Federal Artillery at Bentonville — Twenty-Six Guns
North Carolina
Union artillery batteries were positioned along this line on March nineteenth, eighteen sixty-five, during the Battle of Bentonville. When Confederate forces drove back the Federal left and pushed deep into Union positions, it was this artillery line that became the decisive anchor. The guns covered thousands of retreating Federal soldiers, pouring fire into the advancing Confederate columns.
They finally halted the Confederate Right Wing's assault after one of the most aggressive charges Johnston's battered army had mounted in years. Artillery had become the Union's great equalizer in the war's final campaigns. Sherman's army, strung out in separate wings on the march through the Carolinas, depended on concentrated firepower at crisis moments like this one.
The battery positions here saved a significant portion of the Federal left wing from potential destruction.
