Battle of Five Forks

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of April, 1865, a Union general named Philip Sheridan sat down to eat a shad caught from the Nottoway River, cooked over a fire north of Hatcher's Run. So did the Confederate commander opposing him, Major General George Pickett. What happened next decided the fate of Petersburg, Richmond, and very nearly the entire Confederacy.

  The Battle of Five Forks was fought southwest of Petersburg, Virginia, around a road junction in Dinwiddie County that had become the most strategically vital patch of ground in the South. Whoever held Five Forks held the key to the South Side Railroad, the last major supply line and evacuation route keeping Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia alive. Sheridan knew it. Lee knew it. And yet, at the moment the Union assault began, the two senior Confederate commanders were a mile and a quarter away from the front, eating fish.

  The questions Five Forks raises are not simple ones. How does a battle turn on a lunch invitation? What does it mean when a victorious general fires his most capable subordinate out of personal spite, and what becomes of that subordinate twenty-four years later? And how did a Union force manage to roll up a prepared Confederate defensive line largely by accident?

• 2. Nine Months of Siege

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  The 292-day Richmond-Petersburg Campaign had been grinding on since June of 1864, when Union forces failed to seize Petersburg from a small Confederate garrison at the Second Battle of Petersburg on June 15-18. That failure forced Ulysses S. Grant into a campaign of trench warfare, attrition, and slow strangulation that the Confederates were able to endure far longer than anyone expected.

  The Confederates defended Petersburg, 23 miles south of Richmond, by skillfully exploiting field fortifications and trenches, holding out against a larger force for over nine months. But by early 1865 the defensive math had become brutal. After the Battle of Hatcher's Run on February 5-7, 1865, extended the lines another 4 miles, Lee had almost no reserves left behind the lengthened perimeter.

  Lee understood clearly that his position could not hold indefinitely. His best option was to extract part or all of his army, resupply at Danville or Lynchburg, and join General Joseph E. Johnston's force opposing Major General William Tecumseh Sherman in North Carolina. If they could defeat Sherman quickly, they might turn back against Grant before he could combine his forces with Sherman's.

  Before Lee could execute that plan, Confederate President Jefferson Davis pressed him to maintain the Richmond defenses. Unable to move efficiently over winter roads with poorly fed animals, Lee accepted Major General John B. Gordon's proposal to attack Union Fort Stedman in the pre-dawn hours of the 25th of March 1865. Gordon's men captured the fort, three adjacent batteries, and over 500 prisoners, but the Union IX Corps under Major General John G. Parke promptly counterattacked. The IX Corps retook the fort, inflicted roughly 4,000 Confederate casualties including about 1,000 captured, and simultaneously extended the Union left flank closer to the Confederate fortifications at the Battle of Jones's Farm. After those losses, Lee knew that Grant would move against the South Side Railroad very soon.

• 3. The Road to Five Forks

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  Grant had already planned his offensive before the Fort Stedman attack landed, setting a start date of the 29th of March 1865. His objectives were to draw the Confederates into open battle and, if they refused, to cut their remaining supply and communication routes entirely. The Fort Stedman attack did not change his timeline by a single day.

  Grant freed two corps of Major General George Meade's Army of the Potomac for the offensive: Major General Andrew Humphrey's II Corps and Major General Gouverneur K. Warren's V Corps, along with Sheridan's cavalry, still officially designated the Army of the Shenandoah. Sheridan's cavalry included divisions under Brigadier General Thomas Devin, Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer, and Major General George Crook.

  Before dawn on March 29, Warren's V Corps moved west of the Union and Confederate lines while Sheridan's cavalry took a longer southerly route toward Dinwiddie Court House. The first significant clash came along the Quaker Road at Lewis Farm, where Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain's brigade encountered Confederate forces and fought a back-and-forth engagement in which Chamberlain himself was wounded and nearly captured. Casualties on both sides were nearly even: 381 Union, 371 Confederate.

  At the Battle of White Oak Road on March 31, two Union divisions of over 5,000 men were initially thrown back across Gravelly Run by three Confederate brigades. Chamberlain's brigade forded the cold, swollen creek at 2:30 pm and, along with Colonel Edgar M. Gregory's brigade, drove the Confederates back to their White Oak Road Line. Union casualties were 1,407 from the Fifth Corps and 461 from the Second Corps, with Confederate casualties estimated at 800. Warren's corps ended the battle holding a section of White Oak Road between the main Confederate line and Pickett's force at Five Forks, cutting direct communications between the two Confederate commands.

