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JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON
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superseded by Hood another good observer writes to the same effect: "He bore his trouble with a stoicism which was pathetic, since we, who knew and loved him, were so fully aware of the agony of mind and heart he suffered. But no word escaped his lips, whatever his thoughts may have been."50

Then the war came to a disastrous end and everybody was free to abuse everybody else. Davis, in a private letter, afterwards printed, implied pretty directly that Johnston and Beauregard were knaves,51 and Johnston told a reporter that Davis was "perverse and wrong-headed"; that he was "malignant and utterly unfitted to be at the head of any important movement."52 Davis and Johnston both wrote books and said what they thought with lamentable outspokenness. Perhaps Davis's individual utterances are more savage than any of Johnston's. Thus, the former writes in his book: "Very little experience, or a fair amount of modesty without any experience, would serve to prevent one from announcing the conclusion that troops could be withdrawn from a place or places without knowing how many were there."53 And still more forcibly in the very able paper which he prepared for the last session of the Confederate Congress: "My confidence in General Johnston's fitness for separate command was now destroyed. The proof was too complete to admit of longer doubt that he was deficient in enterprise, tardy in movement, defective in preparation, and singularly neglectful of the duty of pre-