WI: General Joseph E. Johnson was Not Shot at Seven Pines

67th Tigers

Banned
As usual, reality says you lie:

quaker.jpg


This is an image of the "strongest fortifications until 1864." Including those supposedly non-existent Quaker guns. I'm surprised he didn't count either Vicksburg or Port Hudson in those categories.


Don't think I can't google a picture.

In this case you've been lied to by a poster at another forum that you copied and pasted this from. That picture is from Centreville in March 1862 (see serial 710 here).
 

67th Tigers

Banned
Don't think I can't google a picture.

In this case you've been lied to by a poster at another forum that you copied and pasted this from. That picture is from Centreville in March 1862 (see serial 710 here).

Now this is a genuine picture of the Yorktown fortifications after the Federals had taken them:

506.jpg
 
Oh, you mean the mighty fortifications at Quakerville (meant Centerville but the typo actually fits the so-called "Great fortifications" that McClellan depended on to excuse that he wouldn't go into battle even when everything was in his favor) held by Joe Johnston's half-a-million man army? :rolleyes: You're right, that was a mistake. That was merely the first time McClellan was hooked by that damn humbug.

But as per here: http://www.historynet.com/hoodwinked-during-americas-civl-war-confederate-military-deception.htm historians who actually are able to admit that white is white and black is black actually credit this as a crowning moment of awesome for Confederate skills at deception. :rolleyes:
 

67th Tigers

Banned
Oh, you mean the mighty fortifications at Quakerville (meant Centerville but the typo actually fits the so-called "Great fortifications" that McClellan depended on to excuse that he wouldn't go into battle even when everything was in his favor) held by Joe Johnston's half-a-million man army? :rolleyes: You're right, that was a mistake. That was merely the first time McClellan was hooked by that damn humbug.

But as per here: http://www.historynet.com/hoodwinked-during-americas-civl-war-confederate-military-deception.htm historians who actually are able to admit that white is white and black is black actually credit this as a crowning moment of awesome for Confederate skills at deception. :rolleyes:

Of course, the OR's contain McClellan's estimates of Magruder's strength, and they aren't off by much. Magruders little show simply didn't fool anyone.

Likewise at Centreville they knew of the existence of the "quaker guns". McClellan was no fool, unlike Grant looking across at the quaker guns at Corinth.....
 
One thing I'd like to note on Johnston vs. Davis: One has to look Lee was able to persuade Davis, and then wonder why none of Johnston's attempts to communicate look like Lee's.

Speaking as someone with no personal issue with bluntness and no reason to dislike Joe, Johnston comes off as less convincing. Regularly.

I think this element is underrated when saying how Johnston was never able to get anything.
 
Last edited:
Relations between Davis and Johnston were bad, this is true. After the ACW there were cases where one or both refused to attend an event for fear of being forced to greet the other in a polite fashion.
 
One thing I'd like to note on Johnston vs. Davis: One has to look Lee was able to persuade Davis, and then wonder why none of Johnston's attempts to communicate look like Lee's.

Speaking as someone with no personal issue with bluntness and no reason to dislike Joe, Johnston comes off as less convincing. Regularly.

I think this element is underrated when saying how Johnston was never able to get anything.

Johnston had some trouble with words, particularly writen ones, and what he believed was briske and to the point when he wrote it read to others as long and confusing - you need only look at his narative to see this. Johnston himself acknowledged this flaw and shied away from anything but the most vital and brief communication in an attempt to avoid confusion as to his position - this didn't always work.

Lee was very good at wording things in a way to seem unintruding and innocuous especially when dealing with someone he knew to be difficult, in fact he took a lot of trouble to avoid arguments with anyone to uphold his historical image.

It is a failure of Davis that expects every officer to treat him the same way and communicate with him in the same fashion as each other. Johnston was certainly not the subtle, unintruding character Lee was and Davis took offensive to this more than he respected it. Davis was a man who could not abide any question of his authority, his judgement or his decisions and people who did question him lost his faith and support, people who opposed him either lost their job, found themselves in an unimportant sector of the war or were treated as little better than traitors.

In short, Davis failed as a commander in chief because he was not capable of treating people as different human beings with different needs and different attributes, and was incapable of creating a working relationsship with all of them or getting the best out of them.
 
Johnston had some trouble with words, particularly writen ones, and what he believed was briske and to the point when he wrote it read to others as long and confusing - you need only look at his narative to see this. Johnston himself acknowledged this flaw and shied away from anything but the most vital and brief communication in an attempt to avoid confusion as to his position - this didn't always work.

