Robert Matteson Johnston was born on Apr. 11, 1867 in Paris, France, the son of William Edward and Bertha (Matteson) Johnston. His father had served as correspondent for the New York Times in the Crimean War, and later settled in Paris where he practiced medicine.
Johnston was for the most part educated abroad, entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1885 and received the degree of A. B. in 1889. He studied law, and was admitted to the Inner Temple, but practiced virtually not at all.
For a time Robert Johnston engaged in business in South Africa. After a period of study as a private scholar in Cambridge, he published, in 1901, the first of his historical works, The Roman Theocracy and the Republic. In that year he went to Naples, but in 1902 came to the United States and began his teaching career.
Johnston lectured at Harvard and at Mount Holyoke, having a permanent connection with the latter institution from 1904 to 1906. In the course of this period he published The Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy, Napoleon, a Short Biography (1904), Memoirs of "Malakoff", from the papers of his father; and prepared a series of historical sketches, Leading American Soldiers (1907).
In 1907 he was called to Bryn Mawr, but after one year's teaching there became assistant professor at Harvard, with which institution he was identified for the rest of his life.
He had always been interested in military history, a taste perhaps acquired from his father, and he was a strong advocate of military preparedness, notably in his Bull Run; Its Strategy and Tactics (1913), excellent on the historical side, and in his Arms and the Race (1915).
With Colonel A. L. Conger he founded and edited the Military Historian and Economist, but the promising career of this journal was cut short by the World War. In April 1918, Johnston was commissioned a major in the army, and soon after became head of the Historical Section at General Headquarters.
Gathering a group of younger historians around him, he began a series of studies on the military history of the war (see his First Reflections on the Campaign of 1918, 1920). Not many months after the armistice, however, his health broke, his staff was dispersed, and he himself subordinated to a regular army officer.
He returned to the United States in ill health, and after a brief period of teaching, died in Cambridge, Massachussets.
Robert Matteson Johnston was a singularly gifted lecturer, with an original viewpoint, and though he occasionally verged on the bizarre, he never failed to be stimulating. He was particularly interested in the French Revolution, and did his best teaching work in this field. He published The French Revolution in 1909, The Corsican, a clever piecing together of Napoleon's recorded utterances to form a sort of biography, in 1910, and the Mémoire de Marie Caroline, Reine de Naples in 1912. In this year appeared also his Holy Christian Church, a bold attempt to deal with the development of Catholic Christianity through the ages--an undertaking for which he was not thoroughly equipped, and to which he brought no really sympathetic insight. Without special training, and beginning rather late, Johnston made a distinct position for himself among historical writers. Another Johnston's achievement came in 1917, when he was appointed Chief of the Historical Section of the General Staff and served in the field with the rank of major in the United States Army.
(Excerpt from The Roman Theocracy and the Republic 1846-18...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(Originally published in 1920. This volume from the Cornel...)
In his historical research Johnston was particularly interested in the French Revolution, as well as in military history itself and he was a strong advocate of military preparedness.
If Johnston sometimes fell short of the strictest canons of scholarship, he united keen insight and imagination with genuine gifts of style. If he sometimes generalized over-boldly, he at least avoided that cautious monotony of emphasis that frequently passes for scholarship.
Robert Matteson Johnston was married in London, in 1895, to Emily Dawson.
