Second, key to the growing legend was Albert Sidney Johnston’s demeanor and unshakable sense of honor and fairness—attested to well before his death during a lifetime of service for the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederacy. In the bleak weeks before Shiloh, Johnston himself took full responsibility for a series of Southern disasters. When told by his staff that he was unjustly being attacked by the Southern press for his subordinates’ loss of Forts Henry and Donelson and the evacuation of Nashville, Johnston reported to Jefferson Davis, “With the people there is but one test of merit in my profession, that of success. It is a hard rule, but I think it is right.” Because the lesser ranked Beauregard arrived at Corinth with greater forces than those under Johnston, he selflessly offered him command of the entire Southern army at Shiloh. Beauregard later wrote, “I positively declined, on his account and that of the ‘cause,’ telling him that I had come to assist, not to supersede him, and offering to give him all assistance in my power. He then concluded to remain in command. It was one of the most affecting scenes of my life.”
Although his earlier career had been marked, like Grant’s and Sherman’s, with a string of professional and financial failures, Johnston had a well-known propensity to be magnanimous and charitable. He had resigned from the army to nurse his ailing first wife as she died from tuberculosis, and for a time attempted to raise his two children in isolation on a Missouri farm. His decade of politicking in Texas was characterized by repeated rejections of offers to run for state political offices. Despite distinguishing himself in the Black Hawk and Mexican Wars, his seeming lack of careerist ambition meant that he was without major commands until well into middle age. His dreary tenure as a Federal paymaster on the Texas frontier was known chiefly for his courage and honesty in safeguarding the transit of thousands of dollars—but offered little chance for acclaim or advancement. In the meantime his unattended plantation in Texas was nearing bankruptcy. When he was asked to lead an expedition against the Mormons in late 1857, Johnston led Federal forces safely through horrendous winter conditions, hostile Indians, and suspicious Mormons, and then avoided a shooting war through firm but reasoned patrolling outside Salt Lake City.
When the Civil War broke out, Johnston was the United States military commander of the Western theater, stationed in California. Some rumors circulated that he might be offered command of all Federal forces in the field. Yet he did not resign his commission until Texas had at last seceded from the Union—and then he refused to use his position in California to transfer Federal arms to Southern sympathizers. His “escape” to Texas across the deserts of the Southwest was a feat of courage and endurance, more so in that he deliberately sought to avoid conflict with Federal pursuers.
In short, the fifty-nine-year-old Johnston had a wealth of friends and contacts but had found almost no money or fame—suggesting that he had never used his offices for personal profit or notoriety. He was as well respected as Lee, but came across with a frontier accessibility and charm that was without aristocratic distance and formality. Southerners from all classes and regions—Johnston was born of New England parents, grew up in Kentucky, was educated for a time in the North, and lived variously in Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas—were enamored with him despite his propensity to resign jobs, lose money, fail in farming, and pass up promising political and military advancements. Just as martyrdom would later fit well with the pious Stonewall Jackson, and the nobility of the Lost Cause would characterize the long-suffering and noble Lee, so the Lost Opportunity found birth with the much admired Albert Sidney Johnston, in a way impossible with the others at Shiloh—the somewhat shady Nathan Bedford Forrest, the martinet Braxton Bragg, or the vainglorious Beauregard.
Third was Johnston’s intimate relationship with Jefferson Davis, who did much to protect his own record of ineptness by later attributing Confederate setbacks to the tragic loss of Johnston at Shiloh. On Johnston’s death, Davis announced to the Confederate Congress, “Without doing injustice to the living, it may safely be said that our loss is irreplaceable.” The two had known each other since adolescence when they were roommates in the medical school at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1821, been familiar at West Point, and subsequently served together during the Black Hawk War of 1832 and then again at Monterrey, Mexico, during the successful American invasion. Davis, as secretary of war in 1855, had appointed Johnston as a colonel and commander of the 2nd United States Cavalry Regiment stationed in Texas. On the eve of the Civil War, when Johnston arrived in Richmond after his miraculous escape from California, Davis made him full general and commander of all Confederate forces in the West, outranking Joe Johnston, Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee. “I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove generals; but I knew I had one, and that was Sidney Johnston,” Davis wrote, when he learned that Johnston had left Federal service and joined the Confederacy.
There was no doubt that Davis also stuck by Johnston out of long friendship and genuine confidence in his abilities. Shiloh, in Davis’s eyes, confirmed his original trust, proved his sniping critics wrong about Johnston, and of course became the subsequent basis for explaining away much of his own later ruinous conduct of the war. Because the postbellum Davis was an accomplished polemicist, prolific and long-lived, the Lost Opportunity at Shiloh garnered an important voice. Hours before he passed away, Davis still insisted to the end that he had to finish his memoirs and provide more detail about the noble character of his idol, Albert Sidney Johnston. Had Beauregard perished in Johnston’s place at Shiloh, it is more than likely that Davis would have remained silent about the consequences of his demise. Indeed, he probably would have been relieved that his flamboyant subordinate was at last gone.
