Joseph E. Johnston

by Craig L. Symonds

"General Joseph E. Johnston was in command of Confederate forces at the South's first victory--Manassas in July 1861--and at its last--Bentonville in April 1865. Many of his contemporaries considered him the greatest Southern field commander of the war; others ranked him second only to Robert E. Lee. To Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, he was the Union's most skilful opponent. But Johnston remains an enigma. His battlefield victories were never decisive. He failed to save Confederate forces under siege by Grant at Vicksburg, and he retreated deep into Georgia in the face of Sherman's march. His intense feud with Jefferson Davis ensured the collapse of the Confederacy's western campaign in 1864, and made Johnston the focus of a political schism within the government. Craig Symonds gives us a rousing narrative of Johnston's Civil War, and the first rounded portrait of the general as a public and private man."--book jacket.