Siege of Petersburg

• 1. Introduction

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  The Siege of Petersburg was not really a siege at all. That distinction matters, because what unfolded outside Petersburg, Virginia, from June 1864 to April 1865 was something the American Civil War had never quite seen before: nine months of grinding trench warfare that would foreshadow the killing fields of World War I by half a century. The Confederate city of Petersburg sat just south of Richmond, connected to the Confederate capital by rail, by road, and by the fate of the war itself. Without Petersburg, Richmond would starve. Without Richmond, the Confederacy would collapse. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant understood this arithmetic perfectly. Robert E. Lee understood it too, and that is what made what followed so brutal and so consequential. How did the most strategically significant campaign of the Civil War begin with a series of near-misses and fumbled opportunities? Why did Grant, after months of costly frontal assaults, shift to a strategy of slow strangulation? And what did it mean that the war's largest concentration of African-American troops fought and died in the trenches and craters outside this Virginia city?

• 2. The Road to Petersburg

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  On the 4th of May 1864, Grant and Meade's Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River and entered the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, launching the Overland Campaign. For six weeks, Grant hammered Lee's army through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor, suffering approximately 50,000 casualties, or 41 percent of his force. Lee lost approximately 32,000 men, around 46 percent of his, losses the Confederacy could not replace. Northern newspapers, appalled by the bloodshed at Cold Harbor, began calling Grant "the Butcher." Cold Harbor was the battle Grant later said he regretted more than any other. The frontal assault on June 3 against Lee's fortified positions was repulsed with heavy losses, and Grant never attempted anything quite like it again. On the night of June 12, Grant pivoted sharply. Rather than slug it out north of Richmond, he marched his army left and south to the James River. His men built a pontoon bridge 2,100 feet long and crossed on June 14-18. Petersburg, a prosperous city of 18,000, stood at the junction of five railroads and sat on the Appomattox River with navigable access to the James. It was the main supply depot for the entire region. Seize Petersburg, and Richmond would be cut off. Lee had long feared being drawn into exactly this kind of siege, and his worst fear was now poised to materialize.

• 3. The Days the City Was Almost Lost

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  Petersburg came within hours of falling before the siege ever started. On June 15, Smith's XVIII Corps crossed the Appomattox and swept over the Confederate Dimmock line on a front three and a half miles wide, driving the defenders back to Harrison's Creek. Beauregard later wrote that Petersburg "at that hour was clearly at the mercy of the Federal commander." Beauregard's entire force numbered just over 2,200 men concentrated in the northeastern sector, with infantrymen spaced an unacceptable 10 feet apart. Smith, despite a virtually undefended city immediately in front of him, chose to wait until dawn. The normally decisive Winfield Hancock, who outranked Smith and arrived at his headquarters that evening, uncharacteristically deferred to Smith's judgment. Beauregard used those hours brilliantly. Receiving no guidance from Richmond, he stripped the Howlett defensive line to free the divisions under Hoke and Johnson. By morning he had concentrated about 14,000 men in a new defensive position. Three more days of uncoordinated Union assaults followed. On June 17, a surprise dawn attack by Potter's IX Corps brigades captured nearly a mile of Confederate fortifications and about 600 prisoners before stalling. The final assault on June 18 ended with the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment losing 632 of its 900 men, the heaviest single-battle regimental loss of the entire war. After four days, Union casualties totaled 11,386. Grant ordered his men to dig in. The ten-month siege had begun.

• 4. The Battle of the Crater

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  Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer from Pennsylvania commanding the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, proposed a solution to the Confederate stalemate: dig a mine shaft beneath the Confederate lines, fill it with explosives, and blow a gap through the defenses. Digging began in late June. The finished shaft ran 511 feet with a perpendicular gallery of 75 feet at its end, packed with 8,000 pounds of gunpowder buried 20 feet beneath Confederate works at Elliott's Salient. Burnside had trained Ferrero's division of United States Colored Troops to lead the assault, with specific tactics for exploiting the breach. The day before the attack, Meade ordered the Black troops removed from the lead role, citing the political danger if the attack failed. Burnside protested; Grant sided with Meade. The replacement division was selected by lot, and Ledlie's 1st Division drew the assignment. Ledlie gave his men no briefing on their mission. At 4:44 a.m. on July 30, the charges exploded. The blast created a crater 170 feet long, 60-80 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, and killed between 250 and 350 Confederate soldiers instantly. Ledlie's men waited ten minutes before moving, then climbed down into the crater itself. No ladders had been provided to get back out. Mahone assembled a counterattacking force that ringed the crater and, in Mahone's own description, conducted a "turkey shoot" into the men trapped below. Ferrero's men were then sent in and suffered the same fate. Union casualties reached 3,798. Grant wrote that it was "the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war."

