Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics

Epilogue

Epilogue£ TER JOHNSTON'S TRAGIC DEATH, Colonel Preston requested of General Beauregard that Johnston's staff be permitted to carry his body from the little church on the Shiloh battlefield to New Orleans for temporary burial until the family could choose a permanent resting place. Beauregard consented, and that night Dr. Choppin injected whiskey into Johnston's blood vessels to preserve the body during the long journey south~l The next morning Johnston's staff placed his body in a wagon and rode in somber cavalcade from Shiloh's field of death to Corinth, where the body was prepared for burial,2 From there they went by train to New Orleans, arriving on Aprilg, to be met at the depot by Governor Thomas O. Moore of Louisiana and General Mansfield Lovell, commander of Confederate troops defending the city.3 The General's 1 D. W. Yandell to William Preston Johnston, November 11, 1877, Johnston Papers, Barret Collection. 2 William Preston Diary, April 7, 1862, War Department Collection of Confederate Records. 3 Unidentified newspaper clippings in Scrapbook, Johnston Papers, Barret Collection. Epilogue 353 body was borne to the City Hall, where it lay in state for two days. On the afternoon of the eleventh, with his staff as pallbearers, Johnston was laid to rest in the St. Louis cemetery. At the invitation of Mayor John T. Monroe of New Orleans, he was buried in the Monroe family tomb.4o For almost five years Johnston's body remained in the cemetery in New Orleans. Admirers from time to time decorated the vault with garlands and flowers. One citizen wrote and fixed upon the tomb a poem eulogizing Johnston as "a great captain," mourned by a bereaved people and claimed by three commonwealths.5 But Johnston's final resting place was not to be New Orleans. He was known to have preferred burial in Texas; to his brother-in-law, William Preston, he once said, "When I die, I want a handful of Texas earth on my breast." 6 In the fall of 1866, after obtaining the approval of Johnston 's family, the Texas Legislature resolved to bring Johnston's body to Austin for interment. A committee of distinguished Texans was appointed escort for the solemn task.7 On January 23, 1867, Johnston's body was removed from the St. Louis cemetery. A brief religious service was held beside the tomb, in the presence of a throng of admirers and mourners. Pallbearers were former Confederate generals, including Beauregard, Bragg, Hood, Richard Taylor, and Longstreet.8 From New Orleans, Johnston 's body was taken to Galveston, then to Houston, and at last to Austin. Bitterness and irony attended this movement. Fearing a demonstration of Confederate sympathy, or feigning to fear such, the military authorities in Galveston forbade a funeral procession planned there by Johnston's former comrades. The result was a great outpouring of indignation and Confederate sympathy; thousands of persons filed past the coffin as it lay on the wharf at Galveston. Other thousands paid homage to his memory when his body passed through Houston.9 johnston's body, with its escort, arrived in Austin on February 1. Governor James W. Throckmorton received it with appropriate 4 Daily Delta, April 12. 1862. 5 Daily Picayune, November 4. 1862, and November 2, 1865. 6 Johnston. Life of Johnston, p. 699. 7 H. P. N. Gammel (ed.) , The Laws of Texas, I822-I897, V. 117g-1180. 8 Unidentified newspaper clippings in Scrapbook, Johnston Papers, Barret Collection. 9 Ibid. 354 Albert Sidney Johnston oratory; for a day it lay instate in the Capitol. Again great numbers moved past the bier and covered it with laurel and flowers. On the afternoon of February 2, Johnston was buried in the Texas State Cemetery, to take his place among the honored dead of Texas.1o No spot could have been more fitting for Johnston's sepulchre. He had assisted in the founding of Austin; he had resided in Austin when it was a frontier capital of the Republic of Texas; later, he had lived happily in Austin with his family. Perhaps his own words of the past came back to him now: "Austin is in the ... most beautiful & lovely country that the 'blazing eye' of the sun looks upon in his journey from the east to the west." 11 Albert Sidney Johnston had come home. 10 Weekly Texas State Gazette (Austin), February 2, 1867, quoted in Dallas...