Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

By the final months of the Civil War, a combination of geography and human agency began to break down the long-standing distinction between the Eastern Theater, consisting of operations in and around Virginia, and the Western Theater, which encompassed everything between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. In fact, in one of the war’s great ironies, the closing act of the Western Theater occurred in east central North Carolina.

Having successfully completed his “March to the Sea” and subsequent trek through South Carolina, Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman crossed into North Carolina to press his attack on Confederate supply lines, infrastructure and civilian morale. He planned on uniting with other federal forces at Goldsboro, N.C., before continuing north to link up with Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and destroy Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia.

Standing in opposition to Sherman was the recently christened Army of the South, led by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. Despite the grandeur of its title, this force was a hastily assembled hodge-podge of scattered and broken rebel commands, including the Army of Tennessee, which had been nearly annihilated at the Battle of Nashville three months before. Called out of forced retirement and saddled with the unenviable goal of halting Sherman and then hopefully uniting with Lee, Johnston was aware that his was a near-hopeless task.

Nevertheless, he assembled roughly 20,000 soldiers to block the path of Sherman’s army of 60,000, which was marching in two separate columns toward Goldsboro. Thus far in his Carolinas Campaign, Sherman’s advance had been largely uncontested; still, despite his numerical superiority, he admitted that Johnston’s presence caused him some unease. Sherman was a general who preferred victory through maneuver, not battle, and he hoped to continue that trend.

Johnston, because of his numerical disadvantage, knew his only hope was to attack — and attempt to severely cripple or destroy — one of Sherman’s wings before dealing with the other. Catching Sherman off guard, Johnston attacked the Union army’s left column on March 19, 1865, at Bentonville.

While they were both largely made up of Western Theater veterans, the two armies that collided on the field in North Carolina were in many ways perfect opposites. The federal force was composed of units that had known little but victory during the Civil War. Its soldiers possessed the most modern of weapons and were led by a general characterized by his grit, determination and, thus far, successful wartime career.

Conversely, the rebel army contained men who had experienced one defeat after another, thanks in no small part to a revolving door of incapable, irascible and egotistical commanders. By March the Army of the South was hungry, ill-supplied, lacking weapons and led by a general who, despite his popularity with the rank and file, had proven to be, at best, indecisive on the battlefield.

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Like so many battles prior, Bentonville initially looked promising for the Confederacy, as the rebels sent two of Sherman’s divisions reeling. Unfortunately for Johnston, the attack was uncoordinated, and the Union troops soon began to rally. Nevertheless, the rebels — trying desperately to maintain the initiative the element of surprise granted them — repeatedly charged Union lines. A Confederate colonel witnessing these attacks could not help but comment on the bravery and desperation he witnessed: “It looked like a picture at our distance, and was truly beautiful. It was gallantly done, but it was a painful sight to see how close their battle flags were together, regiments being scarcely larger than companies, and a division not much larger than a regiment should be.”

Recognizing that the battle had degenerated into a stalemate, Johnston ordered his force to fall back and dig in for the night. He hoped that on the battle’s second day Sherman would become impatient and launch costly frontal assaults against the rebel lines, as he had done during a similar engagement the previous year, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. But Sherman — expecting Johnston to retreat — opted to bide his time, and fighting on the second day was restricted largely to skirmishing. However, this provided Sherman with the opportunity to unite his two wings. By day’s end, the Army of the South was facing a force three times its size.

Nevertheless, Sherman refused to order an attack. Bentonville was a battle Sherman had not wanted in the first place — the destruction of Johnston’s army was not his primary goal. His hope was that his numerical superiority would force the rebels to retreat, allowing him to march to Goldsboro, and then to Virginia, relatively unopposed.

This veritable staring contest was broken on March 21 when one of Sherman’s favorite lieutenants, Gen. Joseph A. Mower, probed the Confederate left. Intended only as reconnaissance, Mower’s expedition found a weak spot, turning into a general advance that threatened to break the rebel lines and cut off their only avenue of retreat.

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Despite this success, Sherman — still wanting to avoid a pitched battle — ordered Mower’s forces to halt. After the war, he admitted in his memoirs that “I think I made a mistake there and should rapidly have followed Mower’s lead … which would have brought a general battle, and it could not have resulted otherwise than successfully to us.” Regardless of Sherman’s hesitancy, Johnston realized his position was untenable in the face of such overwhelming numbers and, after removing his wounded, ordered his army to retreat during the night. Proportional to the size of the armies engaged, Johnston’s losses (2,606 men killed, missing or wounded) were drastically heavier than those suffered by Sherman (1,527).

By Civil War standards the battle was small. Its casualty rolls paled in comparison to those of Shiloh, Chickamauga or Franklin. And it was far from the climactic contest one may expect to cap off a war of four years – and in that respect the Civil War in the west ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. Still, while in many ways a coda to a grander story, the Battle of Bentonville, the largest engagement fought on North Carolina soil, revealed the futility of further Confederate resistance and the desperation present in the rebel military as the war drew to a close. Four years of failure in the West had finally caught up to the South.

Following Bentonville, the Army of the South was reorganized and rechristened the Army of Tennessee. B. L. Ridley, a staff officer in the army, effectively captured that futility and desperation days after the battle in his wartime journal. He recorded: “I witnessed to day the saddest spectacle of my life, the review of the skeleton Army of Tennessee.” Ridley’s heart sank as it “filed by with tattered garments, worn out shoes, barefooted, and ranks so depleted that each color was supported by only thirty or forty men.” He commented that this stood in sharp contrast to the condition of the army just one year prior. The army, in its final review, “looked like a funeral procession. The countenance of every spectator…was depressed and dejected…Oh! It is beginning to look dark in the east, gloomy in the west, and almost a lost hope when we reflect upon that review of to-day!”

Nobody was more aware of this forlorn hope than Johnston. Two days after the battle he wrote to Lee: “Sherman’s force cannot be hindered by the small force I have. I can do no more than annoy him.” Sherman would not allow himself to be annoyed, and after the battle he chose not to pursue Johnston’s army. He proceeded to Goldsboro where he planned to receive reinforcements, rest and refit his army and then embark for Virginia.

Events in the Old Dominion, however, rendered this plan moot. On April 3 Lee abandoned Richmond and surrendered his army to Grant six days later. Sherman turned his attention back to Johnston who, due to Lee’s surrender, was now outnumbered 10 to one. Realizing the futility of further resistance, Johnston began surrender negotiations with Sherman on April 14. Twelve days later the surrender was completed at Bennett Place in Durham, N.C.

Sources: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; Confederate Veteran; William T. Sherman, “Memoirs”; Earl J. Hess, “The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi”; Nathaniel Chears Hughes Jr., “Bentonville: The Final Battle of Sherman and Johnston”; Robert P. Broadwater, “Battle of Despair: Bentonville and the North Carolina Campaign”; Thomas L. Connelly, “Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862-1865”; Craig L. Symonds, “Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography.”

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Robert L. Glaze is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

