A few days subsequent to the events in North Carolina to which reference has been made, General Lee proposed to me that General J. E. Johnston should be put in command of the troops in North Carolina. He still had the confidence in that officer which I had once felt, but which his campaigns in Mississippi and Georgia had impaired. With the understanding that General Lee was himself to supervise and control the operations, I assented to the assignment. General Johnston, on the 23d of February, at Charlotte, North Carolina, relieved General Beauregard and assumed command. General Lee's first instructions to General Johnston were to "concentrate all available forces and drive back Sherman." The first part of the instructions was well executed; the last part of it was more desirable than practicable, though the brief recital made herein of the events of the campaign claimed the credit due to a vigorous effort.
General Johnston's force, according to his estimate, when he took command, amounted to about sixteen thousand infantry and artillery, and four thousand cavalry; if to this be added the portion of the Army of Tennessee, about twenty-five hundred men, under command of General Stephen D, Lee, which afterward joined the army at Smithfield, North Carolina, and that of General Bragg's command at Goldsboro, which amounted to about eight thousand, the aggregate would be about thirty thousand five hundred men of all arms.
After leaving Columbia, the course of the Federal army through Winnsboro, across the Catawba at Rocky Mount, Hanging Rock, and Peay's Ferry, and in the direction of Cheraw on the Great Pedee, indicated that it would attempt to cross the Cape Fear River at Fayetteville, North Carolina—a town sixty miles south of Raleigh, and of special importance, as containing an arsenal, several Government shops, and a large portion of the machinery which had been removed from Harper's Ferry—and effect a junction at that point with General Schofield's command, then known to be at Wilmington. Up to this time, while no encounter of any magnitude had taken place, the enemy's progress had been much impeded by the Confederate cavalry, and the robbery of private citizens by gangs of armed banditti, called "foraging parties," was in a large measure prevented. The right of an army to forage as it advances through an enemy's country is not questioned. But the right to forage, to collect food for men and horses, does not mean the right to rob household furniture, plate, trinkets, and every conceivable species of private property, and to burn whatever could not be carried away, together with the dwellings. General Sherman complained that some of these "foragers," who were caught in the commission of the above-named offenses, and had added thereto the greater crime of assaulting women, had been summarily dealt with by some of those whose wives and daughters they had outraged, and whose homes they had made desolate; and he informed General Hampton that in retaliation he had ordered a number of Confederate prisoners of war to be put to death. To arrest this brutality General Hampton promptly informed him that, "for every soldier of mine murdered by you, I shall have executed at once two of yours, giving in all cases preference to any officers who may be in our hands," and adding, with a view to check the inhuman system of burning the houses of those citizens whom they had robbed, that he had ordered his men "to shoot down all of your men who are caught burning houses." [117] This notice and the knowledge that General Hampton would keep his word, produced, it is believed, a very salutary effect, and thereafter the fear of punishment wrought a reform which the dictates of honor and humanity had been powerless to effect.
The historian of Sherman's "Great March," in his illustrated narrative of that expedition, describes both with pen and pencil the manner in which "with untiring zeal the soldiers hunted for concealed treasures. . . . Wherever the army halted," he writes, "almost every inch of ground in the vicinity of the dwellings was poked by ramrods, pierced with sabers, or upturned with spades," searching for "valuable personal effects, plate, jewelry, and other rich goods, as well as articles of food, such as hams, sugar, flour, etc. . . . It was comical," adds the chronicler, "to see a group of these red-bearded, barefooted, ragged veterans punching the unoffending earth in an apparently idiotic but certainly most energetic way. If they 'struck a vein,' a spade was instantly put into requisition, and the coveted wealth was speedily unearthed. Nothing escaped the observation of these sharp-witted soldiers. A woman standing upon the porch of a house, apparently watching their proceedings, instantly became an object of suspicion, and she was watched until some movement betrayed a place of concealment. The fresh earth recently thrown up, a bed of flowers just set out, the slightest indication of a change in appearance or position, all attracted the gaze of these military agriculturists. It was all fair spoil of war, and the search made one of the excitements of the march." [118] The author of the work from which the foregoing is an extract was an aide-de-camp on the staff of General Sherman. The playful manner in which he describes these habitual acts of plunder of "plate, jewelry and other rich goods" from private and undefended dwellings shows that not only was such conduct not forbidden by the military authorities, but that it was permitted and applauded, that it was practiced "wherever the army halted" under the eye of the staff-officers of the General commanding, and was looked upon as one of the pleasurable "excitements of the march." Indeed, so agreeable was the impression made by these scenes of robbery of women's "rich goods" that he has adorned his narrative with a full-page illustration, exhibiting a plantation home surrounded by soldiers engaged, as this staff-officer humorously terms it, in "treasure-seeking," while the lady of the house—its only apparent occupant—stands upon the veranda, with hands uplifted, beseeching them not to steal the watch and chain which they are taking out of a vessel which they have just dug up. That the foreign mercenaries, of which the Federal army was largely composed, should have been guilty of such disgraceful conduct, when free from the observation of their officers, is conceivable; but it is difficult to imagine that, in the nineteenth century, such acts as are described above could be committed habitually, in view of the officer of highest rank in the army of a civilized country, and not merely pass unpunished or unrebuked, but be recorded with conspicuous approval in the pages of a military history.
