Over a bleak Christmas holiday Josie, her mother, and other Union women baked pies and cakes to take to Union prisoners who were being held by the Confederates in the Bowling Green stockade. When they returned to Mount Air the great blow came. Josie’s father stood with three Confederate soldiers in the library by the fire and read a document he’d just been given. By order of the commanding general, A. S. Johnston, they were “to vacate the premises immediately.” The Rebel orderly apologized, but the order stood. Underwood managed to get them a single day longer to pack and leave. They were banished.
All day they packed: Their books, the piano, some of the better furniture, and their clothing in trunks went into a wagon. They took up housekeeping in a small lent cabin in the woods about 15 miles from town. Even as the Underwoods left, Confederate officers were prowling the halls of Mount Air, staking out claims for living quarters. The cabin the family settled in had leaks through which icy rain dripped and Mrs. Underwood’s health worsened. They endured this dingy living through the worst of the winter.
One beastly night in late January the “biggest and most respectable secessionist in town”—and, as well, an old family friend—appeared at the cabin door, warning Josie’s father that soldiers would arrest him the next day for treason, espionage, or both, and that he had best leave at once. With a heavy heart Underwood packed a few things, kissed his wife and daughter, and rode off “into the darkness and the cold night,” hoping to sneak north through the Rebel lines. Next day the soldiers came. Informed that Underwood was not there, they searched the house. As they left, a lieutenant said to Josie, “I’m glad your father isn’t here, Miss. I don’t like this kind of job.”
The dreary winter dragged on in agonizing uncertainty, and then good news. On February 7 word was received that Underwood had gotten safely through the lines and was at Columbia, Kentucky, with Grider and his regiment as well as his son, Warner. Soon it got out that a big battle was raging at Fort Donelson, about a hundred miles to the southwest. A few days after that, two soldiers appeared with a note from a Confederate colonel, saying, “Mr. Underwood—we are about to vacate your premises and advise that you take possession at once lest evil persons destroy the buildings.”
Josie became ecstatic and told her diary, “We are going back to Mount Air. Oh! I am so glad!” Her mother suspected it might be a trick to trap her fugitive husband, but the family quickly mounted their carriage and rode toward Bowling Green. Josie wrote, “Good-bye poor little leaky cabin! And all the good, kind, ignorant people of these woods and this journal, till I can write again in my own old room at dear Mount Air!”
She would never do it. “Mount Air is in ashes!” her next entry cried. Their home was gone, burned to the ground by the time the carriage brought them there. Who did it, they never learned—some spiteful person or persons, civilian or military. Faced with the loss of Fort Henry, Johnston’s army was evacuating Bowling Green, but the Rebel general Hardee had posted handbills warning that anyone caught torching buildings would be shot on sight.
As the Underwoods neared Mount Air it appeared that the house was still there, but that was a mirage; only the gable was standing, and it fell in with a crash just as they arrived and “helplessly watched the smoldering ruins of our once beautiful and happy home. Both orchards were cut down, as well as the avenue of big trees leading [down the drive] toward town—all were gone—not a fence left on the 1000 acres. Ruin, devastation and desolation everywhere!” Then it began to snow.
The Underwoods went to spend the night with Mrs. Hall in town, and next morning the shelling from Buell’s artillery began that interrupted Aunt Sallie’s biscuit bake. “Mike Hall [Mrs. Hall’s bachelor son who lived with her] was so beset he didn’t know what to do and at one point shouted, ‘Great God! What will I do with all these women!’ ” Josie remembered her father telling her that if she was in a house in range of shot to go to the cellar, so that’s what they did. Mike Hall passed a brandy bottle around while some of them prayed and Buell’s shot and shell whistled and crashed into the town. Some of the people rushing by who saw the cellar door open jumped in, and soon they had “quite a heterogeneous crowd—among them the Catholic priest.” As well, one of Josie’s old suitors, Hugh Gwyn, arrived wearing his brand-new Confederate lieutenant’s uniform, which he had just rescued from the tailor, who had not quite finished sewing up the collar. Josie noticed this, and “as the hours in the cellar wore on, the cannon keeping up the steady booms, everyone felt a little safer in the situation. I offered to sew [Gwyn’s] collar—so he and I rushed out of the cellar into the house where I got Mrs. Hall’s [sewing] basket and sewed it on, whilst he foraged in the pantry.”
They took a picnic feast back to the cellar—half a ham, pickles, as well as the bowl of “cold beat biscuit” that the cook had been kneading when the cannonball entered the kitchen. Going back to the cellar Josie was nearly decapitated by a ball that “whizzed right in front of my face and buried itself in the ground not six feet from us.”
Around dark the shelling slowed and then stopped. They later learned that a deputation of prominent men had gone across the river to convince Buell that the Confederates had all gone, including Hugh Gwyn, who said he was “off to my regiment, if I can find it.” Soon Union troops entered the town. Josie’s older sister Fanny was married to Ben Grider, and Josie and her mother took up residence in her home. The day after the shelling her father arrived, and next day so had her 15-year-old brother Warner, resplendent in his new blue lieutenant’s uniform. They had lost much, but at least the family was together again. It would not be so for long.
CHAPTER 7
HE LOOKED LIKE AN OLD VIKING KING
A FUROR CONVULSED THE SOUTH IMMEDIATELY after the loss of Forts Henry and Donelson and the evacuation of Columbus and Bowling Green. It was aimed mostly at Albert Sidney Johnston but also rubbed off on Jefferson Davis, since he was the one who had sent him west with such great expectations. On February 22, 1862, a second inaugural was held for Davis in Richmond, the new Confederate capital, during which he remarked, “Battles have been fought, sieges have been conducted and the tide for the moment is against us. We have had our trials and difficulties. That we are to escape them in the future is not to be hoped. It was to be expected when we entered this war that it would expose our people to sacrifices and cost them much, both of money and blood.” He went on to predict that the South would overcome these difficulties and prevail, but the gloomy assessment by the president was unprecedented, and he was heavily condemned in the press.
Yet the press and the public seemed to reserve a special scorn for Sidney Johnston, whom they had been assured was to be the savior of the West. “Every hamlet resounded with denunciation, and every breast was filled with indignation at the author of such calamities,” wrote Johnston’s son Col. William Preston Johnston, who served on his father’s staff. The general, the younger Johnston said, “became the special target of every accusation, including imbecility, cowardice, and treason.” A deputation of politicians appeared at Davis’s door to demand Johnston be relieved, to whom Davis sourly replied, “If Sidney Johnston is not a general, I have none.” When Davis and others urged Johnston to defend himself, his answer underscores part of the reason Winfield Scott called him “the finest soldier I have ever commanded” and deserves close attention.
Albert Sidney Johnston was near to a legend for men on both sides of the war who had served in the old army. Handsome and “powerfully made,” he was over six feet tall with wavy gray hair and a piratical mustache, and he exuded the highest air of command. Phillip D. Stephenson, a private of the 13th Arkansas, hung around his headquarters one day in hopes of getting a glimpse. “If ever a man looked the ‘great man’ Albert Sidney Johnston did,” Private Stephenson wrote later. “A martial figure, although dressed in civilian clothes. I saw him but once, a black felt ‘slouch’ had shaded his features as he walked head down as though buried in deep thought. He looked like an old Viking king!”
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p; Johnston was born in Kentucky in 1803, the son of a physician, and studied at Lexington’s Transylvania College, along with Jefferson Davis, who was two years behind him. Both men received appointments to the U.S. Military Academy, and Davis developed a strong admiration for Johnston during those years. In 1826 he graduated eighth in his class and served in the 1832 Black Hawk War as chief of staff for Gen. Henry Atkinson. In 1829 he had married Henrietta Preston, who soon contracted tuberculosis, and in 1834 Johnston left the army to care for her. After she died in 1836, he went to Texas and took up farming but enlisted in the Texas army during that republic’s war for independence from Mexico. His exploits became renowned. People retold the story of how Johnston waded into a fight between a mountain lion and a pack of hunting dogs, clubbing the lion to death with the butt and barrel of his rifle. He rose quickly in the ranks and became adjutant general, and later commander, of the Republic of Texas Army.
This nearly cost him his life, as it seemed to be a common practice in the Texas of those days for a man seeking command of the army to issue a challenge to his opposition, just for the hell of it. Such a man was one Felix Huston, a Texan via Mississippi, who had come to the struggling republic with 500 men, staking his fame and fortune on the outcome of the new independent country. When Sidney Johnston was named head of the Texas army, Huston promptly challenged him to a duel on trumped-up grounds, which Johnston—who despised the practice—accepted and named the time as 7 a.m. the following day, February 7, 1837.
No proper dueling pistols could be found so it was decided to use Huston’s giant horse pistols with foot-long barrels. The men met at the appointed time on a plain beside the Lavaca River where Johnston’s second lodged a formal complaint that Johnston had never used such weapons before, but Johnston “waived the objection.”
The duel was a very strange affair. If a man fired a pistol in a duel using hair-trigger weapons, often the sound of the report would cause his opponent’s finger to twitch enough to set off his own pistol. Thus, relying on “his sense of moral superiority,” as his son put it many years later in a biography of his father, Johnston quickly fired first into the air, causing Huston—who was said to be an excellent duelist—to reflexively shoot wild.
At any exchange Huston could have declared that he was “satisfied,” but he chose not to do so, and the bizarre dance of death continued five times, with Johnston discharging his pistol quickly into the air and five times Huston’s shots going wild. On the sixth time, however, Huston finally caught on and shot Johnston in the pelvis, a wound from which doctors on hand declared he could not recover. Huston then approached the stricken Johnston and, of all things, apologized, before slinking back to his quarters for breakfast. It took Johnston many months to heal, but in defiance of the surgeons’ forecast he was once more able to resume his role as commander of the Texas army.
In 1843 he married Eliza Griffin and began a new family, settling on his plantation called China Grove. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846, Johnston commanded the First Texas Rifle Volunteers under Gen. Zachary Taylor and fought at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. After the war he returned to his cotton plantation until, in 1849, Taylor, by then President of the United States, appointed him as paymaster to the U.S. Army with the rank of major. In 1855 Johnston was appointed colonel of the soon-to-be-famed Second U.S. Cavalry, which fought in numerous Indian campaigns in Texas and the Great Plains. The regiment became remarkable for the number of its officers who would become prominent in the Civil War, including Robert E. Lee, who was Johnston’s second in command; future Confederate generals William J. Hardee, Earl Van Dorn, Edmund Kirby Smith, Fitzhugh Lee, and John Bell Hood; and the future Union generals George H. Thomas and George Stoneman.
In 1857 Johnston commanded a force to chastise the Mormons in Utah Territory, who were reported to have set up a religious government and were practicing polygamy in defiance of U.S. law. Beginning in 1847 some 30,000 Mormons had migrated to areas around the Great Salt Lake after being abused and run out of various towns in Illinois and Missouri. The newly organized Republican Party ranked polygamy along with slavery as an immoral and illegal sin and pressured the government to step in. Johnston managed to subdue the Mormons without serious bloodshed, for which he received a promotion to brigadier general and was appointed command of the Department of the Pacific, based at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
Abraham Lincoln had been elected President when Johnston and his family sailed for California in December 1860. Talk of secession was already in the air, but he had hardly unpacked when news arrived that Texas had seceded. Johnston deplored the notion of disunion, but, as in the great majority of cases where Southern loyalties were torn, he remained steadfast with his adopted state, which in those times usually commanded a higher allegiance than did the national government in Washington, D.C.1 On May 3, 1861, his resignation from the U.S. Army was officially accepted.
