Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 18.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Recalled to his shattered command.

One crowning testimony to his worth was reserved to heal the hero's wounded pride. At the darkest hour of the war Robert E. [161] Lee recalled Johnston to the command of the shattered fragments of the Army of Tennessee. In the heroic spirit of the great of old, whose custom was ‘inadversis vultum secundae fortunae gerere, moderari animos in secundis,’ Johnston answered that call of duty. The audacity and fierceness of his attack, with a mere handful of Confederates, on Sherman's army at Bentonville showed what great aggressive strokes might have been delivered had adequate means been wielded by that daring spirit. Men who had stood near him in battle had long before read this in his flashing eye and grim, firm-set, lion-like mouth. Never was war-like temper more visibly stamped on feature, gesture, and bearing, than in the person of this grand leader in the crisis of action. To see him then was to receive a new impulse to battle.