On
March 16-17 1865, three miles south of the town, more than thirty
thousand Federals battled six thousand Confederates.
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The battle at Averasboro [also spelled “Averysboro”] preceded the battle at Bentonville and saw twenty-eight hundred Confederate troops in the first two defensive lines face an enemy of twelve thousand in mid-March 1865.
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Shattered Southern Lines at Averasboro
“[In
noting] the comparative losses on both sides during the War Between the
States, [author Capt. B.H. King] asks, “What say the survivors of Five
Forks, Sailor’s Creek, and Bentonville?” intimating the severity of the
hard-fought struggle on those fields.
Captain
King does not mention Averysboro; but as Bentonville followed
Averysboro so closely that it may almost be considered the second stand
of a continued engagement, I give the percentage of loss in one company
in that fight.
Lucas’s
Battalion of Artillery occupied the extreme left in that engagement,
and a company of regulars --- Capt J.J. Richardson, I think, was on the
extreme left of the battalion. A lieutenant in that [South Carolina]
company was Thomas J. Heyward, then only about twenty-two years old.
Captain Richardson’s company went into the fight that morning ninety
strong. Stubbornly they held the extreme left all day; but that
afternoon they were flanked by overwhelming numbers, and while fighting
as “regulars” do, with the regularity of a drill, they were being shot
in the backs with death-dealing [volleys].
Rather
than surrender, they valiantly cut their way out. At roll call the next
morning only nineteen answered, including the orderly sergeant and
Lieutenant Heyward, in command.
Lieutenant
Heyward saw Capt. Richardson shot down, cut through both legs, while
leading his men out of the flanked trenches, and remarked to the writer
the next day that as he sprang forward to take command he felt as though
he was simply taking his place to be shot down.
I
recall that at the reorganization and review of his decimated army by
General [William J.] Hardee at Smithfield, NC, I saw Lieutenant Heyward
standing proudly and with all the soldierly bearing of a Citadel Cadet
Academy graduate in front of a little squad of heroes, their company
having lost seventy-nine per cent!
Lieutenant
Heyward was at the firing upon the Star of the West in the beginning of
hostilities, and fought in the battle of Bentonville, the last real
hard struggle of the cause; so he might be termed the Alpha and Omega of
that fearful four years of struggle and hardship.
I
heard a North Carolinian, Sergeant Devant, say to two other couriers
from the same State – and all three had been at Gettysburg – at duck
that evening while in front of an enfilading battery of artillery: “If
there was a place in the battle of Gettysburg as hot as that spot, I
never saw it.”
If
living, Capt. W. Perrin Kemp, of Maryland, a member of Gen. [William B]
Taliaferro’s staff, as well as Sergeant Devant, may recall the spot at
dusk in the evening of March 18, 1865, when a bunch of horsemen,
composed of General Taliaferro, his staff, couriers, and signal corps,
at a point near a battery of artillery, could easily see through the
underbrush in the pine forest the flash of every gun as the artillery
enfiladed our shattered lines.
He
may recall the men of the reserve line lying down and lowering their
colors, and even the officers kneeling in compliance with the personal
orders of General Taliaferro.
He
may recall too how, after all had dismounted except for General
Taliaferro, Captain Mathews, and another South Carolinian, he
thoughtfully admonished a lad of sixteen to get off his horse, saying,
“It is foolish to sit there,” and how as the lad thanked him he threw
his leg over the saddle and seated himself behind a tree, when a
grapeshot dashed across the seat of his saddle and buried itself in the
ground at his feet, and also how that raging leaden hailstorm of grape
and canister literally barked the trees, cutting off the limbs as if cut
by hand.”
(“Ask the Survivors of Bentonville,” Samuel W. Ravenel, Confederate Veteran, March 1910, pg. 124)