  The Battle of Dinwiddie Court House on March 31 saw Pickett press the Union cavalry hard all day, forcing a series of delaying actions with the Union troopers consistently falling back. Sheridan suffered 354 total casualties while the best estimate of Confederate losses was 760 killed and wounded. But that night, when Warren sent Brigadier General Joseph J. Bartlett's brigade cross-country to threaten Pickett's flank, Pickett decided to withdraw. Between 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. on April 1, the Confederates pulled back to their defensive line at Five Forks.

• 4. The Shad Bake

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  Major General Thomas L. Rosser had moved his cavalry division from the Nottoway River to Five Forks and brought a large catch of shad on ice with him. At noon on April 1, he invited Fitzhugh Lee and Pickett to lunch at his camp, north of Hatcher's Run, about 1.25 miles behind the front.

  At 2:00 pm, just as Fitzhugh Lee was leaving the Confederate line to ride north, Colonel Thomas T. Munford came up with a dispatch from a lieutenant of the 8th Virginia Cavalry: Roberts's cavalry brigade along White Oak Road had been overpowered by Union cavalry. Fitzhugh Lee told Munford to investigate personally and order up his division if necessary, then rode north with Pickett toward Rosser's camp.

  Because of a combination of thick pine forest and heavy atmosphere between the camp and Five Forks, Pickett and Lee could not hear the sounds of battle when the Union assault began. When two of Munford's pickets arrived at the lunch to report that Union forces were advancing on all roads, the two generals decided that the absence of any audible fighting meant there was little to worry about. This phenomenon, what the source calls an acoustic shadow, had shielded them from reality.

  Munford sent several couriers looking for Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee after the attack began shaping up. Captain Henry Lee of Fitzhugh Lee's staff also searched. None of them could find the two generals. With Rooney Lee technically the senior officer in overall command, stationed at the far right of the line and unaware he was in charge, and with neither Steuart nor Munford knowing that Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee were absent, every Confederate unit commander prepared for the attack as best he could, without coordination from the top.

• 5. The Attack and the Accident

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  Sheridan's plan called for Warren's infantry to strike the Confederate left flank while Custer made a feint on the right and Devin mounted a frontal assault when he heard the infantry attack begin. A key problem emerged before the first shot was fired: Sheridan had been told that the Confederate left extended roughly 0.75 miles further east than it actually did. Captain George L. Gillespie, the engineer Sheridan sent to align the V Corps, later testified at the Warren Court of Inquiry in 1880 that he had made no reconnaissance and did not know there was a "return" on the Confederate left flank.

  At about 4:15 pm, the order was given for the attack. Sheridan, Warren, and Colonel Porter rode at the front of Ayres's division. As Ayres's men crossed White Oak Road, they discovered the Confederate line was not immediately across from Gravelly Church Road but 700 to 800 yards further west. The bad information had sent Crawford's division and Griffin's division past the end of the Confederate line entirely, into woods where they would spend critical time chasing Munford's cavalry outposts rather than closing on the main defensive works.

  Crawford's division missed the roughly 150-yard Confederate return line entirely. Warren went in pursuit of the wandering divisions himself, eventually finding Griffin about 800 yards north of the Confederate works at a local landmark called the Chimneys, and searching repeatedly for Crawford through woods and fields.

  What saved the Union attack was a combination of Ayres's personal reading of the situation and Sheridan's physical presence in the battle line. When Ayres realized his men had overshot the angle in the Confederate line, he changed his front to the left to face the return directly. Sheridan rode along the line shouting encouragement, threats, and profanities. When a soldier was shot in the neck and fell shouting "I'm killed!", Sheridan called back: "You're not hurt a bit, pick up your gun, man, and move right on to the front." The man stood up, moved a dozen paces, and then collapsed dead.

  Ayres's men took the Confederate return position, killing or capturing all of Ransom's men who had not fled. Confederate artillery commander Colonel Willie Pegram was mortally wounded. Brigadier General Matt Ransom himself had to be freed from under his wounded and fallen horse. An officer in one of Ransom's regiments wrote afterward: "The Yankees simply run over us and crowded us so that it became impossible to shoot."

