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 related to civil war:
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“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)