[148] Long after the war General J. E. Johnston addressed the following letter to General Hill, from which it will appear that the influence of Bragg, who was at the elbow of the President as his military adviser, was still omnipotent after he was transferred from the West to Richmond:
Dear General,—Your conduct at Yorktown and at Seven Pines gave me an opinion (of you) which made me wish for your assistance in every subsequent command that I had during the war. When commanding the Army of Tennessee I applied for your assignment to a vacancy. * *
Yours very truly,
It is but just to President Davis, as well as to General Hill, to state that there was good reason to believe that the former, in his last days, became convinced that General Hill was not the author of the petition, or the principal promoter of the plan for Bragg's removal, and that it dawned upon the great chieftain that the retention of Bragg was the one mistake of his own marvellous administration of the government of the Confederacy. When Johnston and others criticised the President, General Hill, then editing a magazine that was read by every Confederate, indignantly refused to utter one reproachful word, even in his own vindication, because, as he said, the timeservers who had turned their backs on the Lost Cause were making him the scapegoat to bear the supposed sin of a nation.
