Yankee Quaker Confederate General: The Curious Career of Bushrod Rust Johnson by Charles M. Cummings. End-note by Noble Wyatt. 436 pp., hc, dj reprint of 1971 edition.

Yankee Quaker Confederate General:The Curious Career of Bushrod Rust Johnson

By Charles M. Cummings

BUSHROD RUST JOHNSON was born in Belmont County, Ohio on October 7, 1817. His family were Quakers, to whom war, arms and slavery were abhorrent. Bushrodís eldest brother was a highly vocal and active abolitionist in Ohio and Indiana.

Despite this upbringing and the influence of other Quakers, Johnson attended the U.S. Military Academy, finishing 23rd in the West Point class of 1840. Among his classmates were William T. Sherman, George H. Thomas, and Richard S. Ewell.

Johnson spent seven years in the ìOld Armyî and was forced to resign after a vague and guileless bribe proposal to a superior officer during the Mexican War. He operated a Military school in Kentucky and Tennessee for thirteen years until the Civil War erupted, and because of Southern ties and perhaps the lingering memory of his indiscretion in Mexico he cast his lot with the Confederacy.

At Fort Donelson he escaped Grant's trap and was wounded later at Shiloh. Johnson led the assault on the Union center at Perryville and is best known for spearheading the drive that pierced the center of William S. Rosecranís lines at Chickamauga.

Transferred to Virginia, Johnson commanded the sector of the Southern trenches blown up by the Federal mine at Petersburg. His men fought at the critical turning point battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865, and at Saylerís Creek five days later Johnson was soundly whipped. At Appomattox he surrendered without a command.

Postwar, Johnson became chancellor of the University of Nashville. Later retiring to an Illinois farm, he died in virtual anonymity on September 12, 1880. The removal of his remains from an obscure Illinois cemetery in Nashville, through the efforts of Noble K. Wyatt, is a fascinating postscript to the Bushrod Johnsons story not told in the first edition (1971) by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Bushrod Johnson is deserving of one, solid, scholarly biography. That need has now been sufficiently filled.James I. Robertson, Jr.