Sherman's March to Bentonville

On the night of March eighteenth, eighteen sixty-five, General William Tecumseh Sherman's Left Wing camped on this ground. The army was pushing north through the Carolina pine country after the long march from Savannah, aiming to link with Ulysses Grant in Virginia and end the war.

The next morning the Left Wing moved east along this road and collided with General Joseph Johnston's Confederate forces at Bentonville, two miles away. It was the last major Confederate offensive against Sherman's army. Johnston had concentrated nearly twenty-one thousand troops in a last attempt to stop Sherman before he could join Grant. Sherman himself was not present that first day. He had moved with the Right Wing toward Goldsboro on a parallel road. The Battle of Bentonville lasted three days, from March nineteenth to the twenty-first. Johnston withdrew on March twenty-second. Within six weeks, he surrendered his army.