Willis Fletcher Johnson

Willis Fletcher Johnson (1857 – March 29, 1931), was an author, journalist, and lecturer who had a twenty-year tenure as the foreign and diplomatic editorial writer for The New York Tribune.

[1] According to Paula Hunt, writing in The New England Quarterly in 2015, Johnson's Colonel Henry Ludington: A Memoir was published privately by Ludington's grandchildren, Charles H. and Lavinia Elizabeth Ludington.

[2] The biography, according to Hunt, "offers a laudatory account" of the colonel's life; Hunt states that it "was certainly not of the order of Johnson’s usual projects", noting that it was omitted from his New York Times obituary.

[3] She writes that the New England Historical & Genealogical Register reviewed it as a "charming, simple memoir",[3] which she says was intended to "remedy a belief that the Revolution-era militia and its officers had not received the recognition they deserved and to ensure the colonel's place in American history", citing page vii of the Memoirs.

[4] She characterized the work as a "not wholly reliable source".