In the summer of 1864, Jefferson Davis watched his most experienced general surrender the Confederacy’s most vital city mile by mile, and he could do nothing to stop it. Davis had warned anyone who would listen that Joseph E. Johnston would retreat until there was nothing left to defend. He told the Confederate Congress.
He told his generals. He told his wife. Nobody listened. Then Atlanta burned, and history made Davis the villain for firing the man who lost it.
The comfortable version of that story has survived for over a century, but it has it backwards. The relationship between Davis and Johnston began in blood, on a battlefield in Mexico. In September 1846, at the siege of Monterey, grapeshot tore into Johnston’s chest and put him in a field hospital. A tent away, Davis was nursing wounds of his own, earned while leading a storming party up a four-hundred-yard slope under withering fire.
Both men survived. Both carried scars. Both believed they had earned the other’s respect. For fifteen years their careers ran parallel, until the Confederacy tore them apart.
In 1861, Davis set the general officer rankings for the new Confederate army. Johnston expected to be first. He got third, behind Albert Sidney Johnston and Robert E. Lee.
The logic was technical, based on regular army commission rather than staff rank, but the effect was devastating to a man who believed fiercely in hierarchy, especially his place at the top of it. One day after the Confederate victory at First Manassas, Johnston wrote Davis a letter. It read, in part: “The president’s disregard of my rank has made it necessary for me to resign. ” Davis read it, set it down, and never forgot it.
The friendship forged in Mexico was over. Davis did not fire Johnston that day. He gave him armies, territories, an entire theater of war. Johnston gave back retreats.
In the spring of 1862, Johnston commanded 70,000 men defending Richmond against George McClellan’s 120,000, the largest army ever assembled on the continent. Johnston’s response was retreat. He abandoned the Yorktown lines, fought a rearguard action at Williamsburg, and surrendered thirty miles of ground without a decisive engagement. Davis urged him to attack.
Johnston fortified instead, and his reasoning never changed: the Union numbers made an attack suicidal. His private communications revealed a man who saw only reasons not to fight. He stopped answering Davis’s letters in detail, sent vague reports, and refused to share operational plans. Davis, who believed the president must control strategy, read the silence as defiance.
Johnston read the demands as micromanagement. Then came Seven Pines. On the morning of May 31, 1862, Johnston launched his first major offensive of the war across flooded bottomland east of Richmond. The plan was ambitious: a coordinated three-column assault to crush the isolated Union corps south of the Chickahominy River.
The terrain made coordination nearly impossible. The attack that should have hit at dawn did not begin until early afternoon. Six hours lost. The assault dissolved into chaos, not from bad luck but from failed coordination, the kind that requires a commander to ride forward and impose his will.
Johnston did not do that until it was too late. When he finally rode to the front to personally direct the faltering attack, he was hit three times in ten minutes. His right thigh shattered. His shoulder tore open.
Shrapnel struck his chest. His horse was shot twice beneath him. Johnston fell unconscious and would not command again for months. The battle left 6,000 Confederate casualties and gained nothing.
That night, Davis visited Johnston’s bedside in the field hospital. He had known this man since Mexico, but what he saw was not a warrior struck down in glory. He saw a general who stayed in the rear for hours while his attack collapsed, then rode forward in desperation and got himself wounded. The conclusion crystallized like ice on a windowpane.
Johnston would never commit to a fight unless forced into one. Command passed to Robert E. Lee, who took the same army Johnston had commanded, faced the same Union force, and within thirty days drove McClellan from the peninsula with the Seven Days Battles. Same army.
Same enemy. Different general. Different result. Davis gave Johnston another chance in November 1862, appointing him commander of the Western Department.
Johnston traveled from Richmond to Chattanooga and found a shattered command: 40,000 troops scattered across 500 miles of front, morale destroyed by a string of defeats. He wrote Davis immediately: “I cannot consent to command this army without authority to act according to my judgment. ” Not a plan, not a proposal. A complaint, before a single order had been given.
By the spring of 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman crossed into Georgia with 100,000 men, veterans of Vicksburg and Chattanooga. Johnston had 55,000. The math was brutal, nearly two to one. But Johnston had terrain: red clay hills and piney woods where every ridge was a natural fortress.
