FOR ALMOST TEN months Grant’s forces picked away at the Confederates entrenched around Petersburg, Virginia. Just twenty miles south of Richmond, Petersburg was a highly industrialized city of eighteen thousand people; its importance lay in the five railroads converging on the city. Northern forces had already cut off many of the other supply lines leading into Richmond. Petersburg was the last outpost, and without it, Richmond—and possibly the entire Confederacy—was lost.
The Confederates had long realized the importance of Petersburg: in 1862, a ten-mile trench line named after its engineer, Charles Dimmock, was dug around Petersburg in a U shape. The line anchored on the south bank of the Appomattox both to the east and to the west of Petersburg. Along the trench line were fifty-five gun batteries, whose walls reached up to forty feet high.
Like all of Grant’s campaigns in Virginia, Petersburg was not tactical but strategic. It turned into a siege with trench warfare unlike any seen thus far during the war. While Grant was still tangling with Lee at Cold Harbor, Major General Benjamin Butler and his thirty-six-thousand-man Army of the James advanced toward Petersburg from the Bermuda Hundred Peninsula, which lay between the James and Appomattox Rivers. Butler, a politician turned general, had proven before to be one of the more incompetent Union officers. He did not disappoint at Bermuda Hundred, allowing his forces to be bottled up by General P. G. T. Beauregard, who was in command of the Confederate defenses at Petersburg.
With the fighting at Cold Harbor now over, Grant decided to launch a deep turning movement without Lee’s knowledge, shifting the campaign south of the James. Screened by a cavalry division while the Sixth Corps remained and occupied the lines at Cold Harbor, the movement was accomplished flawlessly. Grant’s army crossed over a specially built pontoon bridge and marched on Petersburg, which was inadequately defended by Beauregard and twenty-five hundred men.
On June 15, 1864, Grant sent Major General William F. Smith’s Eighteenth Corps and Major General Winfield S. Hancock’s Second Corps to attack the Confederate lines. Just as Butler had failed at the Bermuda Hundred, so did the two corps commanders—Smith was too overcautious in his movements, and Hancock’s corps did not arrive in time to attack before nightfall. By the end of the day, only a small portion of the outer Confederate lines was in Union possession.
Grant, disappointed, kept attacking over the next three days only to witness the same outcome. The Confederates repulsed every Union thrust, and by June 17 the vanguard of Lee’s army had reinforced Beauregard. Lee himself arrived in Petersburg the following day; now the brunt of the Army of Northern Virginia filled the trenches around Petersburg. Grant’s army had lost a golden opportunity over the past four days and in the process suffered more than eleven thousand casualties, while gaining just a few lines east of the city. With no other choice, Grant decided to lay siege to Petersburg.
Grant continued to perform his duties as general in chief. Among his brilliant strategies was the diversion of some of his own forces to the Shenandoah Valley to destroy the breadbasket of the Confederacy. At the same time, his friend Sherman was laying torch to Atlanta, eventually marching to the sea, and driving north toward the Carolinas to pressure Lee’s rear forces. Sherman’s March to the Sea, as it was known, became a model for total warfare and was the boost Lincoln and the Union needed after Cold Harbor.
At Petersburg Grant was making his own history when it came to supplying his army. He set up a supply base at City Point that cared for the needs of the ninety thousand Union troops surrounding Petersburg. Located eight miles northeast of the city on the south side of the James River, it contained eight wharves that stretched a half mile along the waterfront. On any given day, between 150 and 225 vessels arrived at City Point with supplies. The site’s bakery produced 100,000 rations of bread per day, which were then transported by wagon or rail to the soldiers on the battlefield. Those same trains and wagons returned to City Point carrying the wounded and sick, who were placed in one of seven hospitals.
Grant also made his headquarters at City Point, and from the east lawn of Appomattox Plantation he commanded all Union armies throughout the South. During the summer and fall of 1864, Grant and members of his staff lived in tents placed on the grounds of the plantation. When the temperatures turned cooler, the tents were replaced by cabins. Grant had a simple structure built for his own use. One staff member described the cabin: “General Grant’s hut was as plain as the others, and was constructed with a sitting-room in front, and a small apartment used as a bedroom in the rear, with a communicating door between them. An iron camp bed, and iron washstand, a couple of pine tables, and a few common wood chairs constituted the furniture. The floor was entirely bare, although later a wood floor was laid.”1 In December 1864, Julia and Jesse joined Grant and lived with him in the crowded cabin. President Abraham Lincoln visited City Point twice during the siege, once in June 1864 and once in late March 1865. He quartered aboard a vessel docked in the James River called the River Queen.
