By the early spring of 1865, the war the South had started to protect slavery was visibly ending, and everyone could read the arithmetic. Robert E. Lee was pinned in the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, his army wasting away. And in the Carolinas, William T. Sherman was loose. He had burned a path across Georgia to the sea, taken Savannah as a Christmas gift for Abraham Lincoln, then turned north into South Carolina, the cradle of secession, and wrecked it. Now he was in North Carolina, marching for the town of Goldsboro, where two more Union armies were waiting to fold into his. Once they joined, he would have well over eighty thousand men and a clear road into Lee’s rear.

The man sent to stop him had almost nothing to do it with. General Joseph E. Johnston (South) had been recalled to command in February 1865 by Lee himself, now general-in-chief of all Confederate armies, and handed an impossible job: scrape together the broken fragments of Confederate forces scattered across the Carolinas and somehow blunt the unstoppable column coming up from the south. Johnston gathered the remnant of the Army of Tennessee, the western army that had been smashed at Franklin and Nashville the previous winter, along with garrison troops, militia, and Wade Hampton’s (South) cavalry. All told it came to roughly twenty thousand men, many of them old, young, or already beaten once.

Sherman gave Johnston the one thing a weak army needs against a strong one: a target it could fight on even terms. To move faster and forage across more country, Sherman marched his sixty thousand men in two wings on separate roads, often a full day’s march apart. The Left Wing, the Army of Georgia under Major General Henry W. Slocum (North), pushed up the Goldsboro Road. The Right Wing, the Army of the Tennessee under Major General Oliver O. Howard (North), was off on another road to the south. For a day or two, Slocum’s thirty thousand were on their own. Sherman, riding with Howard’s wing, was so sure the campaign was as good as over that when a subordinate warned of trouble ahead, he answered that there was nothing in their front but rebel cavalry.

He was wrong. Hampton’s troopers had been falling back slowly up the Goldsboro Road on purpose, drawing Slocum forward toward a place where Johnston’s whole gathered army lay hidden and waiting. Near a farm owned by the Cole family, a couple of miles south of the village of Bentonville, Johnston had bent his line into a great hook across the road, ready to swing shut on the head of the unsuspecting Union column. He had managed the one thing the South could almost never manage by 1865: to concentrate. For one afternoon, on one road, the beaten Confederacy would outnumber the men in front of it.