Smith, Mark A./Sokolosky, Wade "No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar"

Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign from Fayetteville to Averasboro, March 1865

The final days of the Confederacy were marked by a kaleidoscope of events in the eastern theatre of war, with most Civil War historians focusing on the impending demise of the Army of Northern Virginia. For Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, however, it was the inexorable advance of Union armies through the Carolinas in the spring of 1865 that determined their final steps. William T. Sherman's campaign in the Carolinas was long overshadowed by events in Virginia, although the Confederates recognised it as a decisive blow to the war effort and sent a number of their best generals Johnston, Hardee, Hampton, A. P. Stewart, D. H. Hill and others to oppose it. In their work No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar, the authors correct this omission with a careful and unbiased examination of Sherman's advance along the coast. After his largely unhindered march to the sea in March 1865, Sherman set out again for the north to join Grant and destroy Lee between them. However, the Confederacy in the Carolinas was not yet finished. While Sherman raged through South Carolina, Confederate authorities in the neighbouring state to the north gathered forces to resist him. In North Carolina, the rebels abandoned their huge arsenal of weapons in Fayetteville, which was destroyed by the Northerners, but under General Hardee they prepared to receive Sherman's army in the narrow corridor between the Black and Cape Fear rivers near Averasboro. With a series of untested units (former coastal battalions) and a handful of veterans in Lafayette McLaws' division and Joe Wheeler's cavalry, Hardee created a deeply staggered defence reminiscent of the Battle of Cowpens eighty years earlier. At Averasboro, described in detail here, Hardee deployed his heterogeneous forces in three lines that brought Sherman's veterans almost to a standstill until a flank attack brought victory to the Union. Strategically, the Battle of Averasboro, combined with Braxton Bragg's command, which repelled a Union advance from the coast, bought Joe Johnston time to gather his forces and halt Sherman's advance at Bentonville. Without Averasboro, there would have been no Bentonville. Carefully researched, No Such Army sheds light on a long-overlooked battle whose consequences extended far beyond the heroic sacrifices of the men who, at that point, knew on both sides that the war was heading toward its climax.