The generals -- from Joe Johnston and Cump Sherman down to anyone in command of so much as a brigade -- all knew that the war which they had been fighting for four years was effectively over by this date in 1865. Yet Johnston obeyed Robert E. Lee's order and took the opportunity to attack. He tried to pick off Sherman's left wing, which was commanded by Henry Slocum.
Sherman had gone off with the right wing, dismissing concerns by Slocum's XIV Corps commander Brig. Gen. Jefferson Davis that he was running into trouble (though the trouble was ultimately contained by hard fighting). For a genuinely great general, Sherman never showed much skill in battlefield tactics -- but then you could say the same thing about Dwight Eisenhower.
Johnston made up for his aggression at Bentonville a month later, when he wisely ignored instructions from the other Jefferson Davis (who unlike every almost every soldier in the field appeared to think there was a point in continuing to fight after Appomattox), and surrendered to Sherman. (Both the Confederate president and the Union general, then a colonel and a noncom, respectively, in the US Army, had fought on the same side in the Mexican War Battle of Buena Vista.)
Sherman, whom some have criticized for lack of aggression in counter-attacking the Confederates at Bentonville, was proven right by that surrender. Several hundred men were already killed at the battle, which affected the war's outcome not a jot. Sherman knew there was no reason to kill any more.
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