The three days at Bentonville cost the two sides something over four thousand men. The Union counted 1,527 casualties, killed, wounded, and missing; the Confederates lost 2,606, a far heavier blow against a far smaller army, close to a tenth of everything Joseph E. Johnston (South) had. It was the largest battle ever fought on North Carolina soil, and it was the last time a Confederate army would mount a full offensive in the war. Everything after Bentonville was retreat, collapse, and surrender.

In purely military terms the battle settled nothing that was not already settled. Johnston had gambled that he could catch and maul one wing of Sherman’s divided column, and for one afternoon at Cole’s farm he nearly did. But the wing held, the other wing arrived, and three to one is three to one. Sherman shrugged off the check, gathered his army, and marched on to Goldsboro to join the forces waiting there, exactly as he had intended before Johnston ever struck. The Carolinas Campaign, which Sherman thought a harder feat than his celebrated March to the Sea, rolled on essentially unchanged.

What made Bentonville the war’s ending was not the battle but the calendar. Within days, the eastern front that Johnston had been fighting to buy time for simply gave way. On April 1, Lee’s line west of Petersburg was shattered at Five Forks. On April 2 and 3, Petersburg and the Confederate capital at Richmond fell, and Lee’s army abandoned the trenches and ran west. The one hope behind everything Johnston had done, that Lee might break free and come south to join him, was gone. On April 9, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.

With Lee gone, Johnston’s little army had nothing left to fight for and no army left to join. President Jefferson Davis, fleeing south, wanted to fight on; Johnston, the soldier, knew better, and told his government plainly that further resistance would only be murder. On April 26, 1865, at a small farmhouse called Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina, Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman, giving up not just his own force but all remaining Confederate troops across the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, nearly ninety thousand men, the largest surrender of the war.

The terms were generous, in keeping with the spirit Grant had shown Lee. The shooting in the East was over. Johnston and Sherman, who had spent the campaign trying to destroy each other, came to respect one another deeply; years later Johnston would say of Sherman’s army that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar. Bentonville was the last full battle of that army’s long road, the final time the Confederacy gathered itself to strike. After it, there was only the surrender, and the long reckoning with what the war had been fought over.