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, seeking to join Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia to 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. Reinforced at Goldsboro late in March, Sherman faced a Johnston who saw the futility of further resistance and surrendered on April 26, essentially ending the Civil War. On April 17, 1865, Sherman arrived by train at Durham's Station at the culmination of his Carolinas Campaign to discuss terms of peace at Johnston's request, while Johnston was headquartered in nearby Hillsborough. Carrying a telegram announcing the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Sherman spoke with his cavalry commander, Gen. H. Judson Kilpatrick, near the Durham home of Dr. Richard Blacknall, then rode three miles west to meet Johnston at James and Nancy Bennett's farmhouse to open negotiations for the Confederate surrender. Since the 1820s, the U.S. Post Office Department had assigned this community various names, but it was officially named Durham in 1853 after Dr. Bartlett Durham donated four acres of land for a North Carolina Railroad station and the Durham's Station post office was established. About 100 people lived in the hamlet in 1865, and it grew rapidly around the station. After the Civil War, Durham developed rapidly as a tobacco and textile manufacturing center. Durham County was established in 1881, and by 1900 its population was more than 26,000, while a century later the metropolitan area totaled more than 450,000. Durham residents also served in the Flat River Guards, Co. B, 6th North Carolina Infantry, which saw heavy action at the First Battle of Manassas in July 1861, and in the Durham Light Infantry, Co. C, which took part in Pickett's Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.