It always baffled me that Jefferson Davis replaced the man who was arguably the Confederacy's best general with the man who was indisputably the worst at exactly the right time to break the Confederacy. Joe Johnston would not have allowed Sherman to just march willy-nilly gutting the Confederacy. Sherman would not have been able to cast off from his logistical supply with Johnston there ready to destroy his foraging parties, and Sherman was already at the end of a long logistical tail back to Kentucky so might not have been able to remain in the Confederacy at all. But then Jefferson Davis let personal animosity override sense, as he'd done multiple times before. World's worst war president. It's no wonder that by the end of the Civil War he was probably the most hated man in the South, until years later his diligent Lost Cause propaganda managed to convince Southerners otherwise. In the end the South was undone by incompetence starting at the top. Despite their well known inferiority in manpower and economic might they had sufficient to turn the war into a stalemate that eventually could have caused the North to cry uncle. Indeed, if Johnston had continued the stalemate around Atlanta, it is likely that McClellan would have won the Presidential election in the North and sued for peace. But the arrogance of the Southern political class ruined the possibility of overt support from France and Britain, which destroyed one of the prerequisites for a rebellion to be successful (an outside source of supply and finance), and that same arrogance led them to continually make bad decisions by not listening to people who knew better. The decision to replace Johnston with Hood was one such decision, and one from which the Confederacy never recovered.