"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 saw a kaleidoscope of action in the east, with most Civil War historians focusing on the imminent demise of the Army of Northern Virginia. However, to both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, it was the inexorable advance of the Union’s western army up through the Carolinas in the spring of 1865 that dictated their final moves.

William Tecumseh Sherman’s Carolinas campaign has long been overshadowed by the events in Virginia, even as the Confederates themselves recognized it as the crucial, war-winning blow, and pitted a luminous array of their best generals—Johnston, Hardee, Hampton, A.P. Stewart, D.H. Hill, and others—against it. In this work, career military officers Mark A. Smith and Wade Sokolosky rectify the oversight with “No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar”, a careful and impartial examination of Sherman’s advance up the seaboard.

After his largely unopposed “March to the Sea,” in March 1865 Sherman struck off again north, aiming to unite with Grant and crush Lee between them. But the Confederacy in the Carolinas was not finished yet, and while Sherman rampaged through South Carolina they gathered forces to resist him in its northern neighbor.

In North Carolina the Rebels conceded their vast arsenal at Fayetteville, which the Federals destroyed, but under William J. Hardee prepared to receive Sherman’s host in the narrow corridor between the Black and Cape Fear rivers at Averasboro. With a number of untried units (former coastal battalions) plus a scattering of veterans in Lafayette McLaws’ division, and Joe Wheeler’s cavalry, Hardee created a defense-in-depth, reminiscent of four-score years earlier at the battle of Cowpens.

At Averasboro, Sherman’s spearhead was stopped cold in a two-day battle, which in these pages is described in intimate detail. Arraying his disparate forces into three lines, Hardee forced a full two Union corps to struggle against each one, while saving his true strength for the last. Even then, it was only the fortuitous appearance of Wheeler’s cavalry that retrieved the second day, when Sherman launched a flank attack.

Strategically, along with Braxton Bragg’s command fighting off a Union thrust from the coast, the battle of Averasboro provided time for Joe Johnston to assemble all of his forces in the Carolinas, and then contest the advance of Sherman once and for all, at Bentonville.

This work uncovers a long-overlooked clash in the Civil War, which had consequences beyond the gallant sacrifices of the men, who by then on both sides knew that the war for the Union was approaching its culmination.