Lee was very good at wording things in a way to seem unintruding and innocuous especially when dealing with someone he knew to be difficult, in fact he took a lot of trouble to avoid arguments with anyone to uphold his historical image.

It is a failure of Davis that expects every officer to treat him the same way and communicate with him in the same fashion as each other. Johnston was certainly not the subtle, unintruding character Lee was and Davis took offensive to this more than he respected it. Davis was a man who could not abide any question of his authority, his judgement or his decisions and people who did question him lost his faith and support, people who opposed him either lost their job, found themselves in an unimportant sector of the war or were treated as little better than traitors.

In short, Davis failed as a commander in chief because he was not capable of treating people as different human beings with different needs and different attributes, and was incapable of creating a working relationsship with all of them or getting the best out of them.

While it is beyond dispute that Davis was a hard man to have as a commander in chief, Johnston's protests that he was ignored and backstabbed by Davis would carry a lot more weight if he (Johnston) tried harder to deal with Davis's issues rather than just complaining that nothing he can do will penetrate Davis's thick skull.

That's my problem with Johnston's communications. Whether Davis was an obnoxious twit is not the point. Lee was able to approach Davis in a manner that could get results. Johnston did not even try to use such an approach.

Blaming Davis for being unable to treat people as different human beings is ignoring that Johnston refused to attempt to compromise to better meet what his boss desired in order to get his (Johnston's) way.

I hate to say this, because I think the criticism of Davis is far from illegitimate - but I don't think its the issue.
 
It's not ignoring Johnston's faults, Johnston had many faults, but in the end he was just one general. It wasn't his job to curtail and bow his head to Davis, to sweet talk the President into getting what he wanted, it was his job to command in the field to the best of his abilities - which he may or may not have done - and given a high profile job he should expect to get the President's total support but he never gets it because Davis will not give it to someone he doesn't like.

Davis is the Commander in Chief, it is Davis' job to assess his subordinates, understand their different plus and minus points and deal with them differently to get the best out of them, he fails completely at this. If someone does not either kiss his arse or treat him in a friendly and respectful manner he doesn't have time for them and will not offer them any support.

If it were Johnston's fault that was the major point in this then in OTL it would have been only Johnston who had troubles with the Government but in OTL Beauregard, Chase Whiting, W.H.C. Whiting, Mansfield Lovell, Leonidas Polk, William J. Hardee, John C. Pemberton, D.H. Hill, John Magruder, Benjamin Huger and many others, sometimes including Braxton Bragg, all had trouble with the government and the President.

Had John C. Breckenridge been the Commander in Chief he would have been much better at dealing with people because he, far more than Davis ever did, understood that nobody was the same and everybody had to be treated differently, that's partly why his period as Secretary of War went so well.

Impressive in appearance and bearing and good with words Davis may have been but he had no people skills and that major flaw destroyed the working relationship between many generals and the government. If I had to pick one major difference between him and Lincoln it would be this.
 
It's not ignoring Johnston's faults, Johnston had many faults, but in the end he was just one general. It wasn't his job to curtail and bow his head to Davis, to sweet talk the President into getting what he wanted, it was his job to command in the field to the best of his abilities - which he may or may not have done - and given a high profile job he should expect to get the President's total support but he never gets it because Davis will not give it to someone he doesn't like.

Davis is the Commander in Chief, it is Davis' job to assess his subordinates, understand their different plus and minus points and deal with them differently to get the best out of them, he fails completely at this. If someone does not either kiss his arse or treat him in a friendly and respectful manner he doesn't have time for them and will not offer them any support.

If it were Johnston's fault that was the major point in this then in OTL it would have been only Johnston who had troubles with the Government but in OTL Beauregard, Chase Whiting, W.H.C. Whiting, Mansfield Lovell, Leonidas Polk, William J. Hardee, John C. Pemberton, D.H. Hill, John Magruder, Benjamin Huger and many others, sometimes including Braxton Bragg, all had trouble with the government and the President.

Had John C. Breckenridge been the Commander in Chief he would have been much better at dealing with people because he, far more than Davis ever did, understood that nobody was the same and everybody had to be treated differently, that's partly why his period as Secretary of War went so well.

Impressive in appearance and bearing and good with words Davis may have been but he had no people skills and that major flaw destroyed the working relationship between many generals and the government. If I had to pick one major difference between him and Lincoln it would be this.

Oh aye. But the responsibility for actually working with the boss is on the subordinate. If, for whatever reason (and I'm making this up as an example of annoyance) Davis refuses to sign any paperwork on Sundays, demanding over and over again the he sign something on a Sunday is not a good idea.

