The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg's Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865

By John J. Fox

The first book-length study about the bloody, chaotic Battle of Fort Gregg: “Sweeping . . . insightful . . . military history at its best.” —Civil War News
 
By April 2, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant’s men had tightened their noose around the vital town of Petersburg, Virginia. Trapped on three sides with a river at their back, the soldiers from General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had never faced such dire circumstances. To give Lee time to craft an escape, a small motley group of threadbare Southerners made a suicidal last stand at a place called Fort Gregg.
 
The venerable Union commander Major General John Gibbon called the struggle “one of the most desperate ever witnessed.” At 1:00 p.m., hearts pounded in the chests of thousands of Union soldiers in Gibbon’s 24th Corps. These courageous men fixed bayonets and charged across 800 yards of open ground into withering small arms and artillery fire. A handful of Confederates rammed cartridges into their guns and fired over Fort Gregg’s muddy parapets at this tidal wave of fresh Federal troops. Short on ammunition and men but not on bravery, these Southerners wondered if their last stand would make a difference.
 
Many of the veterans who fought at this place considered it the nastiest fight of their war experience. Most could not shake the gruesome memories, yet when they passed on, the battle faded with them. On these pages, award-winning historian John Fox resurrects these forgotten stories, using numerous unpublished letters and diaries to take the reader from the Union battle lines all the way into Fort Gregg’s smoking cauldron of hell. Fourteen Federal soldiers would later receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for their valor during this hand-to-hand melee, yet the few bloody Confederate survivors would experience an ignominious end to their war. This richly detailed account is filled with maps, photos, and new perspectives on the strategic effect this little-known battle really had on the war in Virginia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940669168

Book preview

THE CONFEDERATE ALAMO

Bloodbath at Petersburg's Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865

John J. Fox, III

Savas Publishing

989 Governor Drive, Suite 102

El Dorado Hills, CA 95762

© 2010, 2014, by John J. Fox, III

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg’s Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865, by John J. Fox, III, was originally published in hardcover by Angle Valley Press of Winchester, Virginia, in 2010, which holds all the rights to this work except for digital distribution.

Includes bibliographic references and index

Digital First Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-940669-16-8

Savas Publishing

989 Governor Drive, Suite 102

El Dorado Hills, CA 95762

916-941-6896 (phone)

916-941-6895 (fax)

For Nancy

ALSO BY JOHN J. FOX, III

Red Clay to Richmond:

Trail of the 35th Georgia Infantry Regiment

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1.    Grant Makes Plans to Bag Lee (Again)

2.    Lee Faces a Serious Disaster

3.    The Union Breakthrough

4.    Confederate Third Corps Chaos

5.    Confederates Punch Back

6.    Reality Reaches Richmond

7.    Gibbon’s Twenty-fourth Corps Approaches Fort Gregg

8.    Walker’s Unusual Artillery Order

9.    The Fort Gregg Defenders: An Uneasy Resolve

10.  A Long Wait to Attack

11.  Osborn’s East Wing Attacks in First Wave

12.  Dandy’s West Wing Attacks in First Wave

13.  The Confederate Defenders Steel Themselves for the Blue Wave

14.  Low on Ammunition and No Reinforcements

15.  Union Reinforcements Hit the West Wall

16.  Another Union Division Attacks

17.  The Blue Wave Surges over the Walls

18.  Inside the Pit of Fort Gregg

19.  Fort Whitworth

20.  Did Sacrificing the Twin Forts Allow Lee to Escape?

Epilogue

Appendix A: The Fort Gregg Area Today

Appendix B: Order of Battle

Appendix C: Fort Gregg Casualties

Appendix D: Confederates at Fort Gregg

Appendix E: Fort Whitworth’s Controversial Artillery Withdrawal

Appendix F: The First Union Flag on Fort Gregg Controversy

Appendix G: Which Southern Artillery Batteries Helped Defend Fort Gregg?

