A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [416]
“We are falling back slowly before Sherman,” Feilden had scribbled in a penciled note to Julia on March 13. “I hope that we may have a victory over this man Sherman. I should like to pursue him from here to South Carolina.”15 None of the Confederate generals, including Hardee, had expected Sherman to make it through the Carolina swamps so quickly, if at all. The right wing of Sherman’s army was within marching distance of Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital. In desperation, Hardee deployed his outnumbered and weakened forces in a surprise attack against Sherman’s left flank on March 16.
The ambush slowed Sherman just enough for Johnston to organize his army into battle formation at Bentonville, North Carolina. There, for three days, beginning at dawn on March 19, 1865, a force of twenty thousand Confederates struggled against an army three times its size. The disparity between the two armies was exacerbated by the Confederates’ muddled organization, but Johnston suddenly showed his critics that he could fight—and fight hard—when pressed. By March 21 Johnston’s army had suffered more than twenty-five hundred casualties, to the Federals’ fifteen hundred. Feilden was talking to General Hardee when a stray shot struck the tree beside them. The next bullet passed through Feilden’s sleeve “near enough to jar my funny bone” and hit his horse, Billy, in the leg. The wound was just bad enough to prevent him from riding the horse in the next cavalry charge. Hardee’s sixteen-year-old son, Willie, begged to take part, and in the heat of the moment, Hardee nodded his assent and kissed the boy farewell. A short while later, a Texas Ranger brought Willie back, shot through the chest. “He was a mere schoolboy,” wrote Feilden in anguish. “He was as gallant a little fellow as ever fired a musket.” The tragedy made him long to be with Julia: “Oh! My precious one, if we are only spared to meet again, and live together, what happiness it will be,” he wrote. “I don’t care how poor we may be. It will be the greatest blessing this earth can afford us.”16
After the Battle of Bentonville, Sherman continued his march toward Richmond while the Confederates retreated to Raleigh, North Carolina—Johnston apparently too stunned to consider pursuit. He telegraphed Lee: “Sherman’s course cannot be hindered by the small force I have. I can do no more than annoy him.” Lee realized that in a few days he would be facing the combined forces of Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman, and he began planning the Army of Northern Virginia’s evacuation from Petersburg. He knew that Richmond would then fall to the Federals, but if his army remained intact, the South would still have its fighting capability. On March 25, he launched a surprise attack against the Union Fort Steadman, on the east side of Petersburg, hoping to distract Grant long enough to enable the rest of the Confederate army to retreat southward, toward North Carolina. The assault was an outright disaster, costing Lee four thousand casualties against the Federals’ fifteen hundred, without any weakening of Grant’s line.
Thomas Conolly was in Richmond during the attack, but the news of its failure made no difference to his confidence in the ultimate outcome of the war: “Richmond thy sun is not setting, rather the Day is just about to break over your hero-crested virgin hills!” he wrote in his diary, adding for good measure: “Always darkest before the dawn! What a dawn, Independence!” Late on the twenty-fifth he received a note inviting him to visit Mrs. Mason’s house. “ ‘Welly’ is to be there!” wrote Conolly in surprise, learning for the first time that his friend Lieutenant Llewellyn Traherne Bassett Saunderson, of the British Army’s 11th Hussars, had arrived in the South at the same time as he had, hoping