And Johnston's method of communicating with Davis involves shoving paperwork at him on Sunday and then complaining that Davis won't listen to him.

I'm not saying Davis wasn't dysfunctional. But Johnston's response to that does nothing to encourage Davis to work with him, and in fact encourages Davis to put less trust in him and less confidence in his judgment as he (Joe) increasingly resists what Davis wants him to do.

That's the problem. If the only way to get Davis to give reinforcements is to compliment him on having great taste in women, look at the general who is eagerly doing so and how he is also the one who got them.

Unless Johnston can deal with that, he's not going to succeed with Davis - whether Joe is right in some comparison of dysfunctionality isn't the point.
 
A problem with blaming Davis or Johnston for the feud is that it's not like Union generals were not cantankerous, self-righteous asses either (see: McClellan, George or Buell, Don Carlos). Lincoln, however, was willing to accept asshattery if it produced results. It never did, which was the problem. Where Davis was unable to do anything of the sort, and the problems were much worse for that reason. With the Civil War, the Union was able to afford those clashes more than the Confederacy did (obviously, given the degree to which Confederate territory shrank despite this).

The feuds in the Confederacy were primarily worse than the Union because nobody so much as pretended to knuckle down and do what needed to be done. Someone like Seward as POTUS during the Civil War, or (God help the USA, Stanton) would have put both Union and Confederate generals under Bad Bosses.......

And unfortunately Davis was the best option any OTL-style Confederacy had.....:(
 
It's not ignoring Johnston's faults, Johnston had many faults, but in the end he was just one general. It wasn't his job to curtail and bow his head to Davis, to sweet talk the President into getting what he wanted, it was his job to command in the field to the best of his abilities - which he may or may not have done - and given a high profile job he should expect to get the President's total support but he never gets it because Davis will not give it to someone he doesn't like.

Davis is the Commander in Chief, it is Davis' job to assess his subordinates, understand their different plus and minus points and deal with them differently to get the best out of them, he fails completely at this. If someone does not either kiss his arse or treat him in a friendly and respectful manner he doesn't have time for them and will not offer them any support.

If it were Johnston's fault that was the major point in this then in OTL it would have been only Johnston who had troubles with the Government but in OTL Beauregard, Chase Whiting, W.H.C. Whiting, Mansfield Lovell, Leonidas Polk, William J. Hardee, John C. Pemberton, D.H. Hill, John Magruder, Benjamin Huger and many others, sometimes including Braxton Bragg, all had trouble with the government and the President.

Had John C. Breckenridge been the Commander in Chief he would have been much better at dealing with people because he, far more than Davis ever did, understood that nobody was the same and everybody had to be treated differently, that's partly why his period as Secretary of War went so well.

Impressive in appearance and bearing and good with words Davis may have been but he had no people skills and that major flaw destroyed the working relationship between many generals and the government. If I had to pick one major difference between him and Lincoln it would be this.

Well, it's worth noting that feuds between Confederate generals, just like those between Union generals, existed during the war. Halleck and Grant got along about as well as Bragg and, say, Hardee did. Yet that with the Confederates cost them entire campaigns with depressing regularity (if you favored the Confederacy then or later) while in the Union, amazingly (if like me you favor the Blue) it seemed that neither Confederate guerrillas nor the seemingly never-ending feuds among the generals slowed down Union armies when they went to fight something.

Grant and McClernand were at loggerheads through the Vicksburg Campaign but that didn't affect the Union except on the second attack at Vicksburg when McClernand, to put it bluntly, lied through his teeth about progress he'd made. By contrast the Army of Tennessee.....it's a question whether the various Union generals it faced or its feuding generals did more damage to it.

Like antiwar movements those existed on both sides, but the Union had ways to use that effectively that for whatever reason simply did not exist in the Confederacy. Davis and Johnston is akin to Lincoln and McClellan, except that Lincoln put McClellan back in charge of the Army of the Potomac when virtually the entire GOP was against it, while Davis put Johnston in actual power over an army again by the time the Union was already in Georgia and Lee was bottled up in Richmond, which was a much more desperate strait than the Union faced in the fall of 1862. Though to me, McClellan reminds me strongly of a Douglas MacArthur without an Inchon.......:eek:
 
Johnston received command of the Army of Tennessee in December of 1863.

Grant didn't bottle up Lee in Richmond until what, August (1864)?
 
Johnston received command of the Army of Tennessee in December of 1863.

Grant didn't bottle up Lee in Richmond until what, August (1864)?

Actually he bottled him up in June until April of 1865. Where Johnston not only kept going with his army intact for all of July but into August. He even pointed out to Davis this difference between the two of them......:D
 
Top