Appendix H: Fort Gregg Medal of Honor Recipients

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Maps

Richmond & Petersburg Defense Line: January–March 1865

West of Petersburg: April 2, 1865, Early Morning

Hatcher’s Run: April 2, 1865, 7:15 AM

Fort Gregg: April 2, 1865, 11 AM

Osborn & Dandy’s Attack Against Fort Gregg: April 2, 1865, 1 PM

Reinforcements Attack Fort Gregg & Fort Whitworth: April 2, 1865, 2 PM–3:15 PM

Local Driving Map of Petersburg

Numerous illustrations have been placed throughout the text.

Preface

Now came one of the most dramatic incidents of an overwhelming day.

—Douglas Southall Freeman, in R. E. Lee: A Biography

MOST OF THE SOLDIERS WHO DONNED the blue and the gray and fought against each other at Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865, had served during the entire Civil War. During four long years of conflict, these men had scuffled on many bloody battlefields. The familiar names of those battles fill the pages of history books and evoke images of well-known events, such as Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, or call to mind famous stands at places like the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania Court House. Nevertheless, many of the men who had participated in more famous battles believed the fight at Fort Gregg was their nastiest experience of the war.

For example, as the 39th Illinois’ Sergeant Michael Wetzel charged the Confederate-held fort, a canister ball nearly severed his arm. He later declared, there is not a day of my whole life the events of which are preserved so vividly in my mind as those of that day. A soldier in the 116th Ohio stated that Fort Gregg experienced the most desperate fighting that was seen at any time under Grant in the East. Lieutenant Colonel Ellsworth D. S. Goodyear fell with several wounds as he led his 10th Connecticut into the fray, and he could only watch as the savagest hand to hand, muzzle to muzzle fights, which it was my lot to witness during the war, unfolded.¹

Confederate veterans similarly recalled the fight. The commander of the 12th Mississippi, Captain Archibald K. Jones, explained fifteen years after the war: I saw the field at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and 12th of May, 1864, at Spotsylvania Court-house, and at neither place were the dead half so thickly strewn as at Gregg. Private Franklin Lafayette Riley, 16th Mississippi, remembered that the more than two-hour battle at Fort Gregg produced the most savage fighting I have ever experienced.²

Many other soldiers made similar comments about what happened just west of Petersburg, Virginia, on that beautiful first Sunday in April 1865. A Homeric defense is an apt description of that day: little more than 300 determined Confederates faced some 4,500 equally determined Union soldiers—odds of 1 against 13. Despite reams of material written by the participants at Fort Gregg, today not much is known about its strategic significance.³

The battle stirred up significant postwar controversy, much of which was played out in newspapers, such as The National Tribune, and periodicals, such as the Confederate Veteran. As many as twenty-five years after the battle, a Mississippi soldier reflecting on the squabbles wrote, There seems to be as much controversy among the Northern soldiers as to who captured Fort Gregg as among those who defended it on that eventful 2d day of April 1865.⁴

One has to wonder, therefore, how such a remarkable story of American bravery and resolve could have been virtually lost to history for more than one hundred years. The men who fought at Fort Gregg certainly did not forget what happened there. Yet when they passed on, Fort Gregg’s story of American valor and heroism seemed to pass on too.

Although the years have not washed away the walls of Fort Gregg or its sister, Fort Whitworth, the sounds of speeding trucks and cars on nearby Interstate 85 can make it difficult for today’s visitors to imagine the heroism and bloodletting this ground witnessed. A respectful silence, however, can be found several miles away at Blandford Cemetery and Poplar Grove National Cemetery, where stone sentinels stand guard over the reburied dead who fell at Fort Gregg.

