Preview: Davis & Greenwalt, “Calamity in Carolina”

About ten years ago I took a little trip down to North Carolina for a series of tours with an email group to which I still belong. We hit up Monroe’s Crossroads, Averasboro, Bentonville, and Forts Anderson and Fisher. (You can read a bit about the Bull Run connections to Bentonville here.) It would have been nice to have had Daniel Davis’s and Philip Greenwalt’s Calamity in Carolina: The Battles of Averasboro and Bentonville, March 1865, from Savas Beatie, along on that trip. Yet another of the ever growing Emerging Civil War series, Calamity covers those closing battles that pitted the forces of William T. Sherman against the who’s who of the Confederacy presided over by Joe Johnston. The convoluted movements of the armies before, during, and after these engagements could use considerably more than the six maps provided in this slim volume, but let’s keep in mind these are overviews, and you can always pick up a copy of Mark Moore’s Historical Guide to The Battle of Bentonville, which includes Averasboro, if you need to visualize.

Along with numerous period and contemporary illustrations and compact narratives of the actions (91 pages), Calamity includes driving tours and orders of battle for both battles, and appendices on Sherman’s March, Mower’s Attack, a sketch of Joseph A. Mower, the road to Bennett Place, the relationship between Sherman and Johnston, and the story of the preservation of Bentonville Battlefield.