Battle of Averasborough: Hardee Buys a Day
Near Fayetteville, North Carolina
By March of eighteen sixty-five, William Tecumseh Sherman's army was a force of nature moving northward through the Carolinas. Sixty thousand Union soldiers had marched out of Savannah, crossed South Carolina, and were cutting through North Carolina in two columns heading toward a junction at Goldsboro. The war was nearly over. The question was whether the Confederacy could land one last meaningful blow before it ended.
General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the last substantial Confederate force in the Carolinas, needed time to concentrate his scattered troops for a major attack. He ordered Lieutenant General William J. Hardee to find a defensible position and delay Sherman's left wing long enough for Johnston to mass his forces. Hardee found it here, at Averasborough, where the Cape Fear River and Black River squeezed the land into a narrow corridor through which the Union column had to pass.
On March sixteenth, eighteen sixty-five, Hardee's roughly six to seven thousand Confederate troops, organized in three defensive lines, confronted the advancing Twentieth Corps of General Henry Slocum's left wing. The terrain channeled the Union attack and made Hardee's outnumbered position far stronger than the raw numbers suggested. Fighting was sharp throughout the day. Sherman himself rode to the front to observe.
By late afternoon, Union forces had flanked the Confederate position and Hardee withdrew northward under cover of darkness. His casualties were between four hundred and five hundred; Union losses reached nearly seven hundred. By the arithmetic of battle, it was a Confederate defeat. By the arithmetic of Johnston's larger plan, it was exactly what was needed.
Hardee's stand at Averasborough bought Johnston one day. Three days later, Johnston struck with everything he had at Bentonville, the largest land battle ever fought on North Carolina soil. He nearly succeeded in destroying half of Sherman's army. It was the last serious Confederate attempt to stop Sherman's army.
