Petersburg, Siege of
1864 CE to 1865 CE
The Richmond–Petersburg Campaign is a series of battles around Petersburg, Virginia, fought from June 9, 1864, to March 25, 1865, during the American Civil War.
Although it is more popularly known as the Siege of Petersburg, it is not a classic military siege, in which a city is usually surrounded and all supply lines are cut off, nor is it strictly limited to actions against Petersburg.
The campaign is nine months of trench warfare in which Union forces commanded by Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assault Petersburg unsuccessfully and then construct trench lines that eventually extend over 30 miles (48 km) from the eastern outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, to around the eastern and southern outskirts of Petersburg.
Petersburg is crucial to the supply of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's army and the Confederate capital of Richmond.
Numerous raids are conducted and battles fought in attempts to cut off the railroad supply lines through Petersburg to Richmond, and many of these cause the lengthening of the trench lines, overloading dwindling Confederate resources.Lee finally yields to the overwhelming pressure—the point at which supply lines are finally cut and a true siege would have begun—and abandons both cities in April 1865, leading to his retreat and surrender at Appomattox Court House.
The Siege of Petersburg foreshadows the trench warfare that is common in the First World War, earning it a prominent position in military history.
It also features the war's largest concentration of African American troops, who suffer heavy casualties at such engagements as the Battle of the Crater and Chaffin's Farm.
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Grant has Lee pinned down by mid-June in fortifications before Petersburg, Virginia, an important rail center twenty-three miles below Richmond.
On June 15, Grant makes a vain assault on Petersburg with 63,797 troops.
Total Union casualties are 11,386 troops, numbering 1,688 killed, 8,513 wounded, and 1,185 missing.
Confederate losses are not known.
Grant has begun the siege of Petersburg and Richmond by June 18, with both sides rapidly constructing fortifications thirty-five miles (fifty-six kilometers) long.
As the siege of Petersburg begins to take hold, Grant continues to look for ways to sever the railroad links supplying the city of Petersburg, Virginia, Lee's army, and the Confederate capital of Richmond.
One of these critical supply lines is the Weldon Railroad, also called the Petersburg and Weldon Railroad, which leads south to Weldon, North Carolina, and the Confederacy's only remaining major port, Wilmington, North Carolina.
In the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road, June 21–23, 1864, the II Corps is able to destroy a short segment of the Weldon before being driven off by the Third Corps of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
Union casualties are 2,962, Confederate 572.
The battle is inconclusive, with advantages gained on both sides.
The Confederates are able to retain control of the Weldon Railroad.
The Wilson-Kautz Raid had destroyed other segments of the Weldon Railroad.
In August, the II Corps operates north of Petersburg, threatening Richmond and its railroads in the Second Battle of Deep Bottom.
Simultaneously, Grant plans another attack against the Weldon.
The V Corps, supported by units from the IX Corps, II Corps, and a small cavalry division commanded by Brig.
General August Kautz is chosen for the attack under the overall command of the V Corps commander, Major General Gouverneur K. Warren.
While the overall Confederate commander, General Robert E. Lee, is observing at the Deep Bottom battle, General P.G.T. Beauregard is the senior commander at Petersburg.
Lieutenant General A.P. Hill commands the Third Corps, Beauregard's primary infantry force.
Union casualties at Globe Tavern are 4,296 (251 killed, 1,148 wounded, 2,897 missing/captured), Confederate 1,620 (211 killed, 990 wounded, 419 missing/captured).
The Confederates have lost a key section of the Weldon Railroad and are forced to carry supplies by wagon thirty miles (forty-eight kilometers) from the railroad at Stony Creek Station up the Boydton Plank Road into Petersburg.
The Union army has gained its first victory during the Siege of Petersburg and achieved a major objective.
Grant has severed the Weldon and extended his siege lines to Globe Tavern, but this is not yet a critical problem for the Confederates.
Union losses had been heavy in the series of battles during the summer of 1864, but Grant had crossed the Petersburg-Weldon Railroad by the end of August and captures Fort Harrison on September 29.
Salt plays a role during the Civil War, not only preserving food in the days before refrigeration, but also vital in the curing of leather.
General Sherman once said that "salt is eminently contraband", as an army that has salt can adequately feed its men. (MacGregor, Graham. Salt, Diet and Health (Cambridge University Press, 1998) p.49).
The most important saltworks for the Confederacy are at Saltville, Virginia.
The battle of Saltville, fought by both regular and home guard Confederate units against regular Union troops, including one of the few black cavalry units, over an important saltworks here, is a Confederate victory, stained by the murders of captured and wounded white and black Union troops by irregular guerrilla forces under the notorious Champ Ferguson. (Ferguson will be tried after the war in Nashville, Tennessee for these and other non-military killings, found guilty and executed.
A second battle will occur two months later when Union general George Stoneman defeats Confederate defenders and burns the saltworks.
Major General Benjamin Butler attacks the Richmond defenses along Darbytown Road with the X Corps in combination with movements against the Boydton Plank Road at Petersburg.
The XVIII Corps marches north to Fair Oaks, where it is soundly repulsed by Major General Charles W. Field's Confederate division.
Confederate forces counterattack, taking some six hundred prisoners.
The Richmond defenses remain intact.
Of Grant's offensives north of the James River, this is repulsed most easily.
Union casualties are sixteen hundred and three, Confederates fewer than one hundred.
Lee still holds Petersburg and ...
...Richmond by the end of 1864, but Southern railroads have broken down or been destroyed, owing mostly to mismanagement and inefficiency.
The Confederate troops are thus ill-fed to the point of physical exhaustion and nearly immobilized by the lack of draft animals and cavalry mounts.
Hunger, exposure, and the apparent hopelessness of further resistance lead to increasing desertion, especially among recent conscripts.
Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin has privately persuaded Lee and other generals that the South's best chance is to emancipate any slave who volunteers to fight for the Confederacy.
When Benjamin repeated this proposal to an audience of ten thousand in Richmond earlier in the year, his idea had been fiercely rejected as politically impossible.
However, as the South runs out of manpower the issue of arming the slaves has become paramount.
By late 1864, the army so dominates the Confederacy that civilian leaders are unable to block the military's proposal, strongly endorsed by Lee, to arm and train slaves in Confederate uniform for combat.
In return for this service, slave soldiers and their families will be emancipated.
Lee explains, "We should employ them without delay ... [along with] gradual and general emancipation."
The first units will be in training as the war ends. (Nolan, Alan T. (1991). Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History. p. 21-22)
Georgian Howell Cobb had fruitlessly opposed Lee's eleventh hour proposal.
Fearing this move would completely discredit the fundamental justification of slavery, that blacks are inferior people, he said, "You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
During Sherman's March to the Sea, the army had camped one night near Cobb's plantation.
When Sherman discovered that the house he planned to stay in for the night belonged to Cobb, whom Sherman described in his Memoirs as "one of the leading rebels of the South, then a general in the Southern army," he had confiscated Cobb's property and leveled the plantation, instructing his subordinates to "spare nothing."
Major General William T. Sherman, after capturing Savannah in the culmination of his march to the sea, had been ordered by Grant to embark his army on ships to reinforce the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James in Virginia, where Grant is bogged down in the Siege of Petersburg against the army of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Sherman has bigger things in mind.
He predicts on January 5, 1865: "I do think that in the several grand epochs of this war, my name will have a prominent part."
He persuades Grant that he should march north through the Carolinas instead, destroying everything of military value along the way, similar to his march to the sea through Georgia.
Sherman is particularly interested in targeting South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, for the effect it will have on Southern morale.