The Battle of Bentonville — Welcome to DrBatten.com!

Back in the 1960s, I was a member of Boy Scouts of America Troop Number 24. At some point during my membership in that troop (and I am guessing that it was 1965), a bunch of troops from the Tuscarora Council ended up at a massive camp-out at the Bentonville Battleground, in North Carolina. I did not know much about that battle in the War for Southern Independence. I knew it took place in my home county, Johnston County, and I knew the house on the property, the Harper House, served as a hospital for injured Union soldiers (and was thus most likely haunted). I did not know who won that battle. I do know that it rained for nearly the entire weekend of the camp-out, and the remains of the breastworks were still visible. I considered the battle to be a minor, insignificant skirmish from late in the war.

I was wrong.

Recently I read Last Stand in the Carolinas: The Battle of Bentonville, by Mark L. Bradley. The book came out in the mid-1990s, but it took me a while to get around to reading it. I do not believe that there is any aspect of this battle that Bradley did not cover. It is a large book, documented with hundreds of footnotes, and sporting maps specially created for the book by cartographer Mark A. Moore.

After the fall of Atlanta, Sherman sliced through Georgia, then turned northward, wreaking havoc through South Carolina. General Robert E. Lee asked General Joseph E. Johnston to stop Sherman from reaching Goldsboro, NC. That attempt happened near the small town of Bentonville, NC. According to Bradley, this was the only significant opposition Sherman had faced since Atlanta. The battle lasted three days, from March 19 through March 21, 1865. A good bit of the fighting took place in the rain.

Johnston was not known for taking chances: he was a cautious and calculating man. At Bentonville, though, he broke from his past pattern and displayed a talent for flexibility and risk-taking. (Perhaps he should have done this earlier in the war.) It is because of this that he was able to hold off a superior force of Union men for three days. The Union army had about 60,000 men under arms for this battle, while the Confederate army clocked in at about 22,000 men. The fighting was intense. Veterans of the Gettysburg campaign found the fighting to be as fierce, if not more fierce, at Bentonville. My childhood notion that this was a skirmish has been disabused.

There were significant losses for both sides. The Union army suffered 1,527 casualties (194 dead, 1,112 wounded, 221 missing or captured), while the Confederate army suffered 2,606 casualties (239 dead, 1,694 wounded, 673 missing or captured).

Who won? That depends upon what you define as a win. In my opinion, it was at best a draw, and more realistically a loss for the Confederates, though that army could look upon the battle as a successful stalling tactic. In the end, Johnston staged a retreat towards Raleigh, and Sherman decided not to pursue him. He moved on to Goldsboro, as per his original plan. Johnston’s letter to R. E. Lee laid out a realistic assessment of the situation: “I can do no more than annoy [Sherman].”

Nineteen days after Johnston’s retreat, Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Seventeen days after Lee’s surrender, Johnston surrendered to Sherman at the James Bennett house, near Durham.

During my visit to Bentonville, all those years ago, the most prominent reminders that this had been a battlefield (aside from the markers, and the mass grave of Confederate soldiers) were the remains of the breastworks. The Union soldiers threw these up hastily to provide some protection from the Confederate fire. They chopped down trees, piled them one on top of the other, then covered them with dirt. According to Bradley, they dug dirt with anything they had on hand, which included cast iron frying pans. The trees had decayed, and the dirt was covered with green grass, but you could still see the ridges that marked the breastworks.

A portion of the battlefield is preserved as a National Historic Landmark. That includes 130 acres of land, but the total land owned by the Bentonville Battlefield Historic Association and the American Battlefield Trust runs to a total of 2,063 acres. When Bradley wrote the book some 28 years ago, most of the land that constituted the total battlefield was in private hands. Since then, some 50 or more purchases of private land have been added to the land owned by the two organizations. The (allegedly) haunted Harper House is still standing, though it is closed for renovation.

A little time ago I attended my high school reunion in Clayton, NC, which is on the westernmost edge of Johnston County. I planned to get to the battlefield before the reunion and walk the terrain with Bradley’s book in my hand. That did not happen: some people just can’t drive, and when they have accidents on an interstate highway, they tend to throw a lot of plans into a cocked hat. The time I should have spent at Bentonville I spent on the interstate, waiting for the police to move the accident a few miles in front of me. It would have been an appropriate time to visit the battlefield because it was raining that day. That would have made it a trifecta: rain during the battle, rain during the big camp-out, rain during my walking tour. As it is, I will have to wait for another rainy day to visit the battlefield that I last visited nearly 60 years ago.