The patriotic sacrifice by the small band of Confederates at Fort Gregg recalls the similar stand made in the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, when an estimated 260 Texans and American volunteers faced some 2,500 Mexicans—odds of 1 against 10. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s troops virtually annihilated the members of the small Texas garrison. The Virginia surgeon at Fort Gregg, George W. Richards, may have been the first participant to compare the two lopsided fights when he wrote, In all, there were from two hundred and fifty to three hundred men defending the fort on the morning that was to give to history and America its second Alamo.⁵

As their lines closed in on the walls of Fort Gregg, the Union soldiers showed remarkable leadership and steadfastness. Fourteen Union soldiers would receive the Medal of Honor for their valor at Fort Gregg, most as color-bearers, and yet these men all lived. When the smoke cleared, the ground was littered with hundreds of men, many of whom died either carrying or protecting a flag of the North or the South. Ironically, these men did not receive medals, and their only recognition beyond soldiers’ campfire banter was an occasional line in a subsequent regimental history. This is the untold story of what happened at Fort Gregg.

Acknowledgments

IWANT TO HUMBLY THANK many people for helping me to accomplish this long-term project. Generous folks who ranged from descendants of soldiers who fought at Fort Gregg to professional historians sent me all kinds of documents to aid this study.

I am especially grateful to Brandon Beck and A. Wilson Greene for reading an early version of the manuscript and steering me in the right direction on several key points and ideas. For those readers seeking a broad view of the end of the Petersburg Campaign, Will Greene’s book, Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion, is the go to study that they will want on their bedside table.

Chris Calkins, who retired as the Petersburg National Battlefield (NPS) historian and then un-retired to run the new Virginia state historical park at Sailor’s Creek, guided me all over west Petersburg and the Hatcher’s Run—Fort Gregg area. He allowed me access to the Park’s files and museum exhibits and then answered numerous questions which helped fill in gaps for this story. I will always remember his time and expertise as he was generous with both.

Other historians who sent me files or steered me toward information that I would not have otherwise found are Robert E. L. Krick, Keith D. Ashley, Matt Atkinson, James W. Campbell, James E. Craig, Steve Cunningham, Sandra Mansmann, Gerald Earley, Chris Ferguson, Richard V. Forte, Bill Furr, Jeff Giambrone, Robert K. Krick, Lewis Leigh, Ken Legendre, Russ Bonds, Kevin Levin, Daniel A. Masters, Don Morfe, Bill Steinbacher-Kemp, G. Ashleigh Moody, Mark D. Okey, Bob Price, David Siegenthaler, Linda Smith, Carole Scott, Marilyn Shuster, Charles Stanley, C. Douglas Sterner, and Bob Zeller. I am also thankful for research assistance rendered by Harold Connerly, Carl Maples, and Betsy L. Hendrix.

A writer who dabbles in the historic arena is always indebted to those who work in the archival trenches. The ghosts of Fort Gregg led me on visits to many wonderful places, and I have highlighted the most noteworthy below. I am particularly thankful for my time spent perusing the incredible collections at the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Dr. Richard Sommers and his staff were extremely helpful with providing needed materials in a timely fashion. I would particularly like to thank Dr. Art Bergeron, Rich Baker, Tom Buffenbarger, Sean Kirkpatrick, Steve Bye and all the others who aided me there.

Other standout research destinations for this project were the Virginia Historical Society; the Duke University Special Collections Library (Elizabeth Dunn and Janie Morris); Pamplin Historical Park (Don Broxon); West Virginia Division of Culture and History; Mississippi Department of Archives and History (H. Grady Howell, Clinton Bagley and Anne Webster); Museum of the Confederacy (Dr. John Coski, Ruth Anne Coski and Cara Griggs); Georgia Division of Archives and History; Mississippi State University Special Collections Library; Virginia State Library (James Ray and Kelley Gilbert); University of Virginia Special Collections Library; University of North Carolina Southern Historical Collection; The Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the National Archives; and the North Carolina State Archives.

Several folks came forward and provided me with information on individual soldiers who fought at Fort Gregg. I want to thank Eleanor Bland and her son Frank for providing me with information on Joseph McCauslin along with the photos of him in uniform and his Medal of Honor. Eleanor is McCauslin’s great granddaughter. I am also thankful for the photo and records that Robin Love Ellis provided me on her great-great grandfather, John Y. Reily. Part of this packet included a detailed manuscript of the battle written by Robin’s father, Colonel Joseph Love, while he was a cadet at West Point in 1948.

