By March 1865 the Confederacy had no realistic path to victory. The army that Johnston scrambled together to oppose Sherman included veterans of the Army of Tennessee, Hardee's corps from Charleston, North Carolina junior reserves, and the Carolina militia - an improvised force trying to land one significant blow before the end. The opening Confederate attack on March 19 caught the Union XIV Corps as it marched in column along the Goldsboro Road, and for several hours the rebels rolled up the federal line. By nightfall the Union held a horseshoe-shaped defensive position; by the morning of the 20th, the rest of Sherman's army was arriving and the numerical advantage shifted permanently. The 21st brought a near-disastrous Union assault by General Joseph A. Mower's division - it punched into the Confederate rear and was within yards of capturing Johnston himself before Sherman ordered the troops withdrawn. Johnston used the night to retreat across Mill Creek. Sherman did not pursue.

The Harper House stood near the southwestern corner of the battlefield, a modest two-story farmhouse owned by John and Amy Harper. When the fighting began on March 19, Union surgeons commandeered the house as the field hospital for the XIV Corps. For three days and after, the Harpers watched their home filled with wounded men - amputations on the front porch, surgeons working by lamplight in the parlor, the dying and the dead carried out the back. The Harper family lost most of their possessions. The reconstructed kitchen and the enslaved people's quarters at the site today are interpretive reconstructions; the only original building still standing from the time of the battle is the main Harper House itself, where the field hospital operated. Around it the visitor walks the same yard the surgeons walked, the same ground where men lay waiting for amputation or death or, occasionally, recovery.

The Confederate defeat at Bentonville was militarily significant but politically decisive. The Confederate Army of Tennessee, which had once threatened Atlanta and Nashville, was effectively spent. The battle was significant enough that Ulysses S. Grant, weighing whether to bring Sherman north to combine against Lee at Petersburg, instead decided to leave Sherman in North Carolina to finish off Johnston's remaining forces. The decision shortened the war. Lee surrendered three weeks later; Johnston, with no army left to fight with, negotiated terms at Bennett Place near Durham within five weeks. Bentonville was the last full-scale Confederate offensive of the war - the last time the Confederacy attempted to seize the initiative on a major battlefield. It failed. But it was, by any measure, a fight.

Today about one-third of the original battlefield is owned by the state of North Carolina as Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site, declared a National Historic Landmark in 1996. Visitors tour the restored Harper House, the reconstructed kitchen and the enslaved people's quarters, and the visitor center with its interactive maps, artifacts, and 15-minute audiovisual program. Outdoor exhibits include the Federal XX Corps reserve trenches - actual earthworks from the battle, still readable in the pine woods. The Harper family cemetery and a Confederate cemetery sit on the grounds. A 10-mile driving tour with eight stops follows the lines of the three-day battle, and nearly five miles of walking trails follow original trenches built during the fighting. The earthworks have settled and softened in the 161 years since the soldiers dug them. You can still see exactly where they ran.