Joseph E. Johnston : a Civil War biography /

Author or editor of four other books on the Civil War, Symonds (US Naval Academy) has produced here the best biography yet written of one of the Confederacy's best generals. The book's first 100 pages are devoted to Johnston's life from birth to the outbreak of the Civil War. Most of the work (about 250 pages) follows Johnston from his first wartime command until the surrender of his army in 1865. A shorter section of about 30 pages covers the general's postwar years. The rest of the book comprises 20 well-drawn maps, 40 pages of endnotes, a selected bibliography, and a good index. Symonds concludes, with good common sense, that Johnston was neither an unappreciated genius (as some writers then and since have held) nor an officious meddler (as other observers have maintained). Rather, he was "an old-style southern soldier who fought in a new-style war to the best of his considerable ability" while allowing himself to become entangled in the political snares of the Confederacy. Highly recommended for public, undergraduate, and graduate libraries. R. G. Lowe; University of North Texas

In the gallery of generals of the South's lost cause, Johnston occupies an ambiguous station. Aside from the first big battle of the war (at Manassas, or Bull Run), he won no convincing victories; rather, he was associated with temporizing maneuvering prior to the falls of Vicksburg and Atlanta. He also feuded with and was sacked by Jefferson Davis, with whom he resumed an acrimonious blame game after the war. Yet his soldiers adored him, attracted by a "magnetism" that the author alleges existed but inadequately describes. Apparently, Johnston was an aloof, ramrod-straight, military stoic--not a posture naturally endearing to the men--but he was less a fighter than an organizer who usually kept them clothed, shod, fed, and safe. In handling the record of this enigmatic man, Symonds intends to improve upon the previous sympathetic biography (A Different Valor, by Govan and Livingwood, 1956) by remaining neutral on the various controversies that marked Johnston's career. He successfully adheres to that criterion and supplies the definitive detail expected in new items for fanatically comprehensive Civil War collections; however, smaller libraries could get along without it. ~--Gilbert Taylor

Symonds offers a well-written annotated biography of one of the more controversial generals of the Civil War. Johnston is often considered to be the greatest Southern field commander, while others rank him second only to Robert E. Lee. Yet his personal faults deprived him of many opportunities for leadership. He fell into disfavor with Jefferson Davis due to Johnston's insistence that he should be the senior field commander rather than Lee. Johnston also tended to be very vague and indefinite in giving orders to his subordinates, and this cost him victory in several battles. Johnston was a military person and did not understand or appreciate the importance of political factors in military planning. He also believed that cities should be sacrificed to save manpower, which brought him into disfavor with the loss of Vicksburg. This is the best biography that has been written about Johnston, as it treats his war and political experiences evenly and without bias. Academic libraries as well as those with Civil War collections should purchase.-- W. Walter Wicker, Louisiana Tech Univ., Ruston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In a significant contribution to interpretive Civil War scholarship, Symonds (History/US Naval Academy) paints an engrossing portrait of one of the most enigmatic and important figures of the war. Contemporaries regarded Joseph E. Johnston as one of the greatest military talents in the Confederacy, in some estimates outranking even Johnston's friend and West Point classmate Robert E. Lee. Nonetheless, posterity remembers him only for commanding Confederate armies in a few inconclusive battles, including some nominal Southern victories--First Manassas (1861), Seven Pines (1862), Kennesaw Mountain (1864), and Bentonville (1865)--and for his failure to stop Grant at Vicksburg and Sherman at Atlanta. Johnston lacked Lee's brilliance, and his victories were more the result of careful planning and diligence than of genius. Yet without endorsing Johnston's tactic of avoiding battle with superior Union forces, Symonds articulates the case for Johnston's strategy: Johnston's army suffered considerably fewer losses than Lee's, and but for Jefferson Davis's giving the aggressive but foolhardy John Bell Hood command of the western army after the fall of Atlanta (which caused disastrous Confederate defeats at Franklin and Nashville), Johnston's Army of Tennessee would have remained intact longer than Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. While Symonds shows that the intensely reserved Johnston enjoyed close friendships with his brother officers, he also recounts the general's tragic failure to work harmoniously with the prickly Davis, which resulted in open enmity by the end of the war. Symonds relates how Johnston entered into the unseemly ``Battle of the Books'' after the war, denouncing Hood and Davis (whom Southerners regarded as a martyr) in his memoir and suffering denunciations in turn. A stimulating and absorbing biography of an undeservedly neglected warrior. (Illustrations; maps.)