On 19 March 1865 Confederate troops under General Joseph E. Johnston attacked the Left Wing of William T. Sherman's Union army near Bentonville, North Carolina. The Union line held, and after three days of fighting Johnston withdrew; on 26 April he surrendered his army. On 19 March 1945 two bombs set the aircraft carrier USS Franklin ablaze off Japan.
Battle of Bentonville
19 March 1865 · 161 years ago
Sherman in the Carolinas
After his March to the Sea, Sherman drove north into the Carolinas in early 1865 with his army split into two wings: the Left Wing under Major General Henry W. Slocum and the Right Wing under Major General Oliver O. Howard. On 16 March Slocum's wing fought Lieutenant General William J. Hardee's corps near Averasboro, and Hardee then withdrew.1
Johnston learned that Sherman's two wings were marching on Goldsboro by separate roads, and decided to attack the Left Wing before the Right could come to its aid. The American Battlefield Trust and the Encyclopedia of North Carolina give him about 21,000 men against Sherman's 60,000; the state historic site gives about 16,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry against nearly 60,000 Union troops once Sherman's wings had joined.2
The attack of 19 March
The battle was fought from 19 to 21 March 1865 in rural Johnston County. Johnston drew up his army in a hook-shaped line across the Goldsboro Road.3
Slocum believed that Johnston's main army was elsewhere and that he faced only cavalry. A Union probing attack was thrown back. Deserters then told Slocum that Johnston's whole army was in his front, and he went over to the defensive and called up reinforcements.4
Deploying the Confederate troops along a single narrow road through the thickets "consumed a weary time", as Johnston put it, and the attack began only in mid-afternoon, at about three o'clock. It drove William P. Carlin's division of the XIV Corps back and took three of its guns. James D. Morgan's division held out, the Confederate advance was stopped at the Morris farm, and at nightfall the Confederates returned to the lines they had started from. The Trust and the state historic site both call the first day a tactical draw.5
Mower's charge and the retreat
On 20 March Howard's Right Wing reached the field, and by four in the afternoon most of it was in line. Johnston stayed where he was, evacuating his wounded and guarding his only line of retreat over Mill Creek. Sherman, unsure of Johnston's strength and expecting him to retreat, decided against a general attack.6
On the afternoon of 21 March, in heavy rain, a "little reconnaissance" by Joseph A. Mower's division of the XVII Corps grew into a full-scale push on the Confederate left toward the Mill Creek bridge. Hardee led the counterattack that stopped it, and Sherman ordered Mower back. Hardee's only son, aged sixteen, was mortally wounded charging with the Eighth Texas Cavalry.7
The Encyclopedia of North Carolina judges that the Confederates escaped mainly because Sherman did not launch a general assault, and in his Memoirs Sherman wrote: "I think I made a mistake there, and should rapidly have followed Mower's lead with the whole of the right wing". In the night of 21 to 22 March Johnston's army withdrew toward Smithfield. The Trust counts Bentonville a Union victory; Sherman reported that his army remained in possession of the field.8
Counting the cost
The Official Records give Union losses of 1,527 killed, wounded and missing: 194 killed, 1,112 wounded and 221 captured or missing. For the Confederates they give 239 killed, 1,694 wounded and 673 missing, 2,606 in all. Sherman and Johnston gave other figures in their own reports and memoirs.9
The end in North Carolina
Sherman did not press the pursuit and moved on to Goldsboro, which he reached on 23 March, joining the forces of John M. Schofield and Alfred H. Terry. On 26 April 1865 Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham. Bentonville was the largest Civil War battle fought in North Carolina. Sherman's earlier campaign is told in our article on the March to the Sea, his life in our profile of William Tecumseh Sherman, and the end of the war in Virginia in our article on Appomattox Court House.10
Battle of Hopton Heath, 1643: Stafford's Civil War battle
19 March 1643 · 383 years ago
On Hopton Heath in Staffordshire, Royalist cavalry under the Earl of Northampton attacked Parliamentarians under Sir John Gell and Sir William Brereton in the English Civil War. Northampton was killed after refusing to yield, and the Parliamentarians left the field after dark.
Read the full story of Battle of Hopton Heath, 1643: Stafford's Civil War battle ›Also on this day
1945: the burning of USS Franklin. At 0708 on 19 March 1945, as the aircraft carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) was launching strikes against Japan, a single enemy plane came in undetected and hit her with two bombs. Fires spread through the armed planes on deck and set off ammunition, bombs and rockets. Franklin lay dead in the water with a 13-degree list. The cruiser Santa Fe came alongside to take off the wounded, and Pittsburgh took the carrier in tow.11
A skeleton crew stayed aboard and saved her; she later steamed home to New York under her own power. Her losses were 724 killed or missing and 265 wounded. Both accounts single out the chaplain, Lieutenant Commander Joseph T. O'Callahan, who organized fire-fighting parties, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Donald Gary, who led some 300 men trapped below decks to safety.12
