The Siege of Petersburg was one of the last major battles of the American Civil War, occurring from 9 June 1864 to 25 March 1865 as Ulysses S. Grant's Union Army of the Potomac besieged Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the vital railroad town of Petersburg, Virginia, just south of the Confederate capital of Richmond. After a months-long war of attrition, Lee was forced to extricate himself and his starving army from the city, resulting in a defeat at the Battle of Five Forks and a beleaguered retreat towards Danville, Virginia in the ensuing Appomattox campaign. Petersburg and Richmond were abandoned to the Union on 2 April 1865, and President Abraham Lincoln visited the burned-down Confederate capital a day later and was greeted as a liberator by the city's Black population.
Background[]
Since May 1864 the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had been fighting each other north of the James River. Union troops assaulted Confederate forces that were firmly planted behind cunningly contrived earthworks. But as the soldiers settled into the Richmond-Petersburg lines, the Confederate mastery of field fortifications was soon matched by that of the Union armies. Stalemate loomed.
After failing to defeat Robert E. Lee in open battle, Ulysses S. Grant shifted his strategy, hoping to sever the Confederate supply lines - the railroads running to the south and west that kept the Army of Northern Virginia in the field. During the siege of Vicksburg, Grant had tightened a ring around the defending army so no supplies could get in and starved it into submission - a tactic that he would pursue again.
History[]
In June 1864, Lee remarked to his staff that if Grant managed to cross the James River and arrive before Petersburg, "it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time." By July the military situation had indeed taken on all the appearance of a siege. For 35 miles, a curving line of entrenchments stretched from north of Richmond to west of Petersburg - a labyrinth of front lines, secondary lines, bombproof shelters, rifle pits, and small forts, or redoubts, scarred the flat landscape. Sharpshooters ruled this denuded world, picking off the unwary. Artillery always thundered somewhere. It was a life lived almost entirely underground. Dirt, mud, sun, rain, wind, and sky - and the occasional whizzing bullet - marked its boundaries.
Mining the line[]
As the standoff settled into a lethal stalemate, members of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, who had been coal miners in civilian life, persuaded their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, a mining engineer, that it was possible to dig a mine beneath a Confederate redoubt called Elliott's Salient, pack it with explosives, and blow a hole in the enemy lines. Though doubting its usefulness, Grant eventually approved the scheme.
Digging began on 25 June and by 17 July the miners had excavated a 510-foot shaft, ending directly beneath Elliott's Salient, only 20 feet above them. They had cleverly concealed their work, devising ingenious ways to provide ventilation. But the inevitable noise had alerted the Confederates who sank countermines in response. Those went wide of the mark, so the Pennsylvanians dug lateral tunnels - like the crossbar on a "T" - which they packed with 230 kegs of gunpowder, totaling four tons of charge, sandbagged to direct the force upward. The miners retracted their steps, unwinding a 98-foot fuse. The plan was to break the enemy line in an instant, then exploit the breach with waves of assault troops who would pour through the punctured works and roll up the Confederate army.
At 4:45 AM on 30 July, Elliott's Salient erupted in an earthshaking roar, a blast that carried skyward men, cannons, gun carriages, and tons of earth. When the dust had cleared, the Salient was gone, replaced by a 170-foot long crater, nearly 80 feet wide and 30 feet deep. The assault troops clambered out of their trenches, reached the edge of the crater, then halted, stupefied at the sight of shattered men and guns strewn across its bottom. Other troops managed to get around it, but since their leaders had remained behind, they quickly became disorganized. In the ensuing chaos, the Confederates received enough to mount counterattacks, and the Battle of the Crater, as it would be called, degenerated into a savage struggle. Screaming men pounded by each other, amid cries of "No quarter!" Black Union troops, trapped in the Crater, were shot down even after surrendering. One Southerner recalled with horror, "My heart sickened at the deeds I saw done." Those Union survivors who had not been captured fled back to their own lines. Grant admitted that it was "the saddest affair I witnessed in the war."
Railroads and a cattle raid[]
Grant redoubled his efforts around the armies' edges, seeking to thin the Confederate lines until they broke. ON 18-21 August, Major-General Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps seize another of Lee's arteries to the south. In the Battle of the Weldon Railroad, troops of General A.P. Hill's Third Corps slammed into Warren's, forcing them back into open fields. There the Union infantry held, despite Hill's repeated assaults - and held the railroad too.
Loss of the Weldon Railroad raised the specter of starvation for Lee's soldiers. In mid-September, General Wade Hampton III and 4,000 troopers rode around the Army of the Potomac, almost as far as Grant's massive supply depot at City Point. They raided the Union cattle corral, rustling some 2,000 head and, driving the herd back the way they had come, managed to lose only 60 men.
That fall, Grant continued his war of maneuver. On 29-30 September, Union forces took Fort Harrison, a key bastion in the Richmond defenses. At the same time, on the other end of the line, a Union reconnaissance force pushed 3 miles west of the Weldon Railroad, only to be beaten back by A.P. Hill and Wade Hampton in a brutal two-day fight at Peebles' Farm.
