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.

The Tail End of the Antebellum Trail

Jarrell Plantation

No doubt, you've heard of General William T. Sherman's March to the Sea.  But what about the towns he didn't burn at the close of the Civil War?  Georgia's Antebellum Trail is a 100-mile trek through seven historic towns spread east of Atlanta from Athens to Macon.  The trail is best seen over a series of three or four days, but Tim and I didn't have that much time.  However, we were able to spend a Saturday tracing the tail end of the trail from Milledgeville to Macon.

Governor's Mansion

Upon our arrival in Milledgeville, we caught the Historic Trolley Tour for a guided tour of the town that once served as the capital of Georgia.  It was here that state legislators voted to secede from the Union on January 19, 1861, as Georgia followed the lead of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama into the Confederacy of the United States.

In 1868, the state's government was moved to Atlanta, but prior to that Milledgeville was considered a prize by Sherman who rode into town on Nov. 23, 1864.

Cadets from the Georgia Military College joined the ragged Confederate forces to try to defend the town but their resistance was unsuccessful.  Sherman's officers tipsy with victory took over the legislature and mockingly passed a law placing Georgia back in the Union.

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church

Because of the cold late-November temperatures, Union soldiers burned the pews for firewood and stabled their horses inside St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.

Interior of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church

They even poured molasses down the pipes of the church organ before marching on to Savannah.  Despite this, the church survived and still stands today.

Our tour guide on the trolley was a retired professor of organic chemistry at Georgia College in Milledgeville.  He told us about these leading citizens of the town.

Oliver Hardy
Photo courtesy of Hal Roach Studio

Oliver Hardy, the comic partner in the acting duo Laurel & Hardy, attended the Georgia Military College in Milledgeville.

Flannery O'Connor
Photo courtesy of CMacauley at English Wikipedia

Southern author Flannery O'Connor attended Georgia College and returned to Milledgeville to spend the last 13 years of her life at Andalusia Farm now a museum.

Charles Holmes Herty
Photo is in the Public Domain

Charles Holmes Herty was an internationally recognized chemist who used his position to mobilize his profession for participation in World War I, urging American business, government and universities to develop a full-scale chemical industry so that America would not be dependent upon foreign sources for vital materials in the manufacture of munitions, textiles, pharmaceuticals and photographic products.

Congressman Carl Vinson
Photo is in the Public Domain

The Georgia Representative to the U. S. House of Representatives for more than 50 years, Congressman Carl Vinson served on the House Naval Affairs Committee and was called the Father of the Two-Ocean Navy for his pre-World War II warning that the United States needed a strong naval presence in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Saw mill, cotton gin and syrup distillation buildings at Jarrell Plantation

Heading back to Macon, we stopped at the Jarrell Plantation in Jones County, a former cotton plantation owned by a single family for more than 140 years.

Cotton Gin

Over the course of that time, savy descendants diversified their farming interests from growing and ginning cotton to sawmilling wood to pressing sugar cane into syrup.  The plantation was donated to the state of Georgia in 1974 by descendants of the family.

Touring the tail end of the Trail only whetted our appetite to return and follow its route from start to finish.  Perhaps one day we'll do so.

Vicksburg Is The Key

Vicksburg National Military Park

Gathering his Cabinet and military leaders to discuss strategies for winning the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln examined a map of the nation and placed his finger on Vicksburg, saying, "See what a lot of land these fellows hold, of which Vicksburg is the key.  The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket."

General Ulysses S. Grant, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of Defense Edwin Stanton

Yesterday morning Tim and I left Foley, AL, bound for Vicksburg, MS, on the banks of the Mississippi River, the city called by Confederate President Jefferson Davis "the nail-head that held the South's two halves together."

We pulled our RV, the Dawntreader, into its spot at the Ameri-Star Casino's RV Park, grabbed some lunch and headed out the door to explore Vicksburg National Military Park, once a Confederate stronghold and now maintained by the National Park Service.

The 15 years we lived in Virginia turned us into Civil War buffs.  We've visited all the battlegrounds within a 90-mile radius of Washington, D.C. and hope to add more to our 'been there/done that' list.

The grandest monument of the 1,300 markers placed on the grounds of the Vicksburg Military Park is the Illinois Memorial.

From its doorway, one may view the hilly terrain of the battlefield

Its dome gives a window to the sky.

The Illinois Seal is the focal point of the rotunda's floor.

I was a history major in college.  Primary sources such as quotations and diaries are the tools a historian uses so bear with me as I list a few here.

The cantilever bridge that carries Interstate 20 over the Mississippi River at Vicksburg

Mid-nineteenth century biographer and newspaperman Lloyd Lewis called the Mississippi River the "spinal column of America...the symbol of geographic unity."  He added that the river could be considered "the trunk of the American tree, with limbs and branches reaching to the Alleghenies, the Canadian border, the Rocky Mountains."

To further employ that analogy, if the Mississippi River is like a tree, then its sap would be the agricultural produce that pooled down its trunk en route to markets overseas.  Terrence J. Winschel in his article, "The Fall of Vicksburg, published in Hallowed Ground Magazine in 2004, wrote, "Indeed, the silent water of the mighty river was the single most important economic feature of the continent, the very lifeblood of America."

A line of cannons arrayed in front of the park's Visitor Center

No wonder control of the Mississippi became a major objective of the Union and Confederate leaders who focused their military might on Vicksburg and brought war to the city, the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy," situated high on bluffs above the river. 

The park's statue of General Ulysses S. Grant

Union General Ulysses S. Grant, along with Major General William T. Sherman, made several unsuccessful attempts to possess the city before he conceived a brilliant plan to march his soldiers in a circuitous march south of the city for a surprise attack against the defensive lines of Confederate General John C. Pemberton.

Confederate General John C. Pemberton

The terrain surrounding Vicksburg favored the Confederates who held the high ground and repulsed the Union attacks until finally Grant laid siege to the city, a siege that lasted 47-days.

The 47 steps to the top of the Illinois Memorial recall the 47 days of the siege.

Union gunboats continued to fire upon the city whose citizens moved into caves to try to escape the barrage.  "Terror strikes, we remained crouched in the cave, while shell after shell followed each other in quick succession," wrote Mary Loughborough in her diary. 

The park's Visitor Center has this representation of a citizen's cave.

Food supplies dwindled.  "Our provisions were becoming scarce," resident Lucy McRae wrote, "and Louisiana soldiers were eating rats as a delicacy, while mules were occasionally being carved up to appease the appetite."  

Battery De Golyer was the largest concentration of cannon in the Union's siege lines around Vicksburg.

Another citizen, Will Tunnard, stated, "It is a difficult matter for persons surrounded with abundance to realize the feeling produced by extreme hunger...It must be felt to be realized; and if once felt, the idea of eating dogs, cats, rats or even human flesh would contain nothing repulsive or repugnant to the feelings."

Pemberton's Headquarters near Vicksburg's historic downtown.

Finally, on July 4th, 1863, the same day the battle at Gettysburg ended, Pemberton surrendered the city.  Together, both battles are considered the turning point of the war.  

Vicksburg National Cemetery

That evening as Tim and I watched the sun set from the bluffs over the Mississippi, we tried to imagine the river as it had been during the siege.  Neither of us could not conceive the devastation the siege brought to this fair city, the city that was the key to winning the war.