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 containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Just what is the civil law? What neither influence can affect, nor power break, nor money corrupt: were it to be suppressed or even merely ignored or inadequately observed, no one would feel safe about anything, whether his own possessions, the inheritance he expects from his father, or the bequests he makes to his children.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn’t.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)