Before dawn on the chilly morning of March 19, 1865, a detachment of Union foragers under Captain Charles Belknap downed the last of their coffee and rode out of camp, “tired, sore, cross, and ugly, but every man in his place.” For weeks, mounted foraging details had set out each morning ahead of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army as it tore through South Carolina and into North Carolina. Belknap’s 90-man patrol, armed with repeating Colt rifles and Spencer carbines, advanced two miles from camp before scattering an enemy picket post in the dark. So far as they knew, it was only a minor outpost of Brig. Gen. George Dibrell’s small cavalry division. Belknap thought they had a good chance of surprising and overrunning one of Dibrell’s camps.
It was fully light when Belknap’s band crossed a swamp, plunged through some brush, and ran into more Confederate pickets. The Federal troops broke up the picket line, then rode over a small rise. Expecting perhaps a handful of tents, they spotted something that was not supposed to be there at all—the entire Confederate Army of Tennessee. Belknap took in “a line of earthworks not forty rods away. As far as I could see to the right and the left the dirt from thousands of shovels was flying in the air.” General Joseph E. Johnston had managed to arrange quite a surprise for Sherman near the village of Bentonville. Belknap and his men were the first to be caught in Johnston’s trap.
