Fighting Below the Road: Battle of Bentonville

Half a mile south of this spot, the ground witnessed one of the fiercest engagements of the Civil War's final weeks. On March nineteenth, eighteen sixty-five, Brigadier General James Morgan's Union division dug in below a road and halted the main Confederate charge during the Battle of Bentonville, one of the Confederacy's last attempts to defeat a Union army.

General Joseph Johnston had gathered scattered Confederate commands, roughly twenty-one thousand men, in a desperate attempt to stop Sherman's march through the Carolinas. The assault on Morgan's line failed. Two days later, after Sherman's full army arrived, Johnston withdrew. He surrendered to Sherman on April twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-five, seventeen days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Bentonville is now a state historic site preserving the field where the Confederacy launched one of its last big attacks.