Another direct descendant of a veteran, Charles Logston, sent me lots of great information on his great-great grandfather Joseph R. Logsdon. A serendipitous moment came several years ago when I met Larry Smith at a Civil War show. Larry owned the rifle that had belonged to the only Confederate who escaped from Fort Gregg, James W. Atkinson. Larry was kind enough to allow me to inspect the weapon and photograph it. Bill Czygan heard about my research and contacted me about his relative who was George W. Richards, Fort Gregg’s surgeon. Bill dug through his family files and sent me information on the doctor along with a photograph.

I am quite thankful for the professional expertise and patience provided by my book production team. Sylvia Frank Rodrigue did a great edit job as she helped me tighten this confusing battle story. J. B. Bechtol took my numerous ideas for the dust jacket and put together a good looking cover. George Skoch created great maps that aid the reader and he took care of my changes in a timely fashion. Michele DeFilippo and her team at 1106 Design jumped right into this project and assembled a book interior that I believe you will also find pleasing to the eye.

Most of all I want to thank my wonderful wife, Nancy, and my children for their incredible patience, love, and yes, endurance, as they put up with the immense time this project absorbed. All writers should be so blessed to have such a supportive family.

CHAPTER 1

Grant Makes Plans to Bag Lee (Again)

MARCH 27 TO APRIL 1, 1865

I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone.

—Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. Army general-in-chief

WITH MARCH 1865’s BLUSTERY arrival and spring’s good weather near, General Robert E. Lee faced limited and difficult options. His beleaguered gray-clad soldiers struggled to man more than forty miles of defense line, which stretched from Richmond’s northeast side to its south, wrapping around Petersburg and continuing southwest beyond Hatcher’s Run. The sparse Confederate supply system had broken down, due in part to the Union Navy’s blockade of Southern ports. Four railroads intersected at Petersburg, from all points of the compass, but only two remained under Confederate control. Only one railroad—the South Side, which ran from Lynchburg to Burkeville—still provided an adequate supply line for Lee’s men.

The fifty-eight-year-old Southern commander could call on no more reserves to help man this extensive defense line, but his counterpart, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, had thousands of reinforcements available. By March 1, 1865, some 56,000 gray troops in the Army of Northern Virginia faced more than 100,000 blue troops from the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James. However, the Confederate numbers would continue to dwindle, due to casualties, desertions, and disease. The addition of Major General Philip Sheridan’s troopers from the Shenandoah Valley spelled potential doom for the Confederacy in Virginia. Additionally, Major General William T. Sherman’s army, fresh from its trek through Georgia and South Carolina, now stood in central North Carolina with another 80,000 Union troops at the ready. Sherman’s march had caused psychological and morale issues among Lee’s soldiers, many of whom feared for the safety of their families in those states. Earlier in the winter of 1864–1865, many of Lee’s men had deserted in order to protect their loved ones from the Yankees.¹

The only Confederate force standing between a linkup of Sherman and the Union armies in Virginia was Lieutenant General Joseph Johnston’s threadbare Army of Tennessee, located at the time in central North Carolina. Lee understood that a connection of the Union armies spelled disaster for the South. He also realized that even without the arrival of Sherman, Grant’s troops could continue to exert pressure against the Richmond-Petersburg area, strangling his supply lines and starving his soldiers as well as the civilian populations of both cities. Lee had no prospect of disrupting the massive Union supply system. Ships laden with food, uniforms, weapons, and ammunition sailed up the James River to unload their cargo at the harbor of City Point, eight miles northeast of Petersburg. Union troops lacked nothing while their counterparts in gray lacked almost everything, except their courage and devotion to each other.

As early as February, the career military officer and astute tactician realized that his best chance to continue the war effort meant somehow extracting his army from behind the siege lines and moving to join with Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. He spent the month pondering how to complete this risky mission.

