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Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography. By Craig L. Symonds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Craig L. Symonds offers a history of Joseph E. Johnston that is more than a battle by battle look at one of the most controversial Confederate Civil War Generals. In Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography Symonds sets out to correct the misinterpretations and outright hostility towards Johnston and his legacy. He asserts that Johnston should be one of the most celebrated Confederate Generals, yet there is only one memorial in the entire South dedicated to him. Symonds believes that Johnston’s fallout with President Jefferson Davis led to “their mutual distrust and suspicion,” which in turn led to the collapse of the Confederate’s western campaign. Symonds’ biography of Johnston reveals that he is neither “Retreatin’ Joe” nor the tragic hero of South; instead, he is a gifted, but flawed, general.

Johnston was the first to graduate in the history of the Military Academy at West Point to be promoted to general in the regular army. His rise in the U.S. Army proved slow and frustrated him. During the Mexican American War, he received two brevet promotions; he thought this earned him a colonel position, but the army refused to accept this. The slowness of his promotions and the frustration of his career ambitions would be a lifelong struggle for Johnston. Even as a member of the Confederate Army, his ambitions always exceeded his positions. When he resigned his position in the U.S. Army, Johnston “went South” to fight to for Confederacy. He was the most senior Union officer to do so. Johnston resigned his position when he learned that his home state of Virginia had decided to leave the Union; for Johnston there was no choice to remain part of the Union Army. When he arrive in Virginia to offer his services, the Governor readily accepted and offered Johnston the command of state forces in and around Richmond. Johnston hoped to gain the rank of major general, but the Virginia Convention decided to that the honor should go to Robert E. Lee, Johnston’s former classmate at West Point.

His first command in the Confederate Army was at Harpers Ferry. He appreciated his officers and troops, and they responded well to him. Johnston’s decision to evacuate Harpers Ferry anguished him. His force was simply too small to keep the high ground. His superiors were less than impressed with his command. Subsequent retreats, such as Seven Pines, convinced Davis that Johnston could not effectively led a command. Johnston received an battlefield wound during Seven Pines, which probably saved him from having to face a public investigation into his actions. Symonds believes that a public investigation would have hurt Johnston in his most vulnerable sensitivity, his public image.

After Seven Pines, Johnston was sent to command campaigns in the West. The campaign in Vicksburg brought another challenge for Johnston. When it became apparent that Vicksburg would fall, Johnston’s wife worried that her husband would be blamed for the failure. Following Vicksburg, Johnston assumed the command of the Army of the Tennessee. Symonds believes that the campaign in north Georgia during the Spring and Summer of 1864 proved the defining moment of Johnston’s career. It was this campaign that people remembered for the rest of his life and the next hundred years. Ironically, the fact the Johnston lost relatively few men in the campaign proved to his critics that he was not doing all he could to defend their position. Lee lost so many men that there could be no doubt he fought with everything he had; Johnston lost only 10,000.

Johnston’s career ended with the close of the Civil War. He spent the rest of his life trying to repair his image. Johnston’s fueled with Davis never really ended and he remained unmoved at news of Davis’s death years later. He Symonds work is interesting, though one feels he lacks the perspective to truly evaluate Johnston’s career. Symonds is enamored by the complex and tragically flawed figure. He finds that Johnston made grave errors and misjudgments, he also grew into his position. Perhaps the work can best be summed up by Symonds final estimation of Johnston, “he was an old style Southern solider who fought in a new-style war to the best of his considerable abilities.

Misty Mehrtens

Texas Christian University

Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography. By Craig L. Symonds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, Pp. 1-387.

In Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography, Craig L. Symonds offers a detailed sketch of the life of this famous general. Symonds hopes to prove that Johnston was more than a retreating general. Symonds feels that Jefferson Davis’ qualms with Johnston led to an unreasonable besmirching of Johnston’s character. Contemporary historians usually equate Northern General George B. McClellan with General Joseph E. Johnston. Scholars acknowledge both men for their abilities to drill their troops and to command the devotion of their men. Yet, both men are remembered because they usually declined to fight. Symonds seeks to demonstrate that Johnston was not a weak general. Instead, Symonds believes that Johnston sought to only engage Northerners in battles that would produce clear victories for the South. Because the Confederacy lacked sufficient numbers of soldiers, Johnston worked to keep his troops intact. Johnston believed it was better to lose land than to suffer numerous casualties (3-387).

