by Edward Ellis, Special Correspondent
Both of the Union Army’s top generals traversed the railroad through New Bern in early 1865 during the final chapter of the Civil War. Major General William Tecumseh Sherman spent the night of March 25-26 in New Bern. The following month Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant – general-in-chief of the army – rode the rails through downtown on a secret mission to meet with Sherman.
By 1865, New Bern – occupied by Northern forces since 1862 – had become a vital supply center for the Federal forces focused on the seizure of Goldsboro, sixty miles to the west. Goldsboro was strategically important because it was the junction of two railroads. One of them, The Wilmington and Weldon, was still in Confederate control and running vital supplies from the open blockade-runner port of Wilmington to Robert E. Lee’s rebel army in Virginia. The other rail line, the Atlantic and North Carolina ran from Morehead City to Goldsboro. It was controlled by the Union only from the coastal town to New Bern. The A&NC link from New Bern to Goldsboro was a no-man’s-land that had been scrapped over for years.
In 1865, General Sherman, after cutting a bloody swath with his forces across Georgia, and burning Atlanta on the way, decided that his ultimate destination was Goldsboro. N.C. Taking out that important rail junction, he concluded, would put the final stake through the heart of the Confederacy. Ironically, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, the conqueror of New Bern, had the same idea and plan in 1862 before he and 8,500 of his soldiers were hurried out of New Bern to bolster troubled Union forces in Virginia. Had Burnside completed his N.C. mission, the Civil War might have been shortened by years.
After a series of remarkable battles in early 1865, the railroad between New Bern and Goldsboro was seized and repaired by Union troops. One of the first eastbound passengers was no less than Sherman himself. He spent the night in New Bern before boarding the steamer Russia Sunday morning March 26 on his way to powwow with Grant in Virginia.
Grant traveled to a secret Raleigh rendezvous with Sherman the following month. Coming shipboard to Beaufort, he passed by rail through darkened New Bern streets on the night of April 24, 1865.