As the siege became a stalemate, a regiment of Pennsylvania soldiers proposed to dig a five-hundred-foot tunnel underneath the Confederates, where they would place four tons of black powder that would in theory kill dozens of South Carolina soldiers on the ground above. Afterward, Union troops could attack, assuming they would be able to rush through the cleared section of line and go straight into the city. Some of the most ferocious, merciless fighting of the war happened at this site on the morning of July 30. Union commanders once again fell apart, and when all was said and done, the Battle of the Crater yielded four thousand Union soldiers dead, wounded, or captured while only eighteen hundred Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. Grant called it a “stupendous failure.”2
During the brutal heat of August, Grant’s troops succeeded in gaining control of the Weldon Railroad that approached the city from the south. From there they continued to move farther south along the railway, destroying the line as they went. As the siege entered the fall, Grant ordered his troops to focus their attention on the Boydton Plank Road and the South Side Railroad, which were also major Confederate supply lines. Two significant battles took place: one at Peebles’ Farm from September 29 to October 2, and the other at Boydton Plank Road on October 27. In neither instance were the Northern soldiers able to cut the two remaining supply lines as a result of the Peeble’s farm battle, but they did lengthen their own lines, causing Lee to also have to lengthen his lines to guard his critical supply routes.
As Grant continued to lay siege to Petersburg, his army looming on the outskirts of the city had a devastating impact on the civilian population. His constant artillery shelling caused widespread chaos, forcing people from their homes and creating overall fear. One citizen, Dr. John Claiborne, was almost killed on September 4, 1864, when a Union shell struck near the bed he had just vacated. He estimated that the gun that fired the projectile was “so far that you can’t hear the explosion at all but sitting out at night you can see the flash as of lightning—then hear the whirr-whirr of the missile for several seconds—and then the explosion or the crash.”3
Also because of the siege, Petersburg suffered from food shortages and inflation. Part of the problem was not necessarily a lack of food to feed the population; rather, distributing it was an issue, again because of the Union artillery shelling. For a time this was resolved when the city council established a market that was temporarily out of artillery range. Grant’s siege also affected Petersburg’s cotton factories. Not only were the facilities threatened by his guns, but many of the male employees were forced to leave their jobs and serve in militia units at the front.
That winter, Grant kept up constant pressure on Lee’s forces by ordering his troops out of the trenches and toward Plank Road. They reached Hatcher’s Run near Armstrong’s Mill on February 5, 1865, and the two armies battled for three days in winter weather. Ultimately the Union line was extended all the way to Hatcher’s Run. As Grant was trying to figure out how to break through Lee’s lines, Sherman successfully marched across Georgia and the Carolinas. On Christmas Eve 1864, Sherman received the surrender of Savannah, Georgia, and he enthusiastically told President Lincoln in a telegram that it was his Christmas present. A month before, Lincoln won reelection largely on the basis of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Now it was up to Grant to finish off the Confederacy.
