His training, then, and an experience greater than any other commander in the Civil War started out with, fitted him for brilliant work from the very first.  At the outbreak of the war, he was put by the Confederate government in command of the departments of Kentucky and Tennessee, and on April 6, 1862, swept down upon Grant’s unprotected army at Shiloh.  That battle might have ended in a disastrous defeat for the North but for the accident which deprived the Confederates of their commander.  About the middle of the afternoon, while leading his men forward to the attack which was pressing the Federals back upon the river, he was struck by a bullet which severed an artery in the thigh.  The wound was not a fatal, nor even a very serious one, and his life could have been saved had it been given immediate attention.  But Johnston, carried away by the prospect of impending victory and the excitement of the fight, continued in the saddle cheering on his men, his life-blood pulsing away unheeded, until he sank unconscious into the arms of one of his officers.  He was lifted to the ground and a surgeon hastily summoned.  But it was too late.

Johnston’s death left the command of the army to General Pierre Beauregard, who had had the somewhat dubious honor of firing the first shot of the war against Fort Sumter and of capturing the little garrison which defended it.  Beauregard was a West Point man, standing high in his class, and his work, previous to the war, was largely in the engineer corps.  When the war began, he was superintendent of the academy at West Point, but resigned at once to join the South.  After the capture of Sumter, he was ordered to Virginia and was in practical command at the first battle of Bull Run, which resulted in the rout of the Union forces.  After that, he was sent to Tennessee, as second in command to Albert Sidney Johnston, and he succeeded to the command of the army on Johnston’s death at Shiloh.

The first day’s fighting at Shiloh had resulted in a Confederate victory, but Beauregard was not able to maintain this advantage on the second day, and was finally compelled to draw off his forces.  Grant pursued him, and Beauregard was forced to retreat far to the south before he was safe from capture.  Two years later, he attempted to stop Sherman on his march to the sea, but was unable to do so, and, joining forces with Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered, to Sherman a few days after Appomattox.

Joseph E. Johnston had been a classmate of Lee at West Point, and had seen much service before the Civil War began.  He was aide-de-camp to General Scott in the Black Hawk war; and in the war with the Florida Indians, was brevetted for gallantry in rescuing the force he commanded from an ambush into which it had been lured, the fight being so desperate that, besides being wounded, no less than thirty bullets penetrated his clothes.  In the war with Mexico he was thrice brevetted for gallantry, and was seriously wounded at Cerro Gordo and again at Chapultepec.  At the beginning of the Civil War, he was quartermaster-general of the United States army, resigning that position to take service with the South.