As the Noose Tightens Around General Robert E. Lee Outside Richmond, General U.S. Grant Sends Intelligence of Significant Confederate Movements Indicating an Attempt Break Out of the Union Lines

An uncommon Grant letter on intelligence of Lee’s movements in the final days

In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln commander of the Union Armies. His headquarters would be with the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Gen. George G. Meade. Grant developed a strategy to defeat the Confederacy by placing his army between the rebel capital of Richmond and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In his Spring offensive in 1864, Grant confronted Lee’s army a number of times in very bloody engagements in which both sides suffered great losses. The Battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania proved Grant’s fearless tenacity, but both were essentially draws. After each battle Grant moved southeast to try to create a wedge between Lee and Richmond, but Lee’s army successfully followed up the engagements by foiling that maneuver. Then Grant’s assaults at Cold Harbor, his most mistaken plan of the war, and the one he most regretted, resulted in a sharp defeat. Grant thus found that he was unable to take Richmond directly.

Next Grant focused on Petersburg, due south of Richmond. Three railroads met there, and they were the capital’s chief source of supply. If Grant could take Petersburg, then the Confederates would have to abandon Richmond. Grant’s attempt to take it quickly failed, so by mid-June 1864 Lee ended up in Petersburg with the Appomattox River protecting his back, and surrounding the city below the river he built two lines of works that covered the entire area. Grant ended up besieging the city, and his Army of the Potomac built works from the river northeast of Petersburg down to south of the city, as far as they could go. The Confederates controlled all the ground from Grant’s southern tip west up to the river. Grant’s main objective during the ten-month Siege of Petersburg was to extend his lines south and west to cut Lee’s railroad links and encircle him at the same time. Lee’s problem was that he was stuck in Petersburg and every Union successful extension west forced him to extend his lines. And every time he had to extend, those lines became thinner.

By the end of January 1865, Lee’s army had been besieged in Petersburg for some eight months. Although some supplies continued to reach his embattled army, Union forces had cut off most of the supply routes to that city. The last major Confederate port capable of aiding the army, at Wilmington, North Carolina, had been closed by Union arms in mid-January. As a result, Lee’s army suffered from inadequate clothing and supplies, as well as hunger. Though it was winter, Grant kept a constant pressure upon Lee’s forces in order to cut the remaining two open supply routes, or at the least to force Lee to further stretch and thin his already-thin lines to protect those routes. On February 5, 1865, Grant ordered his troops out of their lines and toward the Boynton Plank Road, which was one of the two still open to Lee. At Hatcher’s Run the armies battled for three days; and ultimately the Union line was extended, and Lee’s line correspondingly thinned. March began with President Lincoln’s second inauguration, which put an end to any lingering Southern hopes that the North would tire of the war and sue for peace. At the same time, Lee could only watch as Union armies defeated Confederate forces elsewhere; in the Shenandoah Valley, Gen. P.H. Sheridan’s army scored important victories, while Gen. William T. Sherman’s army had taken Savannah and was moving north successfully through the Carolinas, with the aim of ultimately joining up with Grant. Any junctures of these forces would spell catastrophe for the Confederacy. The military and political fortunes of the Confederacy were degrading.

In early March 1865, Lee decided that his army must break out of the Richmond and Petersburg lines, obtain food and supplies at Danville, Virginia or Lynchburg, Virginia and join General Joseph E. Johnston’s force opposing Major General Sherman’s Union army. He began preparations for the movement.

On March 4, 1865, Lee approved an attempt to capture or break a portion of the Union lines. The expected result of a successful attack would be to threaten or damage Grant’s base and supply lines, compel Grant to shorten his line from the western end and to delay his pursuit of any Confederate force’s withdrawal. Then, Lee could shorten his line and send part of his army to help Johnston in North Carolina.

Autograph letter signed, City Point, VA, March 7, 1865 to Major General Meade, informing him of Confederate troop movements that could betoken a break out from Petersburg. “All of Mahone’s division is now reported to be in the Bermuda front and Pickett’s division, which was there, at the railroad depot awaiting transportation, it is supposed for Lynchburg.” The Bermuda Hundred front was south of the James River, in the direction Lee sought to move, so to strengthen his forces on that front would hopefully forestall a Union attack there while increasing Lee’s capacity to break out. Lynchburg was a prime objective in any movement Lee might make.

Mahone did go to Bermuda, but Pickett stayed with Lee’s army and did not make it to Petersburg. On March 22, 1865, Gordon told Lee he had determined that the best place to attack would be at Fort Stedman, east of Petersburg and south of the Appomattox River where the armies’ lines were only about 200 yards apart. It was lightly fortified, and a Union supply depot was directly behind it. With luck, a large force could penetrate Union defenses there and move on Grant’s supply base and headquarters 10 miles away at City Point. Lee approved the attack. The pre-dawn assault on March 25th overpowered the garrisons of Fort Stedman and Batteries 10, 11 and 12. But the Confederates were brought under a killing crossfire, and counterattacks led by Maj. Gen. John G. Parke’s Ninth Corps contained the breakthrough and captured more than 1,900 of the attackers. Elsewhere, elements of the Second and Sixth Corps southwest of Petersburg assaulted and captured the Confederate picket lines in their respective fronts, which had been weakened to support the assault on Fort Stedman. The loss was a devastating blow for Lee’s army, setting up the Confederate defeat at Five Forks on April 1st and the fall of Petersburg on April 2-3rd.