Symonds demonstrates that Joseph E. Johnston had the makings for future greatness. At the US Military Academy, Johnston earned good grades in conduct and in French. His classmates included Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Symonds notes that Lee had a natural ability for performing well in and out of class. Lee was stronger in academics than either Johnston or Davis. Davis, on the other hand, enacted numerous shenanigans, for which he was almost expelled. Johnston had a long-lasting friendship with Lee, and his hatred of Davis grew with each passing year. After graduation, Johnston enlisted with the artillery (3-21).

For nearly forty years, Johnston waited for a slow progression of promotions. Although he signed on with the artillery, he began to notice that his fellow West Point classmates, who joined the infantry, were promoted over him. Symonds explains that sycophants were usually appointed, instead of men with known skill. After serving in the Mexican War, Johnston received two promotions known as brevets. With these accolades, Johnston believed that he would become a colonel. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis refused to acknowledge Johnston as a colonel. Symonds contends that this disagreement between Davis and Johnston foreshadowed their future feelings of hostility and resentment. Eventually, Johnston was promoted to a position that commanded both respect and seniority. In 1860, he was appointed as the quartermaster general (22-98).

Once Virginia voted to secede from the Union, Johnston knew that he must depart with his state. Symonds seeks to show that Johnston felt extreme angst, while making this decision. Symonds demonstrates that Johnston did feel some loyalty towards the Union, since he received his education from West Point and because he had served in the US military. Yet, Johnston’s decision shows that Southerners, like Johnston who did not own slaves, went with their states because their loyalty for their home trumped their fidelity for the Union (88-98).

During the Civil War, Johnston was appointed as a general for the Confederacy. Although Johnston was well loved by his troops and other officers, Jefferson Davis did not understand why Johnston had such a positive following. Because Johnston called for a retreat during the Peninsula campaign and because he did not gain a decisive win at Seven Pines, Jefferson Davis began to believe that Johnston was an ineffective commander. At Seven Pines, Johnston was wounded and he temporarily relinquished his command while he healed. Although Jefferson Davis pinpointed Johnston for the Confederacy’s shortcomings, in the Confederate Congress, Louis T. Wigfall defied Davis by praising Johnston’s efforts (101-84).

Johnston then commanded campaigns in the Western theater. Because Johnston was unable to help save Vicksburg from falling to the Union, this provided more evidence for Davis’ case against Johnston. While commanding the Army of Tennessee, Johnston continued to retreat and abandoned places to the Union. Johnston insisted that he was only preserving his forces. Davis believed that Johnston was a coward. According to Symonds, “For Jefferson Davis, Johnston’s retreat south of the Chattahoochee was the last straw” (319). Although Davis, removed Johnston from his command, Davis later succumbed to the demands of Congress and appointed Johnston to lead the troops “east of the Mississippi except Lee’s … army” (343). After the Confederacy’s defeat, Johnston continually sought to clear his name. He contended that Jefferson Davis was the reason for the South’s loss (85-387). An interesting work, Symonds biography demonstrates that Johnston was a tactical general and not an inept commander.

Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography. By Craig L. Symonds. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Pp. 450. Cloth.)

Few generals from the American Civil War stir more controversy among historians than Confederate General Joseph Eggleston Johnston. Every inch the professional soldier, Johnston was one of the most highly ranked and respected generals in the prewar U.S. Army. Despite his impressive antebellum credentials, Johnston failed to achieve a decisive battlefield victory or execute a successful military campaign during the Civil War. This peculiar paradox between a remarkable prewar career in juxtaposition to a far from stellar Civil War performance has long troubled historians, and they have tended to resort to excessive criticism or extreme sensitivity with regards to Johnston’s military capacity and personal character. Exhibiting a penchant for the strategic withdrawal, Johnston’s supporters consider him a military genius who waged a Fabian-style war by trading space for time and not sacrificing his army for the sake of a geographic point that could always be retaken. His critics, on the other hand, rank Johnston alongside Union Major General George Brinton McClellan as a supreme organizer who simply lacked the will to fight. Moreover, they criticize Johnston for being a stubborn thorn in the side of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and carp against the political associations that helped him attain positions of importance throughout his military career. In 1992, Craig L. Symonds, a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, published Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography and attempted to sift through the controversy surrounding the elusive general in order to arrive at a more balanced view of Johnston and his Civil War career.