The advance of the enemy's columns across the Catawba, Lynch's Creek, and the Pedee, at Cheraw, though retarded as much as possible by the vigilant skill of our cavalry under Generals Hampton, Butler, and Wheeler, was steady and continuous. General Johnston's hope that, from the enemy's order of moving by wings, sometimes a day's march from each other, he could find an opportunity to strike one of their columns in the passage of the Cape Fear River, when the other was not in supporting distance, was unhappily disappointed.
On March 6th, near Kinston, General Bragg with a reënforcement of less than two thousand men attacked and routed three divisions of the enemy under Major-General Cox, capturing fifteen hundred prisoners and three field-pieces, and inflicting heavy loss in killed and wounded. This success, though inspiring, was on too small a scale to produce important results. During the march from the Catawba to the Cape Fear several brilliant cavalry affairs took place, in which our troops displayed their wonted energy and dash. Among these the most conspicuous were General Butler's at Mount Elon, where he defeated a detachment sent to tear up the railroad at Florence; General Wheeler's attack and repulse of the left flank of the enemy at Hornesboro, March 4th; a similar exploit by the same officer at Rockingham on the 7th; the attack and defeat by General Hampton of a detachment on the 8th; the surprise and capture of General Kilpatrick's camp by General Hampton on the morning of the 10th, driving the enemy into an adjoining swamp, and taking possession of his artillery and wagon-train, and the complete rout of a large Federal party by General Hampton with an inferior force at Fayetteville on the 11th.
As it was doubtful whether General Sherman's advance from Fayetteville would be directed to Goldsboro or Raleigh, General Johnston took position with a portion of his command at Smithfield, which is nearly equidistant from each of those places, leaving General Hardee to follow the road from Fayetteville to Raleigh, which for several miles is also the direct road from Fayetteville to Smithfield, and posted one division of his cavalry on the Raleigh road, and another on that to Goldsboro. On the 16th of March General Hardee was attacked by two corps of the enemy, a few miles south of Averysboro, a place nearly half-way between Fayetteville and Raleigh. Falling back a few hundred yards to a stronger position, he easily repelled the repeated attacks of these two corps during the day, and, learning in the evening that the enemy's corps were moving to turn his left, he withdrew in the night toward Smithfield.
Early in the morning of the 18th General Johnston obtained definite information that General Sherman was marching on Goldsboro, the right wing of his army being about a day's march distant from the left. General Johnston took immediate steps to attack the head of the left wing on the morning of the 19th, and ordered the troops at Smithfield and General Hardee's command to march at once to Bentonville and take position between that village and the road on which the enemy was advancing. An error as to the relative distance which our troops and those of the enemy would have to move, exaggerating the distance between the roads on which the enemy was advancing and diminishing the distance that our troops would have to march, caused the failure to concentrate our troops in time to attack the enemy's left wing while in column; but, when General Hardee's troops reached Bentonville in the morning, the attack was commenced. The battle lasted through the greater part of the day, resulting in the enemy's being driven from two lines of intrenchments, and his taking shelter in a dense wood, where it was impracticable for our troops to preserve their line of battle or to employ the combined strength of the three arms. On the 20th the two wings of the Federal army, numbering, as estimated by General Johnston, upward of seventy thousand, came together and repeatedly attacked a division of our force (Hoke's) which occupied an intrenched position parallel to the road to Averysboro; but every attack was handsomely repulsed. On the next day (21st) an attempt by the enemy to reach Bentonville in the rear of our center, and thus cut off our only route of retreat, was gallantly defeated by an impetuous and skillful attack, led by Generals Hardee and Hampton, on the front and both flanks of the enemy's column, by which he was compelled to retreat as rapidly as he had advanced. In this attack. General Hardee's only son, a noble boy, charging gallantly with the Eighth Texas Cavalry, fell mortally wounded. On the night of the 21st our troops were withdrawn across Mill Creek, and in the evening of the 22d bivouacked near Smithfield. On the 23d the forces of General Sherman and those of General Schofield were united at Goldsboro, where they remained inactive for upward of two weeks.
On the 9th of April the Confederate forces took up the line of march to Raleigh, and reached that city early in the afternoon of the same day closely followed by the Federal army.