GEN. JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON AND OTHER OFFICERS.
The Confederate army had five full generals, ranking in date of their commission as follows: Samuel Cooper, whose headquarters were at Richmond, Va., the capital, and who was never assigned to the field; Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, and G. P. Beauregard. All of them had resigned from the United States army to join the Confederate States army.
Joseph E. Johnston was fourth on the list, but he was the highest ranking officer who had thus resigned. He was assigned to the command of the Army of Tennessee in 1864, when it had expended its greatest strength, there being no resources to draw upon. He was confronted by an army double the numerical strength of his own, with all the resources at hand that could be asked for. Much of the territory of the Confederate States and its most resourceful sections were in the hands of the enemy. The Mississippi River had been closed to Confederate navigation, foreign intervention had become a dead letter, the exchange of prisoners had indefinitely ceased, and the blockade of Southern ports completed the hope of receiving resources from the outside. Truly was the South hermetically sealed.
Who can say that the tactics assumed by General Johnston in his Atlanta campaign were not the best that could be used under all the circumstances? Or that, if he could have succeeded at all, it must have been by the military operations he adopted? Do not the operations of General Hood in a few weeks thereafter prove this to be true? For, after fighting a few battles around Atlanta, losing as many men as Johnston did in his campaign from Dalton to Atlanta, and then falling back to Jonesboro, thirty miles south, where he fought Sherman, all without material results, he then moved to the rear of Atlanta, continuing his campaign against Nashville, that terminated so disastrously. Again, were they not the same tactics that General Lee was inaugurating when he left Petersburg with his little army, retreating to Appomattox, which movement, we can see now, was made when it was too late?
I am not able to say what would have been the result of Johnston’s proposed movement at Atlanta, but I can say this: that it promised more success than any that was attempted later. The restoration of General Johnston to the command of the Army of Tennessee looked as if Mr. Davis was repudiating his order of a few months before. General Johnston in accepting it displayed a magnanimity of character and patriotism never excelled. The army from which he had been so summarily dismissed was now shattered and broken to pieces, and the Confederacy itself was staggering to its downfall. His desire to share the fate of his soldiers and countrymen must have been the only motive.