A fourth reason for Johnston’s apotheosis was his own genius at repartee and impromptu speech, especially appreciated in a romantic society that valued wit and elegance. An entire corpus of Johnston’s aphorisms survives from his few hours at Shiloh. Many draw allusions from classical literature and reflect his earlier education—he read Latin well enough—and his love of dramatic adages. In the minutes before the battle, legend had it that he rode across the army yelling, “Look along your guns, and fire low.” When the first shots were heard overhead, Johnston calmly remarked, “Note the hour, if you please, gentlemen.” And as the army approached the battlefield, he shouted to his staff, “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” To Colonel Marmaduke, he shouted, “My son, we must this day conquer or perish!”—perhaps a spin on King Leonidas’s admonition to his Spartans at Thermopylae that on the evening of the battle’s last day they would dine in Hades. A few minutes later he advised General Hindman, “You have earned your spurs as Major-General. Let this day’s work win them.” As he rode down the line before the initial charge, he paused at the Arkansas contingent: “Men of Arkansas! They say you boast of your prowess with the bowie-knife. Today you wield a nobler weapon—the bayonet. Employ it well.”
More formally, his last proclamation before the battle resembled something from Napoleon or perhaps an oration from Caesar’s Gallic or Civil Wars, with its references to family, honor, and the homeland:
With the resolution and discipline and valor becoming men fighting, as you are, for all worth living or dying for, you can but march to a decisive victory over the agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate you and to despoil you of your liberties, your property, and your honor. Remember the precious stake involved; remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters, and your children, on the result; remember the fair, broad, abounding land, and the happy homes that would be desolated by your defeat. The eyes and hopes of eight millions of people rest upon you; you are expected to show yourselves worthy of your lineage, worthy of the women of the South, whose noble devotion in this war has never been exceeded in any time.
In the moments before he was killed, he shouted to his officers, “Those fellows are making a stubborn stand here. I’ll have to put the bayonet to them.�
� Earlier in the morning he had rebuked an officer burdened with Union booty: “None of that, sir; we are not here for plunder!” Then taking up a worthless tin cup, he added, “Let this be my share of the spoils today.” Perhaps his last words to the rank and file were, “I will lead you.” Unlike the unlettered Forrest or the pretentious Beauregard, Johnston revealed a noble eloquence in speech that had the effect of remaining with Confederates for decades after Shiloh—and thus also contributed to the foundation of the martyred hero.
Yet a fifth contributing factor to the miraculous reinvention of Johnston was his physical beauty and rugged physique, which characterized every contemporary description of the general. More than any other commander, North or South, the imposing Johnston looked the part of a general. He had none of the foreboding massive brow of Bragg, nor the dapper almost effeminate appearance of the diminutive Beauregard—much less the suspect shabbiness of the dour Grant and nervous Sherman. As elegant as Lee, he lacked the former’s sense of frailty, and possessed the physicality of Forrest without his sinister stare. Rather at six feet two inches, 200 pounds, and square-jawed, he appeared the epitome of Southern manhood.
Contemporary descriptions, while hagiographic, nevertheless reiterate that common consensus. Veteran of Shiloh Colonel Munford wrote that Johnston “was tall, square-shouldered, full-chested, and muscular. He was neither lean nor fat, but healthily full, without grossness, indicating great bodily strength. His bust was superb, the neck and head mounting upward from the shoulder with majestic grace.” After continuing with a detailed description of Johnston’s mustache, chin, nose, forehead, eyes, skin, and posture, he summarized Johnston as looking near-divine. Munford claimed that while mounted, Johnston was “centaur-like” as if his horse “had grown up part of him.”
Nor were such encomia mere postbellum mythmaking. Well before the war, on the eve of his Mormon command, the Northern Harper’s Weekly reported:
Colonel Johnston is now in the mature vigor of manhood. He is above six feet in height, strongly and powerfully formed, with a grave, dignified, and commanding presence. His features are strongly marked, showing his Scottish lineage, and denote great resolution and composure of character. His complexion, naturally fair, is, from exposure, a deep brown. His habits are abstemious and temperate, and no excess has impaired his powerful constitution. His mind is clear, strong, and well cultivated.
Later, another contemporary of the general confirmed the view:
General Johnston reminded us of the pictures of Washington. He was very large and massive in figure, and finely proportioned. He measured six feet two inches in height, and had flesh to give him perfect symmetry. His face was large, broad, and high, and beamed with a look of striking benignity. His features were handsomely molded. He was very straight, and carried himself with grace and lofty and simple dignity. . . . His whole appearance indicated, in a marked degree, power, decision, serenity, thought, benevolence. We thought him then at first flush, and thought it unvaryingly afterward, and think now, in the hallowing memory of his noble manhood, made sacred by the consecration of his thrilling and heroic death for the Southern cause, that he was one of the sweetest and most august men we ever met. His character was enhanced by pure nobility. We thought him an object of deep veneration; and, whenever we look at the familiar and majestic features of the great Pater Patriae, we always think of Albert Sidney Johnston.
Like Washington, Johnston looked the part of a heroic general. His appearance complimented the majestic manner of his death, his long career, and his nobility in speech, thus also contributing to the spread of the myth of the Lost Opportunity.
