had fought a long and bloody duel—hilt to hilt and toe to toe, and the arena extended from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. Sherman advanced with sword and torch in the hands of his splendid army; Johnston met him with strategy and the stubborn resistance of his thin lines of gray; the duel ended only when the resources of military art were exhausted and the shattered remnant of Johnston’s weary columns was overthrown by Sherman’s overwhelming numbers. When the conflict was ended and the battle flags were furled, these two great captains met in the capital of the republic and shook hands across the bloody chasm. Sherman died in February, 1891, and Johnston, broken in health and feeble with age, was one of his pall-bearers, an office which he had also performed at the funeral of his friend, General Grant. A month later he joined the silent hosts to which these antagonists on many a field of glory had preceded him.
Joseph Johnston was the eighth son of Judge Peter Johnston and Mary Woods, of Virginia, whose Scotch ancestors had lived and prospered and passed away on the old plantation at Osborne’s Landing. The boy was a born soldier and foreshadowed his brilliant career, even when a child at his mother’s knee. The story is told that his father took him coon-hunting one night, and he became so interested in describing and illustrating military tactics to the negro boy who attended him that they became separated from the hunters, and fell so far behind that they could not reach them with their voices. Jo made the boy dismount and kneel on the ground with his gun presented, in imitation of a hollow square of infantry. Then he withdrew and re-appeared as a regiment of cavalry, charging down upon the hollow square; but his horse was not a war-steed and was totally untrained in battle, and suddenly shying from the squatted infantry, threw the cavalry regiment to the ground. His biographer, Robert M. Hughes, says, “of course he was wounded—he always was on every available occasion.”[1]
The growth and development of the lad increased his determination to be a soldier. So marked was his predilection that his father, who had served under “Light Horse Harry Lee” in the Revolution, gave him his sword, although he was next to the youngest son. Young Johnston treasured it, and kept it bright till 1861, when the tocsin of Civil War was sounded, and, like Lee, he drew it in defense of his native State, although, like Lee, he was opposed to secession.
GENERAL JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON