Albert Sidney Johnston - Civil War

Civil War

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnston was the commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Pacific in California. Like many regular army officers from the South he was opposed to secession, but resigned his commission soon after he heard of the secession of his adopted state Texas. It was accepted by the War Department on May 6, 1861, effective May 3. On April 28 he moved to Los Angeles where he had family and remained there until May when, suspected by local Union authorities, he evaded arrest and joined the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles as a private, leaving Warner's Ranch May 27. He participated in their trek across the southwestern deserts to Texas, crossing the Colorado River into the Confederate Territory of Arizona on July 4, 1861.

Early in the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis decided that the Confederacy would attempt to hold as much of its territory as possible and he distributed its military forces around its borders and coasts. In the summer of 1861, Davis appointed several generals to defend Confederate lines from the Mississippi River east to the Allegheny Mountains. The most sensitive, and in many ways the most crucial areas, along the Mississippi River and in western Tennessee along the Tennessee River and the Cumberland River were placed under the command of Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk and Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, who had been initially in command in Tennessee as that State's top general. Their impolitic occupation of Columbus, Kentucky on September 3, 1861, two days before Johnston arrived in the Confederacy's capital, Richmond, Virginia, after his cross–country journey, drove Kentucky from its stated neutrality and the majority of Kentuckians into the Union camp. Their action gave Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant an excuse to take control of the even more important and strategically located town of Paducah, Kentucky without raising the ire of most Kentuckians and the pro-Union majority in the State legislature.