Joseph E. Johnston

Joseph E. Johnston was a career United States Army officer who became one of the Confederacy’s senior generals during the American Civil War. He commanded in Virginia early in the conflict, was seriously wounded at Seven Pines in 1862 and later held major commands in the western theatre.

Johnston’s cautious defensive strategy during the 1864 Atlanta Campaign repeatedly frustrated Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who replaced him with John Bell Hood. Recalled near the war’s end, Johnston surrendered his remaining forces to William T. Sherman in North Carolina in April 1865.

In Bernard Cornwell’s Copperhead, the fighting at Ball’s Bluff and the Union advance up the Virginia Peninsula place Richmond under threat, while Starbuck’s Northern birth makes every setback an excuse for suspicion. Accused of serving as a Union spy, Starbuck must identify the real source of the intelligence passing through Confederate lines. His investigation is entangled with divided families, political influence and rival officers as George B. McClellan approaches Richmond and Joseph E. Johnston gives way to Robert E. Lee. In Jeff Shaara’s The Fateful Lightning, in the closing phase of the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman leaves Atlanta and marches across Georgia towards Savannah, destroying railways and supplies that sustain the Confederate war effort. Soldiers, freed people and civilians experience the campaign from sharply different positions as the armies move through a landscape stripped by war. Sherman then turns north into the Carolinas, where Joseph E. Johnston gathers the remaining Confederate forces for a final resistance.