Albert Sidney Johnston (1803-1862) was a West Point graduate and veteran of the Texas Revolution and Mexican-American War. In 1861, at the outset of the American Civil War (1861-1865), Johnston was named commander of Confederate forces in the Western Theater. After a series of Confederate losses in the west, Johnston launched a surprise attack on Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. The resulting Battle of Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862) ended in a Union victory and was the bloodiest clash of the war up to that point. Among the casualties was General Johnston, who was mortally wounded–most likely by his own troops–during the first day of the battle. Johnston was the highest-ranking general on either side to be killed in the war, and his death was a crushing blow to the Southern war effort.
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Albert Sidney Johnston and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were longtime friends, having first met as students at Kentucky's Transylvania University before attending West Point together in the 1820s.
An 1826 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., Johnston fought in the Black Hawk War (1832) and the Mexican War (1846–48) and was in the bloodless expedition against the Mormons in Utah (1857). When his adopted state of Texas seceded from the Union in 1861, he resigned his commission as commander of the U.S. Pacific Department and was appointed second-ranking general in the Confederate Army by President Jefferson Davis, whom he had known at West Point. Assuming command of the Western Department in September, Johnston succeeded in raising and organizing an army to guard a long and vulnerable line from the Mississippi River to the Allegheny Mountains. His forces were no match, however, for the superior numbers of the North, which forced the Confederates to retreat from Forts Henry and Donelson, in Tennessee, and from Bowling Green, Ky., and led to the fall of Nashville, Tenn., in February 1862. Nevertheless, bitter criticism of Johnston did not affect Davis' confidence in him.
Concentrating his army at Corinth, Miss., Johnston determined to attack General Ulysses S. Grant at Pittsburg Landing. His surprise assault upon the Union forces at the Battle of Shiloh (April 6 and 7) was almost successful, but he was mortally wounded in the first afternoon's fighting.
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