The Carolinas Campaign began on February 1, 1865, when Union Gen. William T. Sherman led his army north from Savannah, Georgia, after the “March to the Sea,” intending to join Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia and help crush Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. As scattered Confederate forces consolidated in North Carolina, the Confederacy’s logistical lifeline, Sherman defeated Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s last-ditch attack at Bentonville, and after receiving reinforcements at Goldsboro late in March, Johnston recognized the futility of further resistance and surrendered on April 26, essentially ending the Civil War. On April 19, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 58, suspending hostilities and naming West Point as the northern end of a truce line between his forces and Johnston’s while the two commanders negotiated surrender terms about seven miles southwest at James Bennett’s farm. Union Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick placed his cavalry here near the West Point mill village above the Eno River, but despite the truce line, army stragglers and hungry civilians often searched the area for food, shelter, and livestock, a Union patrol once scattered looting Confederate strays, and Federal soldiers were known to harass West Point landowners and damage private property in search of food. In 1865 West Point was one of the region’s most prominent mill villages, with several dwellings, a gristmill, a blacksmith shop, a cotton gin, a general store, and a post office serving about 300 residents, and local miller John Cabe McCown’s Greek Revival-style farmhouse became a frequent target for Union cavalrymen practicing with new seven-shot Spencer repeating rifles acquired in late March 1865 in exchange for single-shot Burnside carbines. The site of Durham had earlier been occupied by the Eno and Occaneechi Native American tribes before Scottish, Irish, and English settlers built gristmills along the Eno River and nearby streams, and Durham is also thought to have been the site of an ancient Native American village called Adshusheer, praised by John Lawson in A New Voyage to Carolina, his account of a 1700–01 expedition through the Carolinas.