A Magnate, the Courage of His Convictions Make Him a Reformer.
AT the time of the Civil war Tom L. Johnson was just old enough to
begin to realize the significance of events; he could remember his
family’s former affluence, and this memory served as a spur to urge
him to the rehabilitation of broken fortunes. At the outbreak of the
conflict his father, A. W. Johnson, had joined the Confederate army as
a colonel, removing his wife and children, from the Kentucky homestead
near Georgetown, to the south, and finally to Staunton, Virginia, for
greater safety. There the boy Tom, who was born in 1854, spent four
of the most impressionable years of his life, and there he earned his
first dollar.