(2 of 4)
A touchy strategist, popular with his officers but fatally careless of administrative detail, was Joseph Eggleston Johnston, who took over the army Beauregard left. "Small, soldierly and greying, with a certain gamecock jauntiness," Johnston was already smoldering with rage at Jefferson Davis over being placed fourth in a list of full generals. Ceremonious, bad-tempered notes passed back & forth. The Secretary of War, Judah P. Benjamin, maddened Johnston by going over his head in military matters and out-arguing him afterward. At one sore point, Johnston beseeched Benjamin to help "create the belief in the army that I am its commander."
Johnston should have been studying maps. When McClellan's Union army began to loom in the despondent winter of 1862 and Johnston decided to retreat from Manassas on Richmond, he shocked Davis by "declaring himself ignorant of the topography of the country in his rear." What shocked Johnston was to find that the secretly planned retreat was known all over Richmond. After that he drove Davis wild by keeping military secrets from him.
What was worse, the Union Commander did not do what Johnston, with perfect strategic soundness, thought he was going to do. Johnston "was put in the unhappy attitude of fleeing when no man pursued." Many stores were unnecessarily lost. Two months later, on the Peninsula between the York and James Rivers, Johnston retreated again for good strategic reasons but, it seemed, precipitately. Bitterly he wrote of one unassailed though indefensible Confederate position: "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack."
Johnston seemed relieved of bedevilment when 1) Confederate batteries unexpectedly stopped Union forces moving up the James, 2) "Stonewall" Jackson whipped the Unionists in the Shenandoah. Late in May, in a countryside boggy from deluge, Johnston's great moment came: he attacked at Seven Pines. In reporting this totally erratic action, Dowlas Freeman reproduces the strain of a day from which one Confederate general retired physically paralyzed, not from fear but from sheer confusion. Johnston's plan as ususal was good; his orders were, as usual, not clear or explicit enough. McClellan had been beaten, but Johnston's army got nowhere and suffered greater casualties than McClellan's. Johnston, hit in the shoulder and chest, yielded command to Robert E. Lee.
A Dependable General, or if possible several of them, would enable Lee to carry out his careful and tactful plans. One man who had everyone's confidence was James ("Old Pete") Longstreet. In the retreat on the James peninsula, Longstreet had capably fought a rear-guard action for Johnston, complacently reporting: "My part in the battle was comparatively simple and easy, that of placing the troops in proper positions at proper times." It was a rare achievement.
The secret of Longstreet's power, says Freeman, was "his incredible nervous control." A broad-shouldered man with cold grey-blue eyes and a thick beard, Longstreet once told another officer: "I never felt fatigue in my life." He kept discipline among his troops and clear understandings with his subordinates. A private grief, the death of three of his children, left him a somber man and a complete soldier.