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Bennett Place
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bennett Place, the popular name for the farmhouse owned by James and Nancy Bennett (alternatively and probably correctly, Bennitt), was the site of the largest surrender of troops during the American Civil War, on April 26, 1865.
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After General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea, he turned north through the Carolinas for the Carolinas Campaign. Confederate President Jefferson Davis met General Joseph E. Johnston in Greensboro, North Carolina, while Sherman had stopped in Raleigh. Sherman offered an armistice on April 17 and Johnston, whose army was vastly overmatched and recently defeated at the Battle of Bentonville, agreed. The two generals met three times in the farmhouse located seven miles from Durham Station (now Durham, North Carolina) before they agreed upon surrender terms.
The difficulty in reaching an agreement lay in part in Johnston's desire for more than the purely military surrender that Sherman offered. His original terms matched those offered by Ulysses S. Grant to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, while Johnston insisted on resolutions of political issues such as the reestablishment of state governments after the war. But the negotiations were also soured by the Union's anger over the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14. The two generals had agreed on terms of surrender that included the political issues, but Union officials in Washington turned them down in favor of purely military terms. In response, Jefferson Davis ordered Johnston to disband his infantry and escape with his mounted troops, but Johnston disobeyed orders and signed the surrender terms, which ended the war for 90,000 men in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.
Currently, Bennett Place is a registered historic site located in Durham, North Carolina. The buildings presently on the site are similar in style and date to the originals and were moved there in the 1960s. The originals burned in 1921. The site is also home to a memorial museum and a yearly reenactment of the surrender.