On 27 October, Grant's Second Corps and part of his Fifth Corps, with a cavalry screen, reached out even father west in an attempt to cut the Boydton Plank Road, an important link to the southwest. By exploiting a gap between the two corps, the Confederates succeeded in turning their enemies back, though several thousand more names were added to the casualty rolls. Lee desperately struggled to keep his remaining supply line, the South Side Railroad, from being severed.
Dark winter days[]
As winter set in, Lee faced another worry: desertion. Union pickets knew that "Johnnie Reb" (the archetypal Southerner) was waiting for the results of the presidential election in the North. After Lincoln prevailed, hope went out of the Army of Northern Virginia. Each day for months on end, the incessant shelling continued. Nerves were breaking. Self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and occasional suicides, were reported. At night, scores of men disappeared, some coming into Union lines to surrender. A truce was called at Christmas, and soldiers emerged from the trenches without fear of snipers. Robert E. Lee's winter of discontent was upon him, and the prospects for the spring looked bleak.
As 1865 dawned, the opposing armies dug in outside Petersburg were stymied. In a campaign that foreshadowed the trench warfare of World War I, both sides had made repeated attempts to achieve a breakthrough without gaining any decisive advantage.
Union superiority[]
Yet the situation was much more serious for Robert E. Lee's army than it was for Ulysses S. Grant's. The Southern army was outnumbered by more than two to one, and the odds were worsening week by week as a steady stream of desertions further sapped its manpower. Grant had been able to use his numerical advantage gradually to extend his lines, which stretched Lee's resources to the limits. Moreover, the Confederate supply routes had been cut one by one, with the loss of Wilmington, the only surviving link to the sea, delivering a particularly devastating blow.
With only bad news coming from the Carolinas, Lee knew that it could only be a matter of time before General William T. Sherman's forces would be able to link up with the Army of the Potomac and complete his encirclement. To avoid that scenario, Lee had to extricate his army as soon as possible. Lee turned to Major-General John B. Gordon, commander of the Second Corps, who devised a strategy that involved sending armed troops masquerading as deserters to launch a surprise assault on Fort Stedman, a strongpoint at the eastern end of the Federal lines. At first the play succeeded, but after four hours' fighting, Union forces staged a successful counterattack and Gordon's men were driven back with heavy losses.
Decisive clash at Five Forks[]
Grant at once determined to take advantage of this reverse. On 29 March, he sent an infantry corps accompanied by General Philip Sheridan's cavalry, newly arrived from the victorious Union campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, to probe the western end of Lee's lines. Lee took vigorous measures to counter the move, and there weas hard fighting on 30 March,w ith neither side managing to achieve an advantage. The next day, Philip Sheridan's horsemen confronted General George E. Pickett's decision at a crossroads known as Five Forks, 20 miles southwest of Petersburg.
Sheridan dispatched the Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac under Major General Gouverneur K. Warren with orders to attack the Confederate left flank. Despite confusion in the plan's execution, the pincer attack worked. By 7 PM, Pickett's force had collapsed, with half the men surrendering and the rest taking flight. The Union breakthrough had finally been achieved.
The defeat at Five Forks, sometimes called the "Waterloo of the Confederacy," threatened Lee's last remaining lines of communication to the west and south and his position was untenable. The next morning, 2 April, he sent word to Jefferson Davis that Petersburg would fall and that when it did, Richmond itself would have to be abandoned. As it happened, the message had barely reached the Southern president, who was attending a Sunday-morning church service at the time, when Grant's men launched an all-out attack along Lee's lines at Petersburg. The Confederates resisted, but only as a holding action designed to give the army time to withdraw in some semblance of order from the beleaguered city. By the following morning, Petersburg was in Union hands.
The fall of Richmond[]
With Petersburg fallen, Richmond could not be defended. As soon as Lee had telegraphed Jefferson Davis that 2 April morning to abandon the city, the evacuation had commenced. Orders were given to torch everything of military or strategic value. After the civil authorities had departed, the city was unpoliced and the conflagrations spread uncontrolled until the first Union detachments arrived next morning to accept the city's formal surrender and to begin dousing the flames. By then, much of the Southern capital was in ruins; an estimated 25% of its buildings had burned down, and remaining hopes for the Confederacy lay smoldering.
Aftermath[]
Following the fall of Richmond, the Confederacy became a country and a cause without a capital. Lee's retreating army was its only remaining bulwark. Jefferson Davis used the city's last rail link to escape to Danville, 150 miles to the southwest, where he issued a defiant promise to continue the struggle. In contrast, Abraham Lincoln who happened to be visiting the Army of the Potomac when Richmond fell, traveled into the city barely a day after Davis had left it. He was welcomed as a liberator by the city's black population. "You are free, free as air," the President told them. But Lincoln would die within two weeks.
Lee hoped to escape with his army to the Danville area and fight on, but the move was blocked by Grant. With this, Lee had no option but to surrender.