American educator, son of Gen. A. S. Johnston; born in Louisville, KY, on the 5th of January 1831. He was graduated from Yale in 1852, and at the Louisville Law School in 1853; served in the Confederate army, as colonel, on the staff of Jefferson Davis; professor of history and literature in Washington and Lee University (1867–77); president of Louisiana State University (1880–83); in 1884, on the foundation of Tulane University, in New Orleans, became its first president; in 1891, chosen regent of the Smithsonian Institution. He published The Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston (1878).
