During the Carolinas Campaign, Confederate cavalry under Wade Hampton, Joseph Wheeler, and Matthew C. Butler served as the rear guard for William J. Hardee’s Corps as it evacuated Fayetteville on March 12, 1865. Wheeler placed artillery and dismounted cavalry on the eastern bank of the Cape Fear River to protect Clarendon Bridge until the last Confederates crossed, then burned it. Henry W. Slocum, commanding William T. Sherman’s Left Wing, had been ordered to do all possible to secure the bridge while capturing Fayetteville, but Confederate skirmishers delayed his lead division approaching from the west. Part of Sherman’s Right Wing, led in part by the 15th Illinois Cavalry, entered the city first, where Hampton and his men held them off in street fighting before firing the bridge as Giles A. Smith’s infantry division arrived in support. Confederate small arms and artillery fire from the eastern bank kept Union forces back until the bridge was engulfed in flames, and Union soldiers failed to put out the fire despite struggling with washtubs of water. Hampton’s cavalry then left the east bank and marched toward Averasboro, while Butler covered routes toward Clinton. Sherman’s engineers later built pontoon bridges across the river, and his army departed Fayetteville on March 14. Clarendon Bridge, named for Clarendon County, from which Cumberland County was later formed, had been completed in 1819 as a large covered wooden toll bridge built with the patented Town Lattice System, and a new covered bridge completed in 1866 stood there until 1909, remaining a toll bridge until about 1885.