The last battle: 150 years later
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on March 15, 2015 1:50 AM
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News-Argus/MELISSA KEY
Randy Sauls, Civil War re-enactor and enthusiast, stands in his North Carolina Confederate uniform along with some of his authentic war memorabilia in his home office. Sauls has been re-enacting for nine years and will play the role of a private during the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Bentonville.
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News-Argus/MELISSA KEY
Confederate soldier papers from Randy Sauls' collection of authentic Civil War memorabilia rest on a general's desk in his home office.
The fields and forests in southeastern Johnston County are quiet for now.
Trees wave gently in the breeze, and visitors can walk among the monuments erected to fallen soldiers at the Bentonville Battlefield Historic Site. They are welcomed by smiling faces loaded full of knowledge of the past.
But it wasn't always this way.
On Saturday and Sunday, March 21-22, the battleground will revert 150 years back in time to when the largest Civil War battle in the state ripped across the countryside near this small rural community.
The sesquicentennial anniversary of the Battle of Bentonville is expected to draw some 4,000 re-enactors and as many as 50,000 spectators to witness history unfold during the two-day re-enactment.
Several local men will take part in the action, all of whom are part of Wayne County's History Club.
Randy Sauls, Kerry Thompson, Lynn Bull and Bob Richter all have a friend who has a cannon. After firing the contraption at several events, they were hooked.
"It was just fun," Sauls said. "It was addictive."
Naturally, Sauls began to look for other ways to get involved. Eventually, he suited up in a Civil War uniform and began falling in line with re-enactors.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Sauls invited Richter and Thompson to take part in several re-enactments with him, and then they were hooked, too.
While the group does not take part in every re-enactment held in the region, they say Bentonville calls out to them due to its storied history and the sheer scale of the battle. More than 80,000 men took part in the actual battle.
The group participated in the 145th anniversary reenactment at Bentonville five years ago, switching uniforms to fight for one side and then the other.
Richter said he was a Boy Scout when he first fell in love with re-enacting Civil War battles.
"When I was a Scout, they had a jamboree out there at Bentonville in 1965," Richter said. "I was 12 or 13, and I was with Troop 96, and they had a cannon out there and I was enthralled with that cannon."
The Bentonville re-enactment occurs only every five years, a switch that was made in 1990, Bull said.
"Bentonville is unique in that the re-enactment takes place on the battlefield," Richter said. "It takes place where the troops were and not every re-enactment is like that."
There is another fact that makes Bentonville unique -- while it was fought only 100 miles from the Atlantic coast, it is considered a western Civil War battle.
"You had the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater, and so the troops that fought at Bentonville -- you had Sherman coming from Georgia and you had the Confederate troops coming from Tennessee -- so they consider it a western battle even though it's on the Eastern Seaboard," Bull said.
When the Battle of Bentonville happened in 1865, there was no Confederate army in North Carolina. When Gen. William T. Sherman marched through the state with 60,000 troops, only 20,000 Confederate soldiers -- mostly the remnants of the Army of Tennessee -- followed him.
Sherman marched in two columns of 30,000 men each. The Confederates attacked one column, but had to retreat when the second arrived on the scene. Then Sherman finished his march to Goldsboro, where he restocked his troops at the railroad junction here.
Re-enactors will attempt to re-create the battle that erupted between the two forces. All re-enactors will be dressed in period clothing, and will not be allowed to break character during the mock fights.
"There will be troops there from all over the country," Sauls said.
The re-enactment will also give spectators a sense of the gear required to fight major Civil War battles.
"It'll give people a sense of what it took to fight these battles, and what it took to house and feed and take care of troops in the field," Richter said. "People will really see what it was like when a Civil War soldier held a musket on his shoulder. In other words, when you look at his whole kit, you'll say, 'He's living in the wild.'"
Sauls said the event will be crowded -- very crowded.
"At the 145th re-enactment there were about 35,000 people watching," Sauls said. "It'll be very crowded, and they'll have a series of lectures and talks. There will be a sutler's road, which are merchants that sell Civil War related memorabilia."
Actual re-enactments of the battles will take place in the afternoon on both days.
"We have to be there two hours before everything starts to place the guns," Sauls said. "There are 16 cannons. We place the guns and we wait our turn and then we're told when to fire -- they have it scripted out."
Attending the re-enactment, Sauls said, is important -- it is a living, breathing, walking museum, he said.
"It's a taste of history," Sauls said. "It's one of the biggest in North Carolina, but even then it dwarfs in comparison to what the real battle was. But what people will get is a little slice of what it would have been like. They get to see what it sounded like, what it looked like, what it smelled like -- if you think about it, gunpowder coming from 40,000 muskets and 16 cannons going off, you're going to have the smoke and smell of it. You get a little bit of what it was like to have lived through it."
The battle re-enactments will be held at 3 p.m. on Saturday and 1:30 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets for the battle re-enactments cost $15 for adults and $10 for children 9-12, and can be obtained by visiting www.150thbentonville.com, at the historic site, or by calling 910-594-0789. Tickets can also be obtained at the gate, if they are not sold out.
Attendees are urged to be in place at least an hour prior to the start of the battle.
Bentonville is located about 20 miles west of Goldsboro. Residents can take Stevens Mill Road west from Cherry Hospital until it turns into Harper House Road at the county line. The battleground is on the right.