• 5. Cutting the Railroads

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  Petersburg's lifeline ran on iron rails. Grant's strategy after the failed initial assaults was systematic strangulation of the three rail lines still supplying Petersburg and Richmond: the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad, the South Side Railroad running west to Lynchburg, and the Weldon Railroad running south to Wilmington, North Carolina. The Wilson-Kautz Raid of June 22 to July 1 sent 3,300 cavalrymen and 12 guns to destroy as much track as possible. The raiders tore up about 60 miles of track but were caught in a trap near Reams Station on June 29. Wilson and Kautz burned their wagons, destroyed their artillery, and fled north in what was called "a wild skedaddle." At least 300 escaped slaves who had joined the raiders were abandoned during the retreat. Grant reluctantly called the expedition a "disaster." The real break came in August. Warren's V Corps reached Globe Tavern on the Weldon Railroad on August 18 and, after three days of fighting against Mahone and Heth, held a permanent Union grip on the line. The Confederates were now forced to haul supplies by wagon 30 miles from Stony Creek up the Boydton Plank Road into the city. A member of Lee's staff acknowledged the inconvenience but insisted "no material harm is done us." That calculation would change as the months wore on and the South Side Railroad became the only line directly supplying Petersburg.

• 6. African Americans on Both Sides

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  Petersburg in 1860 was home to the largest number of free Black residents of any Southern city. Of the city's roughly half-Black population, nearly 35 percent were free, working as barbers, blacksmiths, boatmen, and livery stable keepers. Virginia as a whole held about 549,000 Black residents, one in six of the Confederacy's total Black population, of whom 89 percent were enslaved. When war came, the Confederacy put both free Black men and enslaved people to work. In 1862, Captain Charles Dimmock used their labor to build the ten-mile defensive line of trenches and batteries that would later bear his name. In September 1864, Lee asked for 2,000 additional Black laborers. On the 11th of January 1865, he wrote to the Confederate Congress urging legislation to arm and enlist enslaved men in exchange for their freedom. Congress complied on March 13, and Jefferson Davis promulgated the policy in General Order No. 14 on March 23. The emancipation it offered remained conditional on a master's written consent. On the Union side, the concentration of United States Colored Troops at Petersburg was the largest of the entire war, ranging between 9,000 and 16,000 men organized as the XXV Corps by December 1864. USCTs participated in six major engagements of the Petersburg campaign and earned 15 of the 25 Medals of Honor awarded to Black soldiers during the entire Civil War. The first wave of USCTs had helped breach the Dimmock line on June 15, the very first day of the campaign.

• 7. The Collapse at Fort Stedman

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  By March 1865, Lee's army was outnumbered roughly 125,000 to 50,000 and bleeding away from desertion, disease, and hunger. Sheridan's cavalry would soon return from the Shenandoah Valley. Sherman was marching north through the Carolinas. Lee assigned Major General John B. Gordon to plan a surprise attack on the Union lines at Fort Stedman that might force Grant to contract his position and buy Lee time to escape south. Gordon's assault began at 4:15 a.m. on March 25. Lead parties of sharpshooters disguised as surrendering Confederate soldiers overwhelmed Union pickets and removed obstacles. Within minutes, Batteries X, XI, and XII and Fort Stedman itself had been seized, opening a gap nearly 1,000 feet long in the Union line. Gordon, arriving at Fort Stedman, found the attack had exceeded his "most sanguine expectations." Union Brigadier General Napoleon McLaughlen rode into the fort in the confusion, began issuing orders, and was captured when both sides simultaneously realized who he was. But Gordon's deeper exploitation force, three detachments of 100 men each, wandered in confusion through the Union rear, with some men stopping to eat captured Federal rations. Hartranft's reserve division ringed the Confederate penetration by 7:30 a.m. By 7:45, 4,000 Union troops in a semicircle a mile and a half around Fort Stedman counterattacked. Confederate casualties reached approximately 4,000, against 1,044 for the Union. Lee had weakened his own right flank to give Gordon's attack its strength, and the II and VI Corps seized much of the Confederate picket line to the southwest. Grant's breakthrough at the Third Battle of Petersburg was now set for the 2nd of April 1865.

• 8. Surrender and Legacy

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  Five Forks fell on April 1. Petersburg itself was breached on April 2, and the city surrendered at dawn on April 3. Richmond fell that same evening. Lee retreated west with the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia and surrendered at Appomattox Court House. The campaign had lasted nine months and produced trenches that ultimately stretched over 30 miles from the outskirts of Richmond around the eastern and southern edges of Petersburg. At the end, Grant had 125,000 men prepared for the Appomattox campaign; Lee had roughly 50,000, eroded past the point of recovery. The Richmond-Petersburg campaign is remembered in military history as an early model of the industrial-scale trench warfare that would define the Western Front in World War I. The mine detonated beneath Elliott's Salient on the 30th of July 1864, the crater it left still visible today, stands as one of the most dramatic and tragic episodes in that long campaign, a near-revolution in tactics that collapsed into catastrophe through failures of leadership. The story of the XXV Corps, the all-Black formation assembled at City Point, earned 15 Medals of Honor across six major engagements, a record that points toward the larger transformation the war set in motion.