FEBRUARY 25, 1865:
Despite writing, "My opinion of General Johnston's unfitness for command has
ripened slowly and against my inclinations into a conviction so settled that it
would be impossible for me again to feel confidence in him as the commander of
an army in the field," Jefferson Davis, under immense pressure from
his Congress, his Cabinet, and his General-in-Chief, appoints Joseph E.
Johnston as General of all Confederate forces in North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Robert E. Lee
immediately dispatches Johnston to central North Carolina to take control of
the largest single (but unnamed and long inactive) body of troops in the South
(outside of the Richmond-Petersburg pocket).
Johnston immediately
issues orders for all his subordinate commanders --- among them Hardee and
Beauregard and Hampton --- to bring their scattered forces to him.
As the tatters of the various
Southern commands move north to gather in North Carolina, Johnston begins to
put some starch into the spines of his men. Scraping the very bottoms of his
Commissary and Quartermaster barrels white, he distributes fresh food and new
clothes and munitions to his ragamuffin men wherever he can. He reorganizes his
fighting units which have become little more than a leaderless mob. He places
Braxton Bragg in charge of a brigade-sized Corps and lets him rot there to the
joy of everyone but President Davis and Bragg himself. He issues a mass amnesty
to all deserters.
Within days, the ranks
begin to swell. By early March Johnston has 25,000 men in reasonably fit
fighting trim, and declares his forces to be the Army of Tennessee restored.
