Bennett Place: The Surrender Nobody Knows

Eight days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April ninth, eighteen sixty-five, a larger ceremony took place in a farmhouse outside Durham.

On April seventeenth, General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the Army of Tennessee and all Confederate forces in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, met General William T. Sherman at the farm of James Bennett. Johnston surrendered approximately ninety thousand Confederate soldiers, the largest single surrender of the Civil War, larger than the forces Lee had given up at Appomattox.

Abraham Lincoln had been shot three days before this meeting, on April fourteenth. He died the morning of April fifteenth. Sherman and Johnston were negotiating the terms of a massive military surrender while Lincoln's body was still traveling north toward burial in Springfield, Illinois.

The first set of terms Sherman offered was sweeping: political amnesty, recognition of existing state governments, restoration of property. The terms were generous enough that the new president, Andrew Johnson, and the cabinet in Washington rejected them. Sherman was ordered to offer only military terms, which he did in a second meeting on April twenty-sixth. Johnston accepted.

The Bennett farmhouse and the site are preserved as a state historic site northwest of Durham. A reconstruction of the farmhouse stands on the original foundation. The field around it is quiet, off the interstate, and visited by a fraction of the people who go to Appomattox.

What ended the Confederacy's organized military resistance in the Eastern theater was not one surrender but two, nine days apart. The first, the one most people know, was in Virginia. The second, the larger one, was in a Durham farmer's front yard.