The three day Battle of Bentonville produced a total of 4,133 casualties. Union losses were 1,527, with 194 killed, 1,112 wounded, and 221 missing and captured. Confederate casualties totaled 2,606, with 239 killed, 1,694 wounded, and 673 missing and captured. Many of the wounded found themselves in a field hospital set up by Sherman's Fourteenth Army Corps. Its surgeons, searching for a safe location, chose the modest two-story farm home of John and Amy Harper, and wounded began streaming to this makeshift medical facility within minutes of its establishment a mile from the chaotic front lines. Throughout March 19 and 20, Federal surgeons at the Harper House treated a total of 554 men, both Union and Confederate. Without the benefit of antibiotics to stop infection, doctors amputated shattered arms and legs to prevent gangrene from claiming their patients' lives. Despite the screams of the wounded, the piles of severed limbs, and the stench of blood and chloroform (an anesthetic used by Union surgeons) that pervaded the Harper House, the family refused to leave their home during this time.

March 19, 1865, dawned soft and balmy in central North Carolina. A brass band played the hymn "Old Hundred." The hymn's tranquil strains reminded the 30,000 men on the Left Wing of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's Union army group that it was Sunday, while blossoming fruit trees called to mind quiet homes and families far away. Many of the soldiers looked forward to the end of the war, which now seemed imminent.

But the idle thoughts of a Sunday morning exploded as the Federals approached the farming community of Bentonville. Just outside of town 20,000 tattered Confederates, the remainder of a once-powerful army, attacked the Union troops. Dreams of joyous reunions were soon replaced by the carnage of war, and men who had marched to the front now lay wounded on the battlefield.

Four years earlier, at the beginning of the war, these men might have remained, untreated, on the battlefield for days. At the First Battle of Manassas in 1861, for example, many Union doctors fled in fear and those who stayed found themselves without adequate supplies or ambulances for their patients. As the war progressed and casualties mounted, however, military surgeons became more adept at caring for wounded. By the Battle of Bentonville, one of the last major engagements of the Civil War, the United States Army Medical Department had developed an effective system for operating field hospitals and an ambulance corps. This improved organization was typical of the advances in logistics that helped the North's war effort. Bentonville's Harper House was quickly overwhelmed by both Union and Confederate wounded; the historic Harper House reflected the typical Civil War battlefield's Medical Treatment for the Wounded.

Sources: National Park Service; Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site