After the initial hysteria over the losses of Forts Henry and Donelson waned, Southerners began to appreciate—and more often exaggerate—Johnston’s almost single-handed efforts to force the issue at Shiloh. He alone had marshaled the army. He had overridden the objections of Beauregard, who panicked on the eve before Shiloh and urged a general withdrawal. In words reminiscent of Don Juan on the eve of Lepanto, who had similarly quashed the prebattle jitters of his generals with a brief admonition, Johnston, it was said, broke up the late-night parley with, “Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.”
In reply to worries about Grant combining with Buell before he could attack either, he was said to have remarked to Colonel Preston, “I would fight them if they were a million.” Moments before the firing started, Johnston broke up yet another meeting of his wavering generals with, “The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions.” And when Johnston learned of the inability of his poorly trained divisions to form up in Beauregard’s clumsy three-line plan of attack, he scoffed, “This is perfectly puerile. This is not war!”
The Johnston legend had both immediate and long-term effects on the Southern acceptance of their own dilemma. Few appreciated in the weeks after Shiloh that with the loss of Kentucky and Tennessee, the Mississippi was ultimately defenseless to a relentless and determined man like Grant. He, along with Sherman and quite unlike other Federal generals, thought in terms of strategic conquests rather than tactical victories. Southerners seemed blind to the fact that the grubby-looking pair—complete failures in antebellum civilian life—cared little for manners or tradition, or the gentlemanly conduct of war. Both instead counted heads and bullets, and then in tandem planned to kill off and wreck as much Southern manpower and capital as their ever-growing resources would allow under the guidance and sanction of a realist like Lincoln, who lived in a pragmatic universe very different from the mythic realm of Jefferson Davis. There was rarely a serious and sober Confederate assessment that concluded with the depressing truth that vast advantages in manpower, supplies, political leadership, and talent among generals gave the North an insurmountable edge in the West—and that ultimately the war was to be won or lost there. No Southerner ever thought to ask why an entire people might believe that their own salvation hinged on the survival of a single near-sixty-year-old man like Johnston, who had never led a large army into battle.
The death of the general that created the Lost Opportunity fed into the even more attractive—and far more pernicious—Lost Cause, or the larger Southern notion that a tragic mishap had ruined a majestic Confederacy, not the vast superiority of Union arms, soldiers, trained officers, and the moral edge of eliminating rather than championing slavery. Instead, losing for a noble crusade of self-defense was seen as morally preferable to using industrial might to devastate an outnumbered enemy. The postbellum emphasis on Johnston’s character, appearance, and witticisms was entirely in line with this even larger mistaken credo that in the Civil War, chivalry, traditional gallantry, and heroic romanticism should have meant something for the “better men” in a contest against the likes of the rough-looking Lincoln and his equally odious and suspect pair of Grant and Sherman. The former calculated his edge in men and matériel, and then systematically wore down Lee, while the latter envisioned a new war that had nothing to do with battlefield heroics but everything to do with economic power, food, transportation, and the heart of a nation’s spiritual and psychological resistance. Southerners apparently found comfort that their martyred Johnston was a better looking, kinder, more mature, and gentlemanly commander than anyone the North might offer—as if all that should have somehow translated into military advantage in a new war of the machine age.
The tragedy of Albert Sidney Johnston dying “at the moment of victory” at Shiloh established a dangerous precedent, and was soon followed by the corollary of Stonewall Jackson being accidentally shot at the climax of Chancellorsville, therein robbing Lee of his “right arm” in the weeks ahead at Gettysburg and allowing a dilatory Longstreet to “lose the war” on Gettysburg’s second day. Ultimately, the embrace of such “second day” scenarios, where victory won was turned into defeat only by a chance event along with a predictable refrain of “almost,” “what if,” and “if only,” made it difficult for the postbellum South to accept, or perhaps even understand, the verdict of the Ci
vil War—with unfortunate ramifications for the ensuing century. Since chattel slavery was outlawed at war’s end and the Union restored, the South often took refuge in the Lost Cause myth that the war had been fought solely over the remaining disagreement and principled issue of states’ rights. The perceived harshness of Reconstruction only added a patina of victimhood: with the Union reunited and all Americans free, what more did the North really want from a prostrate South?
Central to that fable of an aggrieved better people suffering for their principles was the requisite military side of the equation: the Lost Opportunity that in postbellum analyses of defeat swept away all rational social, economic, and military considerations and substituted instead the gallantry and genius of a few irreplaceable Southerners at a few key minutes. If the South, but for fate, could have defeated the North militarily, then perhaps its Cause was the more just after all. Yet if Confederate survival really was contingent on one landmark event, then a single Nathan Bedford Forrest put in independent command of a large army—something easily in the prerogative of Jefferson Davis—would have had far greater consequences on the war’s outcome than the tragic death of Johnston at Shiloh. But that “what if” of not utilizing Forrest properly involved the institutionalized stupidity that actually transpired rather than the romance that did not. Albert Sidney Johnston created a vast ripple at Shiloh that had a marked effect not only on the Civil War, but upon Southern culture itself. Yet it had far more to do with what was imagined than with what really did happen at 2:30 in the afternoon of April 6, 1862.
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