The Life of Albert Sidney Johnston, selected by John H. Jenkins III as one of the basic Texas books, reads like a litany of the important events in the life of the Texas Republic and early statehood through the Civil War. A native Kentuckian and 1826 graduate of West Point, and a veteran of the Black Hawk War, Johnston arrived in Texas in 1836 shortly after the battle of San Jacinto and enlisted as a private in the Texas Army. Soon discovered in the ranks, he was immediately appointed the army’s adjutant general. His injury from a duel with Felix Huston later prevented his taking command of the army. In 1838 he was appointed Texas’ Secretary of War, and later led the expedition against the Cherokee Indians in East Texas. He commanded the 1st Texas Rifle Volunteers dring the Mexican War and became a regular officer in the US Army–one of the few Texas military men permitted to do so. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Johnston was offered a position second in rank only to the aging Winfield Scott, but he refused the Federal government’s offer and instead became commander of the Confederacy’s Department No. 2, the Western Department. Keenly aware of the military weakness of the South, he issued a call for men at Bowling Green, Kentucky, and formed and drilled his army. On April 6, 1862, Johnston was killed at the battle of Shiloh.

The author, Johnston’s son, presents a whole picture of the character of a difficult, generally taciturn man, and defends his actions in a balanced, scholarly manner. The son, having access to all of his father’s private correspondence and papers, including his complete Confederate archives, was able to provide anecdotes only a son could know, and was able to persuade many of his father’s associates to submit memoirs about him.

Never before reprinted since its last publication in 1878, this new volume is of inestimable value and interest to historians and to other readers of Civil War history and early Texas history.

This edition contains a new introduction by Charles P. Roland, author of Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics, and Jefferson Davis’s Greatest General: Albert Sidney Johnston (McWhiney Foundation Press, 2000).