  Sheridan jumped his horse over the berm into the Confederate works, landing among men who had already thrown down their weapons. The color-sergeant of the 190th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment planted the first Union flag on the Confederate line. Ayres took over 1,000 prisoners and eight battle flags, though Colonel Frederick Winthrop was mortally wounded and Colonel Richard N. Bowerman was severely wounded in the process.

  Griffin then turned west on White Oak Road and drove to Five Forks itself, where his division met Pennington's and Fitzhugh's dismounted cavalry brigades breaking through from the front. On the right, Bartlett's brigade captured an ambulance and wagon train on Ford's Road. Crawford's division, once finally redirected, captured seven ambulances and additional wagons from Wallace's brigade, sending prisoners to the rear so fast that Crawford's provost marshal could not keep an accurate count.

  The Union held Five Forks. The Confederates had lost over 1,000 casualties and up to 4,000 prisoners.

• 6. Warren's Removal

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  Just before noon on April 1, one of Grant's staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel Orville E. Babcock, delivered a message to Sheridan: Grant authorized Sheridan to relieve Warren of command of the V Corps if in Sheridan's judgment the corps would do better under one of the division commanders. Sheridan told Babcock he hoped it would not be necessary.

  Grant had issued the order partly because a staff officer mistakenly reported at about 10:00 a.m. that Warren's corps was still held up at Gravelly Run. Throughout the campaign's preceding days, Sheridan had accumulated a series of grievances against Warren, some of them grounded in genuine communication failures and some in Sheridan's private enmity. Sheridan had been angered at 7:00 a.m. when he found Warren at the rear of Griffin's column rather than the front, not knowing that Warren had stayed back to supervise Crawford's careful withdrawal from a position in close contact with the enemy. Sheridan's exclamation at that discovery, "That is where I should expect him to be!", was considered unfair by Warren's own men, who knew Warren had never shown a lack of personal bravery.

  After the battle, Sheridan relieved Warren of command. Warren spent years attempting to clear his reputation. At the Warren Court of Inquiry in 1880, twenty-four years after Five Forks, witness after witness testified to the conditions Warren had faced: a wrecked bridge at Gravelly Run, an impossible timeline imposed by Grant, faulty intelligence about the Confederate line that sent two of his three divisions past the end of the Confederate position. Gillespie's 1880 testimony directly contradicted Sheridan's after-action report.

  For Colonel James G. Grindlay, the battle had a different outcome: he was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor for leading Winthrop's brigade into the Confederate works and capturing multiple battle flags and numerous prisoners. Colonel Alfred L. Pearson, who had fought at Lewis Farm days earlier, also received the Medal of Honor.

• 7. The Domino

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  Pickett crossed Hatcher's Run on horseback just as Munford's cavalrymen were falling back with Kellogg's brigade pressing forward. He had returned too late. The Confederate line at Five Forks had already broken.

  The fall of Five Forks did exactly what Robert E. Lee had feared. With the Union holding the junction and the road to the South Side Railroad, Lee could no longer maintain his defenses at Petersburg. He informed Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate States Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge of the situation. Lee abandoned both Petersburg and Richmond and began what would become his final retreat, the beginning of the Appomattox Campaign that would end eight days later.

  The 292-day siege that had seemed to promise an indefinite stalemate collapsed in a single afternoon. The Confederate brigades of Corse, Mayo, Steuart, Wallace, and Ransom, which had held their lines through months of attrition, were gone as a fighting force. Three companies of the 1st Maine Veteran Infantry Regiment had chased Rosser's cavalry across Hatcher's Run before the day was out. Even the Union cavalry commander who had provided the fish for the ill-timed lunch, Thomas Rosser, had lost his division's wagon train to the Union advance.

  Pickett himself wrote later that he had assumed Lee received his message asking for reinforcements and would send help. No copy of Lee's reply ordering him to hold Five Forks "at all hazards" was ever found, as historian Douglas Southall Freeman noted in 1944, and historian Edward Longacre pointed out the account of that order came from Pickett's widow thirty years after the battle, through a source he considered unreliable. What is not in dispute is the result: one road junction, one afternoon, and the war in the East was over within a week.