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.
Read more about this topic: Albert Sidney Johnston
Famous quotes by civil war:
“During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)