JOSEPH EGGLESTON JOHNSTON
1807-1891

Joseph  Eggleston Johnston, Confederate general, legislator, and author, son  of Peter and Mary (Wood) Johnston, was born in Prince Edward  County, Virginia, on February 3, 1807. He attended Abingdon  Academy and the United States Military Academy at West Point,  where he was graduated thirteenth in the class of 1829. During the  Seminole campaign he was aide-de-camp to Winfield Scott from  February 22 to May 21, 1836. Johnston resigned from the army on  May 31, 1837, but was reappointed first lieutenant of Topographical  Engineers on July 7, 1838, with a brevet captaincy for gallantry in the  Seminole War. He took part in several major actions of the Mexican  War, attaining rank of lieutenant colonel on April 9, 1847. Johnston  was engineer on the Texas-United States boundary survey in 1841  and was chief topographical engineer of the Department of Texas  from 1848 to 1853. On June 28, 1860, Johnston was appointed  brigadier and quartermaster general of the United States Army; he  resigned his position on April 22, 1861, to enter the Confederate  service, rising to the rank of full general. He was in joint command  with Pierre G. T. Beauregard at First Manassas. Johnston  commanded the Army of Northern Virginia. When he was wounded  in the battle of Seven Pines, Robert E. Lee was given his command.  Johnston commanded the Confederate Army of Tennessee at various  times and in Georgia conducted a masterly retreat before William T.  Sherman's Union Army. Johnston finally surrendered the Army of  Tennessee to Sherman on April 26, 1865. From 1879 to 1881  Johnston represented Virginia in the House of the Forty-sixth  Congress. He was United States commissioner of railroads from  1887 to 1891. Johnston published his Narrative of Military  Operations in 1874 and contributed articles to various periodicals  and to R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel's Battles and Leaders of the  Civil War (1887-88). Johnston died at his home in Washington,  D.C., on March 21, 1891, and was buried at Baltimore.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY: George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of  the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West  Point, New York (8 vols., New York [etc.]: D. Van Nostrand [etc.],  1868-1940). Alan Craig Downs, Gone Past All Redemption?: The  Early War Years of General Joseph Eggleston Johnston (Ph.D.  dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1991). Gilbert Eaton  Govan and James W. Livingood, A Different Valor: The Story of  General Joseph E. Johnston, C.S.A. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,  1956). Robert Morton Hughes, General Johnston (New York:  Appleton, 1893). Bradley Tyler Johnson, A Memoir of the Life and  Public Service of Joseph Eggleston Johnston (Baltimore:  Woodward, 1891). Jeffrey N. Lash, Destroyer of the Iron Horse:  General Joseph E. Johnston and Confederate Rail Transport,  1861-1865 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991). Craig  L. Symonds, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography (New  York: Norton, 1992).

 Frank E. Vandiver