Civil War Confederate General. An 1826 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he first served at Sackett's Harbor in New York before being transferred to the 6th United States Regular Infantry regiment at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, operating as regimental adjunct during the Black Hawk War. He married Henrietta Preston in 1829, and after being forced to resign his commission in 1834 to take care of his ailing wife, he set up a farm near St Louis where he cared for her until she died in the summer of 1835.The next year he moved to Texas and enlisted in the Texas militia. By August, he was appointed Adjutant General and in 1837 was promoted to Brigadier General in command of the entire Texas army. After a duel with the man he replaced, he was injured in the leg and was unable to take his new command. On December 1838, he was named the Secretary of War of the Republic of Texas by President Mirabeau B. Lamar and concerned himself with fighting the Cherokee along the eastern border. After his term expired in 1840, he returned to Kentucky and lived there several years, marrying Eliza Griffin on October 3, 1843. Shortly afterwards the two moved back to Texas and settled at the China Grove Plantation in Brazoria County. With the outbreak of the Mexican War, he reenlisted in the United States Army, and was commissioned as Colonel of the 1st Texas Rifle Volunteers and served in Monterrey, Mexico as inspector general. From 1849 to 1860 he was assigned to various duties over the western frontier; from the Indian fighting in the Great Plains in 1855 to escorting the Mormons to Salt Lake City from 1858 to 1860. By the end of 1860, he was working in the Pacific Department of the Army in San Francisco, California. Upon hearing that Texas had seceded and sided with the Confederacy at the outset of the Civil War, Johnston resigned his commission and returned home. Enlisting in the Confederate army upon arrival, he was appointed a Brigadier General by Confederate President Jefferson Davis and assigned command of the Western Department. Taking Bowling Green, Kentucky as his base of operations, he called for volunteers and worked on honing them into soldiers. After moving his base to Corinth, Mississippi, he led his men at the April 1862 Battle of Shiloh, by all accounts performing brilliantly on the field until his natural eagerness for involvement led him to ride too far ahead of his troops. He was shot, like Stonewall Jackson later would be, by his own men. Hit behind his right knee in the same leg he had been wounded in the duel many years ago in Texas, the nerve injury from the duel did not give him notice how severe this wound was. The bullet had severed an artery and Johnston's boot filled with blood. After first ordering his medics to tend to the others, he started feeling faint and his men had to help him dismount from his horse. Once his men carried him to a small ravine out of range of the Union soldiers, Albert Johnston died on the Shiloh battlefield on April 6, 1862 of massive blood loss. The man whom Jefferson Davis called the Confederacy's finest general was laid to rest in New Orleans until 1867 when he was re-interred at the Texas State Cemetery with full honors in recognition of his service to Texas.