This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place (review)

This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place. By Mark L. Bradley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xix, 404. $34.95.)

One of the oddities of the Civil War is that the struggle that began at Belmont, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh in the western theater ended in the East, in fact, farther east than Appomattox. Except for this and similar interesting oddities, Joseph E. Johnston's surrender to William T. Sherman at the Bennett Place, near Durham Station, North Carolina, has long been treated as an afterthought, meriting little discussion other than an acknowledgment that Johnston's surrender was inevitable after the demise of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

Fortuntely, Mark L. Bradley, who previously skillfully told the story of the campaign and battle of Bentonville, has rescued Johnston's surrender from its near footnote status by providing a well-documented and careful analysis of the political and military situation within which Sherman and Johnston maneuvered and negotiated in the six weeks after Bentonville. It is an interesting story, told with considerable skill from the accounts of Federals and Confederates, politicians and soldiers, civilians and military men.

Appropriately, Bradley's account begins in the immediate aftermath of Bentonville, where Sherman had both the capacity and the opportunity to destroy Johnston's army on the battlefield. Johnston's escape with the remnants of the Confederate Army of the South (soon to be renamed the more familiar Army of Tennessee) provided the Confederacy a thin ray of hope that Johnston could evade Sherman and somehow combine with the Army of Northern Virginia and fight Grant or Sherman before the two Union generals could join forces. When Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865, deprived Johnston of that option, the Confederate commander focused on a more realistic goal: ending the war on the best possible terms for Southern soldiers and civilians.

While Johnston has been much criticized in recent studies for his performance earlier in the war, Bradley demonstrates that in April 1865, "Old Joe" excelled in a hopeless situation. He was able to cobble the scant remnants of the old Army of Tennessee together with miscellaneous Confederate troops stationed in the Carolinas to create a nimble and viable force that could, by its mere existence, prolong the war for weeks or even months. Johnston used this substantial bargaining chip to great effect, first to negotiate a political as well as military surrender in mid-April and, when Washington rejected those terms, to negotiate "supplemental" terms that provided for the surrendered troops and no doubt minimized their marauding through the countryside on the way home.

Bradley livens his narrative with interesting sidelights to the end of hostilities. The stories of North Carolina's Confederate governor Zebulon Vance illustrate the chaos of these final days of the war. Vance experienced problems and even hostility from the military authorities of both sides as he struggled to make his state government relevant to the transition from war to peace. Of more interest to Civil War historians is the story of how eighty boxes of Confederate War Department records were recovered by Federal troops after the surrender, to be preserved for the instruction of generations to come.

Bradley is to be commended for a well-written and impressively researched monograph on a long ignored subject.

Sam D. Elliott
Signal Mountain, Tennessee

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