Bennett Place: Largest Confederate Surrender Ends the Civil War
What was the last surrender of a major Confederate Army during the Civil War? Many Americans think it’s Appomattox Court House, but while the latter negotiated surrender between Union Lt. Gen. U.S. Grant and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was crucial to ending the war, the last major Confederate Army to surrender did so at Bennett Place, North Carolina, days later on April 26, 1865—159 years ago today.
Besides U.S. Grant, Gen. William T. Sherman was the most brilliant and successful Union general of the Civil War. His March to the Sea was a decisive move toward ending the war, and he and Grant worked together and depended on each other in a large and vital degree. Confederates and their modern sympathizers love to vilify Sherman, accusing him of various horrors; ironically, some of the “crimes” were just Confederate propaganda, and Sherman’s successful campaign never even approached the brutality of widespread Confederate war crimes. Sherman’s negotiation of the surrender at Bennett Place, however, helps to illustrate just how eager he was to welcome back any Confederates who truly wanted peace, and how willing he was to give them (perhaps overly) generous terms.
On April 17, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston met with Sherman to discuss a potential surrender. The negotiations were complicated first by news of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s tragic assassination on April 14 at the hands of a racist Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had planned an excessively charitable reconstruction, but, understandably, the Republicans and federal government were feeling less than generous after Lincoln’s death. In the long run, however, Sherman’s terms were quite generous. Few traitors in human history have received so merciful a treatment.
From Military.com:
“U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Lincoln's cabinet rejected the agreed terms of surrender and ordered Sherman to renegotiate on military terms only. Johnston met with [Confederate President J.] Davis in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where Davis ordered Johnston to escape from North Carolina with his cavalry and reject the negotiations.
Johnston disobeyed Davis' orders, telling the Confederate president that the people of the South were tired of war, considered themselves defeated and that his army was deserting en masse.
Johnston met with Sherman once more on April 26, 1865. The two sides came to agree to essentially the same terms Grant and Lee agreed to at Appomattox Court House. More than 89,000 Confederate soldiers were allowed to return to their homes and were given 10 days' rations. With the end of the Civil War in the southeastern United States, Sherman began distributing food to southern civilians.”
Military.com adds, “Substantial Confederate armies were still in the field, but none was as large or essential to continuing the rebellion as Johnston's. Davis considered the surrender an act of treachery, even as Johnston was held by Union forces until May 2. Johnston never forgot Sherman's generosity in the surrender agreement, and the two became close friends for the rest of their lives.”
In fact, it might have been better for the country had men like Sherman been a little harsher in their terms; most of the Confederate perpetrators of war crimes never faced serious consequences, and quite a few former Confederates and their Democrat sympathizers went on to push through racist and divisive legislation at the state and federal levels. Some of the former Confederates put the past behind them and embraced re-Union and civil rights, but most of them did not. They transferred their treachery and racism and terroristic tactics to legislatures and groups like the KKK.
But one fact remains true: Confederate Johnston made the right decision, and he essentially ended the Civil War, America’s bloodiest conflict, by so doing. If more Confederates had been like Johnston, willing to acknowledge final defeat and make close friends of their former Union opponents, perhaps our nation would have healed instead of being still divided to this day by the same issues. Sherman won the battle of his time, and we must now take on the same battle to stop the Democrats from destroying America.
Johnston and Sherman became such good friends that Johnston was a pall bearer at Sherman’s funeral.
Sherman’s relationship with Secretary of War Stanton was so bad that at the massive army parade in Washington a few weeks later when the two men met, Sherman refused to shake Stanton’s hand on the reviewing platform while surrounded by the elite union civilian and military leadership. Many attribute this to the way Stanton and the rest of Lincoln’s cabinet reacted negatively to Sherman’s overly generous, initial surrender terms. Stanton and the Lincoln cabinet sent Grant south to make sure the surrender terms were limited to the Appomattox CH model.