Symonds begins his work with an overview of Johnston’s background and prewar military service. A native of Virginia, Joseph Johnston was a member of the landed gentry. His mother was the niece of Patrick Henry, and his father served in the cavalry during the American Revolution. Groomed for military service, Johnston graduated thirteenth in his class from West Point in 1829 and went on to serve in various expeditions against the Sacs, Creeks, and Seminoles, who were causing trouble in the wake of President Andrew Jackson’s passage of the Indian Removal Act. Eventually, Johnston achieved his most notable successes in the Mexican War, where he served on the staff of Major General Winfield Scott. It was here that Johnston observed Scott achieve victory “by eschewing frontal assaults in favor of siege tactics and battles of maneuver” and “learned scorn for the interference of politicians” in military matters as he watched Scott struggle against the schemes of President James Knox Polk (p. 71). Following his service in the Mexican War, Johnston rose to the rank of quartermaster general largely as a result of his political connections and the help of his family friend Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd.

When war finally wrenched the United States apart in 1861, Johnston initially remained in the U.S. Army, vowing to side with Virginia no matter the course. When Virginia seceded, Johnston held true to his state loyalty and resigned his commission in the U.S. Army, committing his services to Virginia and the Confederacy. Having established Johnston’s impressive resume, Symonds fills the remainder of his book with the general’s wartime exploits. The primary focus of the Civil War years, however, is not on Johnston’s military performance. Symonds glosses over the battles for the most part, quickly and firmly establishing that Johnston’s strategic vision throughout the war in both the Eastern and Western theaters called for a concentration of force and the impulse to trade space for time in the hopes that his numerically superior opponents would make a mistake that he could exploit. Rather than analyze each battle and campaign in minute detail, Symonds elects to concentrate on the uneasy relationship between General Johnston and President Davis.

The personalities of Johnston and Davis made their professional relations extremely volatile. Johnston maintained a strong sense of dignity that often fostered a powerful impression of pride and conceit. Unwilling to ignore affronts to his personal honor, Johnston engaged in a number of acrimonious debates with Davis over issues of rank and strategy. Davis, a man who did not appreciate questions regarding his authority, could not tolerate Johnston’s Fabian strategy, for according to Symonds, he was bound to defend all of the territory within the Confederacy. Moreover, Johnston’s constant withdrawals and incessant calls for reinforcements coupled with the politicking of ambitious officers like Confederate generals Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood poisoned Davis’s appreciation of what Johnston was trying to achieve. In all fairness, Johnston’s failure to communicate his plans effectively made it difficult for the Davis administration to understand exactly what his plans were, and many historians have since asserted that Johnston was successful in his bid to trade space but questioned when he might have elected a time to carry out his grand counteroffensive.

Craig Symonds’s Joseph E. Johnston is the standard study on the life and times of one of the Civil War’s most controversial generals. Although Symonds tends to side with Johnston in the debates with Davis, he does not reserve all of his criticism for those opposed to the general. He maintains that Johnston was sometimes unclear in his orders and acknowledges that although Johnston’s strategic withdrawals were “tactically brilliant,” they were often “politically ruinous” (p. 385). He also discredits Johnston for allowing himself to become tangled in the political bickering in Richmond. One of Johnston’s staunchest supporters and one of the few men to whom Johnston sent personal letters, Louis Trezevant Wigfall, was among the leaders of the anti-Davis faction in the Confederate Congress. In short, “Johnston was an old-school southern soldier who fought in a new-style war to the best of his considerable ability, and who foolishly allowed himself to be dragged into a political struggle that ruined his credibility in Richmond and eventually made it impossible for him to be effective in the field” (p. 386).