Petersburg Is the Key

"The key to taking Richmond is Petersburg" believed Civil War Union General Ulysses S. Grant.  Consequently, when his more direct forays against the capitol of the Confederacy failed, Grant swung his soldiers east and then south to lightly-defended Petersburg in a masterful move meant to sever the supply line of the rebel army.  It was arguably the one time Grant outmaneuvered the canny Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

The Eppes Plantation at City Point

On our way to Washington, Tim and I devoted a day to seeing how Grant did this.  Having lived in Virginia for more than fifteen years, we've become Civil War buffs.  Something about seeing the sites where major battles played out has given the war an immediacy that has captured our interests.  However, in all the time we lived here, we never made it to Petersburg, that is until now.  So beware!  The rest of this post is a history lesson of what impressed us the most about the siege.

With its proximity to the confluence of the James and the Appomattox rivers, Petersburg was a transportation hub that funneled what war materiels the South still possessed to Lee's ill-equipped rebel soldiers dug in at Richmond.  By the time of the Siege of Petersburg from June 1864 to April 1865, the freight of all but one railroad from the Deep South bound for the Confederate capitol passed through Petersburg.

When I was a child, one of our family vacations was a trip to Durango, Colorado, where my railroad-mad dad made reservations for us to ride the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.  That ride  sparked my own interest in railroads and made me pay attention to the importance of the railroads at Petersburg.

To sever those rail lines, Grant laid siege to the city and made use of the dormant City Point section of the South Side rail line to build his own railroad to supply his troops.  This ability to build railroads as needed was another way more industrialized North surpassed the South. The railroads of the Confederacy, in keeping with its strict stance on states' rights, were not centrally controlled like those in the North.  To prevent their purchase by rivals, Southern railroad companies would lay track using different gauges, a business practice that proved detrimental to the Confederate war effort.

Plantation of Dr. Richard Eppes where Gen. Grant established his headquarters.

I found it interesting in our visit to Grant's headquarters at City Point that he chose to live in what looked like a shack instead of appropriating the plantation home of Dr. Richard Eppes for his personal quarters after the Eppes family fled to what they supposed was the safety of Petersburg.

Grant's Headquarters on the grounds of the Eppes' Plantation

So Grant built a short line from the wharfs he quickly constructed at City Point, the base for one of the greatest logistical operations of the Civil War.  There more than 100 ships a day dropped supplies of food, ammunition and supplies which were then ferried by rail to the Union Army entrenched on the east side of Petersburg.

Had the Union commanders pressed their advantage upon their arrival at Petersburg, the siege might not have been necessary, but alas they did not.  At 7 p.m. on June 15, 1864, the boom of Union cannons to the east foreshadowed an attack on the Dimmock Line.  Minutes later, the soldiers of the Union 18th Corps broke through the undermanned Confederates and swarmed over Battery 5, a fortified earthworks emplacement for heavy guns.

In the two hours that followed, the Federals captured 1.5 miles of Petersburg's defenses.  Though few Confederates stood between the Federals and the streets of Petersburg, Union Maj. Get. William F. Smith stopped his advance to await reinforcements.  Had he continued his momentum, nine months of tedious, deadly siege could have been avoided.

"We could blow that damn fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it." ~ A private of the 48th Pennsylvania, June 23, 1864.

Spurred by the offhand suggestion of a former coal miner, Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants put his 48th Pennsylvania to digging.  Their objective was to tunnel under the Confederate line and blow up the battery at Elliott's Salient.

Such a plan stirred Tim's memory of his stint in the Army when he was assigned to the Corps of Engineers, the division that performs a variety of construction or demolition tasks under combat conditions.  Naturally, Tim was fascinated to learn that Pleasants' troops secretly proceeded with their plan literally right underneath the noses of the Confederates.

Beginning on June 25, 1864, and continuing for the next month, these Pennsylvania coal miners burrowed a shaft 511 feet into the hillside.  Then they packed four tons of powder into the magazines under the Confederate battery.  At 3:16 a.m. on July 30, Lt. Col. Pleasants lit the fuse and scrambled out of the tunnel.  After a 30 minute wait for the explosion to detonate, Pleasants concluded that the fuse had gone out.  With dawn approaching and at risk of losing the surprise attack, two volunteers, Lt. Jacob Douty and Sgt. Harry Reese, crawled into the tunnel to try lighting the fuse again.  This time it worked.  Two hundred and seventy-eight Confederates died in the explosion that created a crater measuring 170 feet long, 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep.  Two 1,700-pound cannons were hurled completely out of the works.

But instead of pushing through, the first waves of Union attackers simply stood at the Crater, gawking at the incredible scene they'd created and thus allowed the Confederates to regroup.

And so it went, first one side and then the other surged back and forth, but it was just a question of time.  With the arrival of spring, the beleaguered Confederates and the city fell.  Seventy thousand Americans were casualties at Petersburg.  Infection and disease accounted for the greatest number of deaths.

A window at the Eppes Plantation at City Point

By preserving the Petersburg National Battlefield, the National Park Service gave us a window to look back at this important event.  Two weeks later General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House and the war ended.