Campaign for Petersburg

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Campaign for Petersburg, by Richard Wayne Lykes
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE HISTORY SERIES
RICHARD WAYNE LYKES
National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C. 1970
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents,
U.S. Government Printing Office
Washington, D.C. 20402—Price $1
In the final year of the Civil War in the East, the fighting focused upon Petersburg, an important transportation center for Richmond and Lee’s army. For 10 bloody months of combat, both from behind prepared positions and along the main routes of supply, Lee’s ragged Confederates held the city (shown here from north of the Appomattox River) against Grant’s numerically superior Federals. On April 2-3, 1865, Lee was forced to abandon both Petersburg and Richmond. One week later, he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, dooming the South’s bid for independent existence.
By June 1864, when the siege of Petersburg began, the Civil War had lain heavily on both the North and the South for more than 3 years. Most of the fighting in the East during this period had taken place on the rolling Virginia countryside between the opposing capitals of Washington and Richmond, only 110 miles apart, and all of it had failed to end the war and bring peace to the land. Various generals had been placed in command of the Union’s mighty Army of the Potomac and had faced Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. So far not one had succeeded in destroying Lee’s army or in capturing Richmond.
Perhaps Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan had come the closest to success when, in the late spring and early summer of 1862, his Northern troops had threatened the Confederate capital, only to be repulsed on its outskirts. The other Northern commanders who followed McClellan—Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade—were less successful. Lee had met and turned aside their drives.
After 36 months of bitter conflict the war in the East seemed, to many observers, to be far from a final settlement. The failure of Union forces to deliver a decisive blow against the Army of Northern Virginia was a source of growing concern in Washington. The Confederacy, for its part, was no more successful in settling the issue. Attempted invasions of the Northern States by Lee were turned back at Antietam in September 1862 and at Gettysburg in July 1863.