Qualla: Bentonville Battlefield

Bentonville Battlefield: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sherman did not expect a fight. After cutting his sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction across Georgia and into the Carolinas, the Union general was pushing north through eastern North Carolina in March 1865, his sixty thousand troops spread across two parallel columns, confident that the war was effectively over. General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the scraps of the Army of Tennessee and assorted Confederate forces, decided to strike at the more isolated of Sherman's two wings before they could reunite. On the morning of March 19, 1865, near the tiny crossroads of Bentonville in Johnston County, North Carolina, Johnston ambushed the Union XIV Corps as it marched north. For three days the largest Civil War battle ever fought in North Carolina raged across cornfields and pine woods. When it ended on March 21, roughly 4,000 men on both sides were dead, wounded, or missing. Nineteen days later, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Johnston would surrender what was left of his army at Bennett Place, near Durham, roughly sixty miles to the northwest, on April 26.

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Image: JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bentonville Battlefield: Sherman's Last Major Fight

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DanTD, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 t...

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Image: DanTD | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bentonville Battlefield: The Harper House Field Hospital

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Necessary Evil at Danish Wikipedia, Public domain. 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 Har...

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Image: Necessary Evil at Danish Wikipedia | Public domain

Bentonville Battlefield: What Sherman Decided

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Necessary Evil at da.wikipedia, Public domain. 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...

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Image: Necessary Evil at da.wikipedia | Public domain

Bentonville Battlefield: Trenches and Trails

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bentonvilleshs, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 qu...

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Image: Bentonvilleshs | CC BY-SA 4.0