Over the next two months, his defensive maneuvering was tactically extraordinary. He turned every ridge into a death trap, forced Sherman to flank, extend, and exhaust his supply lines. He fought when the ground favored him and retreated when it did not. Sherman himself later wrote that Johnston “maneuvered like a fox.
”
But the pattern was undeniable. Brilliant defense, no counterattack. From Dalton to Resaca, twenty miles surrendered in fighting withdrawal. At Cassville, Sherman’s army split, and Johnston’s own subordinates begged him to attack the isolated Union wing.
The ground favored him. The numbers, for once, were close to even. Johnston said no. Too risky.
He retreated ten more miles. His subordinates were already betraying him. John Bell Hood, an aggressive, ambitious general who had lost a leg at Chickamauga, wrote directly to Braxton Bragg in Richmond, bypassing the chain of command entirely. “Retreat is easier to Johnston than fight,” Hood wrote in June 1864.
The letters were a calculated bid for command, and they confirmed everything Davis already believed. In late June, Sherman made the mistake Johnston had been waiting for. He attacked head-on at Kennesaw Mountain. The assault lasted two hours and accomplished nothing except proving that Johnston’s defensive strategy worked.
Johnston’s entire philosophy, make them come to you, bleed them, preserve your army, was vindicated in two hours of carnage. And instead of counterattacking Sherman’s battered and demoralized force, Johnston fell back again. He was now a single day’s march from Atlanta. The retreat totaled 110 miles in 50 days.
When Davis demanded to know his intentions, Johnston sent vague replies. No operational plan. No timeline. No commitment.
At four in the afternoon on July 17, 1864, a telegram left Richmond. It relieved Johnston of command and replaced him with Hood. That summer, Davis wrote to his wife Varina. The letter was devastating in its clarity.
Johnston was a general who would never do anything unless forced into it. Davis did not fire Johnston on impulse. He fired him on evidence gathered over three years and multiple theaters of war. What followed proved Davis right about the problem, but in the worst possible way.
Hood attacked exactly as Davis wanted, and the result was annihilation. At Peachtree Creek, the Battle of Atlanta, and Ezra Church, Hood threw his army at Sherman’s fortified lines again and again. Roughly 30,000 Confederate losses came in the weeks after Johnston’s relief. The army Johnston had kept intact through 110 miles of fighting retreat was bled white in a month.
Atlanta fell on September 2, 1864. The Confederacy did not merely lose a city. It lost the war. Abraham Lincoln was facing a contentious re-election, and war weariness had spread across the North.
A Democratic victory in November would have put Confederate independence back on the table. Atlanta’s capture shattered the peace platform overnight. Lincoln won re-election by a commanding margin. The Confederacy lost its last political hope of survival.
Davis was right about the problem. Johnston would never attack. But he was wrong about the solution. Hood’s aggression proved that reckless offense was worse than cautious defense.
That does not make Johnston right, because Johnston never offered an alternative. He never presented a plan to hold Atlanta. He never said he would counterattack. He retreated, demanded more resources, and refused to communicate his intentions.
In February 1865, Robert E. Lee, now general-in-chief of all Confederate armies, did something extraordinary. He reappointed Johnston to command, giving him fragments of armies scattered across the Carolinas to oppose Sherman’s 60,000 marching north. It was a hopeless task.
On April 26 at Bennett Place, North Carolina, Johnston surrendered 75,000 Confederates, the largest surrender of the war, signed by the general they had fired and then begged to return. The war of words continued for another twenty-five years. Johnston published his memoir in 1874, blaming Davis for every failure. Davis fired back in 1881, calling Johnston insubordinate, secretive, and fundamentally unwilling to fight.
The lost cause narrative sold a comfortable story for a century: Johnston the cautious genius, persecuted by an incompetent president. Modern historians have begun to correct the record. Johnston had real grievances, but his refusal to communicate his plans, his inability to commit offensively when conditions favored it, and his toxic insubordination made him exactly the kind of commander Davis described. In February 1891, Sherman died in New York City.
Joseph E. Johnston, eighty-four years old and frail, served as an honorary pallbearer. It was a cold, rainy day, and someone suggested Johnston put on his hat. He refused.
“If I were in his place, and he was standing here in mine,” Johnston said, “he would not put on his hat. ” He stood bareheaded in the rain for four hours, caught pneumonia, and died five weeks later. The general who would never fight stood bareheaded in a winter storm for the enemy who respected him most.