Johnston County: Where the Civil War Ended

Most people know where the Civil War ended. Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, April ninth, eighteen sixty-five, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, the famous handshake and the generous terms. But that surrender covered only Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. There was another Confederate army still in the field, and it was here, in Johnston County, North Carolina, that the war's actual final chapter played out.

The Battle of Bentonville, fought March nineteenth through twenty-first in eighteen sixty-five, was the largest battle ever fought on North Carolina soil and the last full-scale Confederate offensive of the war. General Joseph Johnston, commanding a force of roughly twenty thousand men, attacked William Sherman's army of sixty thousand as it marched north through the Carolinas after its famous march to the sea. For one day, Johnston's men actually pushed the Union advance back. But Sherman concentrated his forces and by the third day the Confederates were in retreat.

Johnston managed to extract his army intact, and the two forces continued to maneuver for weeks after Appomattox. Lee's surrender on April ninth left Johnston with no strategic purpose and no realistic hope. He and Sherman met near Durham and negotiated a surrender on April twenty-sixth, seventeen days after Appomattox, at a place called the Bennett Farm. That agreement, technically covering all Confederate forces in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, is the largest single surrender of the war.

Johnston County takes its name from Royal Governor Gabriel Johnston, who governed North Carolina from seventeen thirty-four to seventeen fifty-two. The county seat of Smithfield, named for an early ferry crossing on the Neuse River, was where the Provincial Council held North Carolina's first assembly meeting in seventeen seventy-five. The county has been making history longer than most people passing through on their way south have any reason to suspect.