Letter from Joseph E. Johnston to Winnie

Authors

Joseph Eggleston Johnston

Files

Description

Letter from Joseph E. Johnston to Winnie, written at Charlotte, N.C. on April 23, 1865, less than two weeks after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnston discusses the state of his forces and the Confederacy.

Transcription

Charlotte, N.C.

April 23d, 1865

My dear Winnie[?]

I have been detained here longer than was expected when the last telegraph was sent you.

X X X X X

The dispersion of Lee's army and the surrender of the [illegible] which remained with him destroyed the hopes I entertained when we parted. Had that army held together, I am most[?] confident that we could have successfully executed the plan which I sketched to you, and would have been today on the high road to independence. Even after that disaster, of the men who straggled, say thirty or forty thousand in number, had come back with this army and with a disposition to fight, we might have repaired the damage; but all was sadly the reverse of that. They threw away theirs[?], and were uncontrollably resolved to go home. The small guards along the road have some times been unable to prevent the pillaging of trains and depots. Panic has seized the country.

[Crossed out:] J. c[?] Johnston and[?] Beauregard were [illegible]"

[page 2]

X X X X X X X

The loss of arms has been so great that should the spirit of the people rise to the occasion, it would not be at this time possible adequately to supply them with the weapons of war.

The above is an accurate extract from the publication in the Globe-Democrat.

Creation Date

4-23-1865

City

Charlotte

State/Province

North Carolina

Creator Life Dates

1807-1891

Keywords

Joseph E. Johnston, Charlotte, North Carolina, Confederate States Army, Confederate States of America, military

Resource Identifier

070425-97

Date Digital

10-6-2013

Document Type

Manuscript

Disciplines

Military History | Political History | Social History | United States History

Publisher

Wofford College

Format (medium)

manuscript

Format (IMT)

PDF

Language

en-US

Digitization Specifications

600ppi or 800ppi 24-bit depth color; Scanned with an Epson 15000 Photo scanner with Epson Scan software; Archival master is a TIFF; Original converted to JPEG with Irfan View, Fast Stone, or GIMP software. JPEGs compiled in PDF using Adobe Acrobat XI Pro.

Source

The original from which this digital representation is taken is housed in The Littlejohn Collection at Wofford College, located in the Sandor Teszler Library.

Recommended Citation

Johnston, Joseph Eggleston, "Letter from Joseph E. Johnston to Winnie" (1865). Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection. 17.
https://digitalcommons.wofford.edu/littlejohnmss/17

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.