Eleven months before, in early 1864, Grant took over as commander of all Union forces. During the subsequent Overland Campaign, he had exhibited a tenacity to attack, unlike his predecessors. The cigar-chomping general had established his headquarters with Major General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac, and over a period of forty-five days this army had pushed and flanked Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia from the charred scrubs of the Wilderness all the way to the city limits of Petersburg.

Nicknamed the Cockade City, Petersburg was the second largest wartime city in Virginia at 18,266 residents in 1860. It lies twenty-three miles south of Richmond on the Appomattox River’s south bank. By mid-June 1864, Grant’s veterans attacked the eastern side of Petersburg only to be slowed by a small but determined group commanded by General Pierre G. T. Beauregard. Beauregard’s troops provided time for Lee’s veterans to rush to Petersburg and dig formidable defense lines. Union troops began to dig similar entrenchments parallel to the Confederate works in the advent of trench warfare. Soldiers from both sides endured miserable conditions, which caused one Union general to lament, This war of rifle pits is terrible.²

By 1865, the survival of the Confederate capital depended on Petersburg. Grant realized that Petersburg’s position as a transportation and manufacturing center provided much of the supplies that sustained Richmond, and he believed that if Petersburg fell, Richmond would fall also. As Lee feared for his soldiers and cause, the fog of war also created problems for Grant, who later described his worries:

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 possible 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. He had his railroad by the way of Danville south, and I was afraid that he was running off his men and all stores and ordnance except such as it would be necessary to carry with him for his immediate defense. 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.³

Not wanting to allow Lee to slip away, Grant needed the weather to improve so that he could launch a spring campaign. Grant insisted, I could not see how it was possible for the Confederates to hold out much longer where they were. He believed that he could end the war in the east once dry weather arrived. He expressed two concerns before he felt comfortable moving his men. First, the winter had been one of heavy rains, and the roads were impassable for artillery and teams. His second issue involved cavalry: General Sheridan, with the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, was operating on the north side of the James River, having come down from the Shenandoah [Valley]. It was necessary that I should have his cavalry with me, and I was therefore obliged to wait until he could join me south of the James River. Early in the last week of March, Sheridan’s cavalry arrived, and the weather improved somewhat.⁴

On Monday, March 27, the major Union players in the Eastern Theater converged on the Petersburg area. Grant met with President Abraham Lincoln, Generals Sheridan and Sherman, and Admiral David Porter. The Union council of war made its decisions, and Grant issued orders to place his great war machine in motion. That night, three infantry divisions and one small cavalry division from Major General Edward O. C. Ord’s Army of the James, which had been stationed north of the James River, moved toward the Cockade City. The men of Major General Alexander A. Humphreys’ Second Corps and Major General Governour K. Warren’s Fifth Corps, located on the Union left flank southwest of Petersburg, readied their equipment to cross Hatcher’s Run and extend the lines toward Dinwiddie Court House. As they moved left, Ord’s troops would replace Humphreys’ men in the trenches. Two of Ord’s divisions came from Major General John Gibbon’s Twenty-fourth Corps. The objective, as reiterated by Grant, was to get into a position from which we could strike the South Side railroad and ultimately the [Richmond and] Danville railroad.⁵

Major General John Gibbon—Union Twenty-fourth Corps commander. Gibbon was born in 1827 and he graduated from West Point in 1847. He commanded the famous Iron Brigade and received wounds at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. Gibbon’s two brothers served on the staff of the 28th North Carolina. MOLLUS Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.

