In the second half of April 1865, as Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army retreated west from Raleigh, his forces scattered and became widely dispersed. By the time he formally surrendered on April 26, troops under his authority were encamped in Charlotte, Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury, and at Trinity College. Confederate Gen. William J. Hardee had retreated with his corps to a point ten miles east of Trinity College by April 17, but before the end of the month, while Johnston negotiated with Union Gen. William T. Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham, Hardee moved his headquarters to the college. He pitched his tent near the main building, while his aides, escorts, and scouts erected their tents among the trees north of the structure, and most of the other men in his corps camped in the vicinity of High Point and Greensboro. Early in May, as Johnston negotiated the surrender of his army to Sherman, Hardee left for Salisbury to board a train for Alabama. Trinity College had begun here as Brown’s Schoolhouse, organized by Methodists and Quakers in 1838; the North Carolina legislature chartered Union Institute Academy there in 1841, the school changed its name to Trinity College in 1859, and it relocated to Durham in 1892, where it became Duke University in 1924. During the Civil War, in May 1861, headmaster Braxton Craven organized the Trinity Guard from among the students there, and in November 1861 the company was assigned to guard the new prison at Salisbury, where Craven served as commandant for a month before remaining headmaster until his death in 1882.