"No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar"

The final days of the Confederacy saw a kaleidoscope of action in the Eastern Theater, 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 armies 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 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 now in paperback.

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. The Confederacy in the Carolinas, however, was not yet finished. While Sherman rampaged through South Carolina, Confederate authorities gathered forces to resist him in its northern neighboring state.

In North Carolina, the Rebels conceded their vast arsenal at Fayetteville, which the Federals destroyed, but under General 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, described here in intimate detail, Hardee arrayed his disparate forces into three lines that nearly fought Sherman’s veterans to a standstill until a flank attack won the day for the Union.

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 his forces and contest Sherman’s advance at Bentonville. Without Averasboro, there would have been no Bentonville.

Meticulously researched and gracefully written, “No Such Army” explores a long-overlooked clash that had consequences beyond the gallant sacrifices of the men, who by then on both sides knew that the war was approaching its culmination.