Repositioning John Gibbon’s corps to Petersburg would represent a huge danger to Lee’s army. Gibbon’s men crossed two rivers and marched for nearly forty miles along the periphery of the Richmond-Petersburg lines, but Lee would not learn of this move in a timely way. For if he had, he certainly would have issued orders earlier for more of Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s battle-toughened soldiers to move from the Richmond area toward Petersburg—before it was too late.⁶

Around 4 PM on March 27, orders passed through the camp of the 11th Maine to strike tents and pack up for the Spring campaign. A sense of excitement permeated the atmosphere that afternoon as the men ran to and fro rolling up, folding, and stowing their clothing and equipment. A short time later, the Mainers fell into formation. As one soldier later recalled, they carried everything we possess[ed] strapped on our backs. Their knapsacks bulged with the essentials: sixty rounds of cartridges, rations for four days, extra clothing, a poncho, and eating utensils. The sun dipped below the trees to the west, casting long shadows over the rows of men. The order rang out, Right shoulder shift arms! Hundreds of rifles moved, and the cool evening air carried the click of wood and metal. The regiment marched out and took its position in the Third Brigade column, sandwiched between sister regiments. Brigadier General Robert S. Foster rode at the head of his First Division as the Twenty-fourth Corps moved southeast, away from Richmond and toward the James River crossing at Deep Bottom, five miles distant.⁷

As the sky grew dark, the men bumped into each other and stumbled along, reaching Deep Bottom after four hours. They stepped onto the wobbly pontoon bridge and shuffled across the quarter-mile inky black ribbon of water. The weary troops continued marching another seven miles across the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, an area formed by the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers.

Captain Albert Maxfield, 11th Maine, described the difficult forced march:

The night was a dark one, with rain. The soft roads, cut up by artillery wheels and wagon trains, stretched here and there into wide morasses of knee-deep mire, into which we could plunge unexpectedly, to wallow through as best we could. It led through woods, and in the darkness those deviating from the road ran against trees; and curiously enough, while the men would wade and flounder along the road in grim silence, when they found themselves violently opposed by a tree-trunk they would use language both lurid and rhetorical.⁸

A crack of light finally appeared along the horizon, off to the left of the column, as they approached the Appomattox River at Point of Rocks. The squeak and clatter of artillery caissons drowned out the shuffle of thousands of feet as the big guns rolled over the bridge.⁹

The growing daylight gleamed upon heart-shaped badges worn on the men’s jacket breasts or caps. On March 18, the Twenty-fourth Corps had adopted the heart as the corps’ badge. Traditionally the three divisions in a corps assumed the colors of red, white, and blue in numerical order. Thus, the First Division troops pinned red hearts to their uniforms; the Second or Independent Division pinned on white hearts, and the Third Division wore blue hearts.¹⁰

As Maxfield’s men neared Petersburg, they came under the scrutiny of new eyes. He was glad the regiment, although leg weary and heavy eyed, presented a soldiery appearance to the curious onlookers of the Army of the Potomac, that from daylight on watched the march of the troops of the Army of the James. He knew what kept his men moving forward: hot coffee, daylight, and the pride that led us to put the best foot foremost under the eyes of our critical, if unsympathizing, friends of the Army of the Potomac.¹¹

Grumbles rolled along the ranks as the serpentine column continued, and most men wondered where they were going and when they would stop. Thousands of tired, overloaded infantryman abandoned equipment along the sides of the road. One Pennsylvania soldier had urged his sister not to send him anything, because the less a soldier has to carry the better for him. This soldier, the 199th Pennsylvania’s Joseph Cornett, lamented the team load of discarded items along the march route: I did not throw away one article that I started with, but if we march again I will leave at least half my load behind. It is surprising to see what is lost or wasted by soldiers just breaking camp in the spring.¹²

Large groups of horsemen would clop by these infantrymen and their cast-off supplies, making many of the tired walkers even more frustrated with their lot. Through breaks in the woods they could see other columns of cavalrymen—Sheridan’s troopers—moving in the same southwesterly direction.

