Hero of the Confederacy defending the railroad connections of the South against superior forces as described by Margaret Mitchell, or wimp running away from Sherman as described by Wikipedia?
Johnston was outnumbered, but weren’t the railroad connections in, or very near to, Atlanta?
He was protecting the railroad hub which linked the Confederacy. According to Mitchell, Grant attempted to encircle him in Tennessee, and Johnston artfully withdrew without having Grant get behind him and still protect the railroad, continuing the maneuver all the eighty miles to Atlanta.
I am confused, hence the thread.
No, he was defending his connection to Atlanta via the Western & Atlantic Railroad. After the first battle of the campaign, the Battle of Rocky Face Ridge (May 7), he lost his rail connection to to the eastern Confederacy (it’s the gray line he keeps withdrawing down).
By the time Johnston got the Army of Tennessee, it was already devastated by the reckless actions of Hood. There was very little that he could do to against the superior numbers of the Union.
A curious bit of history: When Sherman died, Johnston attended his funeral; yes, the funeral of his arch-opponent, Sherman.
Johnston soon died of pneumonia that he caught or that got worse because he attended the funeral that took place under cold and rainy weather.
I read that in the Wikipedia article; “If he were here at my funeral, he would not put his hat on.” He was one of Grant’s pall bearers.
He died two weeks later. At this point in history, opposing generals wouldn’t let their soldiers shoot at other commanding officers. 
Georgia and the states West of her are cut off from the Eastern Confederacy?
Wait, did I get the wrong general?
[checks sources…]
Nope, I was correct; he died because he attended the funeral of Sherman, not the one for Grant.
No, it was I confusing the damned Yankees.
I stand corrected.
Yep. There just weren’t many railroads in the Confederacy, and the big ones passed through Atlanta. Sure, you could **walk **down from Virginia, but, to a great extent, the Civil War was won or lost on the mobility and the freight carrying the railroads provided.
ETA: And the area west of Atlanta was both largely occupied and unserved by the railroads. The Confederacy was completely screwed by its lack of railroads.
Mitchell implied that he was defending the rail connections between the Confederate states all the way, that Atlanta was the hub. He lost the connection after the first battle, and was defending only the railway to Atlanta? To what point, his retreat?
Look at the gray lines on the map I linked. They are railroads. After May 7 Johnston was only defending his line of supply from Atlanta.
GIGObuster, you have it precisely backwards. After Johnson had withdrawn to the gates of Atlanta, Jeff Davis, who seems to have had some personal issues with Joe Johnson, replaced him as commander of the Army of Tennessee with John Bell Hood on the view that Hood was an aggressive fighter and would not simply maneuver to avoid Sherman. Davis was right. Hood hammered Sherman in at least three major battles before Atlanta. Every fight, however, was a failure and Hood lost the city and the railroad.
When Sherman marched part of his army for Savannah in the Fall of 1864, Hood gathered up his forces and set out for Nashville. At Franklin and at Nashville Hood destroyed his army in a massive Picket’s Charge type frontal attack on a portion of the Army of the Cumberland and then by confronting a substantially larger enemy with a worn out and demoralized force.
It was after Nashville that Hood was relieved of command and what was left of the Army of Tennessee retreated into Alabama. Joe Johnson resumed command to confront Sherman in the Carolinas and ultimately to surrender to him about a week of ten days after Lee’s surrender to Grant/Meade.
And now I’m marching Southward
My heart is full of woe,
Going back to Alabama
To see old Uncle Joe.
You may talk about your Clementine
And sing of Aura Lea
But the gallant Hood of Texas
Raised hell in Tennessee.
BTW, Margaret Mitchell was a writer of one novel, one that romanticized the Antebellum South. She may have had difficulty accepting that the Damned Yankees had virtually won the Deep South when they captured and held Chattanooga. Sherman’s March drew forces away from the real fighting in Virginia, but other than that it was practically a mopping up. And I don’t (entirely) say that as a lifelong Yankee who, in his time in Virginia, learned to disdain Southerners who were not from Virginia. 
You are correct, my turn to stand.
I was replying to the OP that mentioned his efforts to defend the railroad connections of the South, I thought that even after Atlanta was gone that there was still some railroads to defend. But I see that it was his “strategic retreats” up to Atlanta that fixed his reputation.
I see you come from the Northeast or Midwest, where rail connections tied together most two-bit burgs and where many of those lines still exist, either as proper railroads or as bike paths. It didn’t happen in the South.
Are you saying that several railroads made for the Civil War were found to be useless or not worthy of repair after the Civil War? Are the remains of some of them still seen in the countryside?
No, I’m saying that many old railroads lasted, usually through merger, into Modern Times. I live less than a block from the right of way of the Chicago, Galena, and Western (later, the Great Western), which is now both a bikepath and the route the pipes taking Lake Michigan water to the Western Burbs follow, because a railroad right-of-way is pretty much useless for anything else.
This is not to be confused with the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, which crosses it two bocks away and was consolidated into the Chicago and Northwestern and, later, into the Union Pacific. That line is still active.
Well, I’m a glutton for [del]punishment[/del] history 
so I was still thinking on the railways that the south still had control of.
Sherman’s march to the sea had also the purpose of cutting off the Charleston and Savannah Railway.
Is Gone with the Wind considered a serious history of the Civil War?