During the spring of 1865, most of Sheridan’s cavalry, fresh from their success in the Valley, joined Grant in Petersburg. On March 29, Grant attacked Lee for the final time. Lee’s troops would not bend, and each time the Yankees drove forward, the rebels pushed them back. Grant still would not give up, and Sheridan’s forces destroyed Lee’s last mobile reserve at Five Forks on April 1. Then Meade crushed the Confederate defenses at Tudor Hall Plantation, which belonged to the Boisseau family and had been a Confederate general’s headquarters, and cut the last railroad into Petersburg.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, during the first week of April 1865, saw one failure after another in its attempt to meet up with Johnston. First, at a road junction in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, known as Five Forks, Grant’s cavalry and infantry crushed their opposing force, while they protected the South Side Railroad, the last supply line into Petersburg. Confederate infantry was under command of Major General George Pickett, while the cavalry was led by Major General Fitzhugh Lee. Lee told both men to “hold Five Forks at all hazards,” since this important road junction was just south of the railroad and the avenue of approach to it. When word reached Grant about the victory there by Sheridan and Warren, he gave the order for a series of assaults on the main Confederate line defending the long sought-after railroad center of Petersburg. Colonel Horace Porter, who usually served on Grant’s staff, but was sent by his boss as a liaison with Sheridan, recalled the joyous celebration at headquarters. Everyone at Grant’s command post, which was no longer at City Point, believed Sheridan had opened up access to the South Side Railroad. “For some minutes there was a bewildering state of excitement, and officers fell to grasping hands, shouting, and hugging each other like school-boys,” said Porter.4
By early morning of April 2, Grant’s columns successfully broke through Lee’s defenses, virtually dividing his forces in two. The Confederacy would lose one of its finest corps commanders, Major General Ambrose Powell, in a brief but deadly confrontation with two Federal soldiers. The rest of the day saw numerous clashes in different sectors of the lines. That night Lee gave orders to withdraw his forces from the three fronts.
Initially plans had been made for the evacuation of Richmond and Petersburg with the idea that Lee would take his army to North Carolina and join up with that of Major General Joseph E. Johnston’s, operating near Raleigh. To do this, they would obtain supplies and subsistence at Amelia, then follow the railroad toward Danville and the border. Making an all-night march on April 2–3, Lee was able to gain a lead on the Union forces, who would take most of the day in occupying the newly captured cities of Petersburg and Richmond.
Lee’s escape from Petersburg plagued Grant the rest of his life and he reflected upon this in his memoirs:
One of the most anxious periods of my experience during the rebellion was the last few weeks before Petersburg. I felt that the situation of the Confederate army was such that they would try to make an escape at the earliest practicable moment, and I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone, and that nothing was left but a picket line. I knew he could move much more lightly and more rapidly than I, and that, if he got the start, he would leave me behind so that we would have the same army to fight again farther south—and the war might be prolonged another year. I was led to this fear by the fact that I could not see how it was possible for the Confederates to hold out much longer where they were.5
While Grant contemplated Lee’s next move, President Lincoln spent two of the last three weeks of his life at City Point when it was apparent that the war was finally coming to an end. During a meeting aboard the River Queen steamer, he revealed to Grant and Sherman, as well as Admiral David D. Porter, what his terms of surrender would be. Grant later recalled that the president’s visit to his headquarters made him uneasy:
Mr. Lincoln was at City Point at the time, and had been for some days. I would have let him know what I contemplated doing, only while I felt a strong conviction that the move was going to be successful, yet it might not prove so; and then I would have only added another to the many disappointments he had been suffering for the past three years. But when we started out he saw that we were moving for a purpose, and bidding us Godspeed, remained there to hear the result. The next morning after the capture of Petersburg, I telegraphed Mr. Lincoln asking him to ride out there and see me, while I would await his arrival. I had started all the troops out early in the morning, so that after the National army left Petersburg there was not a soul to be seen, not even an animal in the streets. There was absolutely no one there, except my staff officers and, possibly, a small escort of cavalry. We had selected the piazza of a deserted house, and occupied it until the President arrived. About the first thing that Mr. Lincoln said to me, after warm congratulations for the victory, and thanks both to myself and to the army which had accomplished it, was: “Do you know, general, that I have had a sort of a sneaking idea for some days that you intended to do something like this.”
Soon after I left President Lincoln I received a dispatch from Major General Weitzel which notified me that he had taken possession of Richmond at about 8.15 o’clock in the morning of that day, the 3rd, and that he had found the city on fire in two places. The city was in the most utter confusion. The authorities had taken the precaution to empty all the liquor into the gutter, and to throw out the provisions which the Confederate government had left, for the people to gather up. The city had been deserted by the authorities, civil and military, without any notice whatever that they were about to leave. In fact, up to the very hour of the evacuation the people had been led to believe that Lee had gained an important victory somewhere around Petersburg.
Furthermore, Weitzel informed Grant that his “command found evidence of great demoralization in Lee’s army, there being still a great many men and even officers in the town. The city was on fire. Our troops were directed to extinguish the flames, which they finally succeeded in doing.”7 Grant took such information with caution. Lee’s army may have been demoralized, but there was no indication he was about to surrender.