David E. (David Emmons) Johnston

Born in Virginia in 1845, David Emmons Johnston served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, later studied law, and built a public career in West Virginia as an attorney, judge, state senator, and U.S. representative. That unusual mix of soldier, lawyer, and politician gave his writing both firsthand experience and a strong sense of public history.

Johnston is especially known today for memoir and historical works including Four Years a Soldier and The Story of a Confederate Boy in the Civil War. Rather than writing from a distance, he drew on his own wartime service to tell a direct, personal story of camp life, battles, hardship, and memory.

He also wrote about the history of the New River region, helping preserve local stories that might otherwise have faded. For readers of older American nonfiction, his work offers both a personal witness to the Civil War and a window into the people and places of Appalachia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.