Ordinarily Johnston and his family would have sailed for New York, but that was complicated by the war. His older son, William Preston, sent a letter warning that if he arrived in New York he would probably be arrested. Indeed, Albert Sidney Johnston was an influential and coveted officer, a fact everyone understood, from the President on down. The adjutant general had suggested to Winfield Scott that Johnston be promoted to major general as an inducement to remain with the Union, which was immediately approved by Lincoln, and a letter containing the promotion was mailed, but not in time for Johnston’s resignation.
Then, in Los Angeles, where Johnston had gone with his family after resigning, word was spread falsely that he was involved in a treasonous plot to seize arms from the U.S. arsenal and take over California for the Confederacy. This was clearly ridiculous, but the word soon came that federal authorities intended to arrest Johnston in California. This prompted him to put his wife and children aboard a ship, and then, on June 16, join up with a dozen other U.S. officers for a tortuous and harrowing journey by horseback across the southwestern deserts to Texas. Along the way they dodged various U.S. troops who had been ordered to capture them; were revolted by the rotting bodies of stagecoach passengers recently massacred by Apaches; nearly died of thirst; and were awed by the Great Comet of 1861 that suddenly appeared one evening after sunset and sparkled nightly in the skies above their wasteland trek. Johnston saw it as “a good omen.”
Johnston and his party reached civilization at San Antonio, two months and 1,500 miles later, and Johnston continued on by steamship and train to Richmond, which he reached in early September. There he was immediately taken to Jefferson Davis, who remarked afterward, “I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove to be generals, but I knew I had one, and that was Sidney Johnston.” Accordingly, Johnston was made one of the two full generals in the Confederate States Army and named commander of Department 2, the Department of the West. He was 58 years old. The clock had begun to tick.
Now, after only a few months into his command, Sidney Johnston had become the object not only of scorn but of ridicule, yet he remained obdurate. “I observed silence because it seemed to me the best way to serve the cause and the country,” Johnston wrote Jefferson Davis from Decatur, Alabama, on March 18. “The facts [regarding Fort Donelson] were not fully known, discontent prevailed, and criticism or condemnation were more likely to augment than to cure the evil.2 I refrained, well knowing that heavy censures would fall upon me, but [was] convinced it was better to endure them for the present … What the people want is a battle and a victory. That is the best explanation I can make. I require no vindication. I leave that to the future.”
Heavy censures aside, Johnston had more than enough cause to be alarmed. Two large Federal armies were converging on him, each larger than his own. After evacuating Bowling Green and then Nashville, Johnston seemed to flounder, beset, in the words of the historian T. Harry Williams, by “a fog of mental paralysis induced by the crisis he was facing.”
He seemed unable to understand the loss of his army at Done
lson because he had ordered Floyd by telegram beforehand that, if it appeared he could not hold the fort, he must “get [his] troops back to Nashville.” It did not seem to occur to Johnston that he had sent Floyd and his men into a trap, which Floyd himself had sprung.
Nevertheless, Johnston was with his army in Decatur, having marched it through the middle of Tennessee to the nearest railhead on the Memphis and Charleston, and was boarding it now on the cars for Corinth, Mississippi, 150 miles to the west. Johnston was afterward criticized by many—and continues to be by modern historians—for not putting himself in the Big Picture, that is, for electing to stay with a part of the army at Bowling Green instead of making his headquarters at some more convenient location the better to command it. In other words, these critics charge that Johnston was behaving more like a division or corps commander rather than the commander in chief of a department.
There is something to be said for these criticisms, since during the four months between the time he first arrived in the department and the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson, Johnston had neither distinguished himself nor provided the sort of leadership that inspires men to battle. Possibly this was owing to his advancing age or to the arduous overland journey across the Southwest, but most likely it had to do with the immensity of the task before him. It couldn’t have helped that the supply of military arms and equipment was wanting, as was the supply of men. When Johnston asked Richmond for a number of trained military engineers, he was told there were only four of these people who were unassigned, and one was on court-martial duty! These day-to-day nightmares seemed without end, crowding out the time to plan strategy. What Johnston needed was a superior second in command to handle the mundane issues, but what Richmond sent him instead was General Beauregard, with his Napoleonic complex and outsize imagination for grand strategies.