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This distinguished officer is a native of Prince Edward county, Virginia, where he was born about the year 1808. His father was the late Judge Peter Johnston, of the General Court of Virginia, distinguished alike at the bar and on the bench, for sound practical sense and solid legal acquirements. He had been a soldier in his youth-had been one of Greene's officers in his celebrated campaign of 1781, in North and South Carolina-had borne himself honorably and bravely at Guilford, Camden, Eutaw, and Ninety-Six-and retained, to the day of his death, a predilection for his early profession, which not all his subsequent success in a profession of a very different character, could entirely obliterate. It is worthy of record, that he was the First Lieutenant of the company in which the celebrated Peter Francisco served as a private, and that the latter, scarcely less remarkable for his gigantic strength and undaunted