The 11th Maine’s Private William H. Wharff expressed his misery: We hope to halt soon as we are getting tired and our knapsacks are growing heavy. He added, We seem to be marching for something as we are only allowed to stop long enough to devour a hard-tack and then it is ‘Fall in’ and on we go, ‘tramp, tramp.’ Similarly, Cornett complained that officers allowed the column to halt only every two to three hours for about fifteen minutes. A brief stop early on March 28 allowed him just enough time to cook our coffee. The men in Cornett’s First Brigade relished their one-hour stop at noon, while Wharff bragged that the men in his Third Brigade halted for longer at about 1 pm. Many of the Twenty-fourth Corps soldiers probably would have agreed with Cornett when he wrote, I never experienced such a hard march in my life.¹³

When Wharff’s brigade column halted at about 9 pm, March 28, the temperature hovered around 50 degrees. Many of the tired men were soon fast asleep, having marched 27 hours without sleep and scarcely any rest. Despite the exhausting march of the previous day, the men rose long before dawn on March 29 and began marching again around 4 AM. The lead units of the First Division reached Hatcher’s Run, seven miles southwest of Petersburg, at 8 AM. In this part of the woods, they saw the entrenchments and quarters of the Army of the Potomac’s Second Corps. As the trees stood sentinel, the Second Corps soldiers moved westward from their position to help extend Grant’s lines. The soldiers in Major General John Gibbon’s Twenty-fourth Corps quickly realized this just-abandoned hole in this part of the line was now theirs to fill.¹⁴

Gibbon may have felt a sense of déjà vu as he coordinated the arrival of his new corps; he had temporarily commanded the Second Corps several months before. The hard-fighting and multi-wounded major general had been born in Philadelphia on April 20, 1827, and his father moved the large family to Charlotte, North Carolina, when John was eleven-years-old. He entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June 1842 and graduated in 1847, ranked twentieth in a class of thirty-eight. His classmates included future Confederate generals Henry Heth and Ambrose Powell Hill, who picked Nicholas Gibbon, John’s youngest brother, to serve on his staff during the war.¹⁵

As Gibbon settled his men into their new quarters, a picket line from the 11th Maine splashed across to the west side of Hatcher’s Run. They soon found their enemy counterparts, and numerous sharp firefights erupted as the opposing forces bumped into each other in the woods and roads near the swampy creek. Gunfire echoed through the woods until darkness brought quiet along the lines.

Meanwhile, in the evening darkness of March 29, General Lee sent an urgent telegram to the Confederate secretary of war: The enemy crossed Hatcher’s Run this morning at Monk’s Neck Bridge with a large force of cavalry, infantry, & artillery, and tonight his left extended to Dinwiddie Court House. Now the Confederate commander had to worry that his escape route to the west might be cut off. Further, he could not allow his only supply line from the west, the South Side Railroad, to be seized. He weighed these matters as he paced the wooden floor of his headquarters at the Turnbull house, just over one mile west of Petersburg. Suddenly he heard another problem: it began as only a slight tapping on the roof, but soon the heavens opened and the rain became a regular rattle.¹⁶

Outside, soldiers blue and gray sought whatever shelter they could find. As Gibbon noted, On the night of the 29th and all the next day a heavy rain fell deluging the whole country, flooding the streams, and transforming the roads and entrenchments into quagmires, retarding very much the movements of troops. At least his Twenty-fourth Corps had completed its thirty-six-mile march and the men were not slogging through the mud.¹⁷

West Virginia brigadier general Thomas Maley Harris, one of Gibbon’s brigade commanders, added some humor by exaggerating the difficult situation:

The wooded country was level and by nightfall March 30 the fields had become ponds of quicksand and mud, in which the horses sunk up to their bellies. It was impossible to bring up supplies because of the danger of losing the wagons in the quagmires that covered the battlefields. The road disappeared altogether and it was impossible to move anything except where corduroy roads were laid in front of the moving trains. The officers later stated the help of Noah was needed more than that of General Grant. When an officer rode by, the troops would call out, asking when the gun boats were coming up.¹⁸

Despite the weather, Grant sent Sheridan orders for his troopers to focus on a desolate place the maps called Five Forks, a junction five miles equidistant from Dinwiddie Court House to the southeast and Sutherland’s Station to the north. From Five Forks, the South Side Railroad lay only two-and-three-quarter miles north on Ford’s Road. If Sheridan could control the junction, Grant anticipated that Lee would