Lee's Last Grand Assault at Fort Stedman: Petersburg Video Tour!

here we are we're between the lines sort of on the edge of the federal line at petersburg we're talking about late in the petersburg campaign specifically late march in 1865. off to my right is union fort stedman connected by batteries and another fort behind me called fort haskell off to the uh off to the right is a confederate position generally i guess known as kolkwitz salient we talked about that long ago in association with some of the attacks that had been some eight or nine months earlier when the main heavies attacked in that direction there okay so now there's been siege operations going on for eight or nine months and the confederates are you know leery of a bunch of things here comes sherman's army coming up from the south after the battle of bentonville um here is grant getting ready no doubt for a spring offensive and they have to do something robert e lee has hated being penned in or necessarily penned in uh by sort of you know maintaining his capital and maintaining the communications with petersburg and whatnot and he is anxious to do something he's got to do something and to talk about that something let's bring on my friend will green co-founder of the american battlefield trust thanks gary we are we as gary indicated here we're standing in some pretty hallowed ground right here and as you look around the landscape the only thing that's really different is that you'd have to imagine all these trees gone there were a couple of shade trees in fort steadman which are now gone but uh most of these woods here would have been well all of these woods would have been cut down otherwise we would have been standing at the edge of the union position now fort stedman was put on the footprint of an old confederate fort this became part of the second confederate defense line that was established on the night of june 15th and 16th when it was abandoned on the night of june 17th and 18th the confederates moved back to the west and then created their new line which included that strong point called colquits salient the federals then came in and fortified all of this area fort stedman and in front of me is battery 10 where you see these two artillery positions that was really connected some of the earthworks are missing now but it was all part of one complex and then to the south as we turn around to the south you can see the mounds of battery 11 which were also connected to fort stedman so this was all a very large fortification complex that was manned by the brigade of the first division of the ninth corps a brigade by the command under the command of a man named napoleon mclaughlin he had several regimens in here the 14th new york artillery manned the guns that were in fort steadman and the mortar and the cannon that was in battery 10 and battery 11 and they had been occupying this position for a number of months across from us is the confederate army and as gary pointed out quite accurately general lee had been in this position since june 18th and gary pointed out that things are happening here in late march of 18 or in march of 1865 that make lee believe that it is time to evacuate petersburg this is a hard sell in richmond but lee explains the necessity of getting out of petersburg before sherman can come up and and trap him and his army would be destroyed lee will turn to at that point his most trusted subordinate john b gordon who was the commander of the second core you'll recall that the second core had been sent out to the shenandoah valley under jubal early in the summer of 1864 but by the winter of 6465 it had come back to the petersburg area and gordon had become the most trusted of lee's subordinates he turns to gordon for advice what would you do general gordon gordon suggests that he tried to negotiate with some kind of negotiated end of the war with general grant lee had actually attempted to do that and grant of course had rebuffed him then gordon said well the other thing to do would be to retreat and lee said i don't know if i can retreat the federal army is over too far to our right and might be in a position to make a retreat impossible and gordon says well your last option is to make an assault and try to bring the union forces from the far west in order to re redeem their situation on the eastern side of the petersburg defenses opening up an escape route for the army of northern virginia to try to join with joseph johnston's army in north carolina now these are none of these are very good options for lee but lee selects that third option it's really his only choice and puts gordon in charge of developing the tactical plan for the assault gordon selects an attack against this position because the lines here are only 284 yards apart the picket lines here are less than 100 yards apart and so the amount of open ground that an attacking confederate force would have to cover before reaching the union line is less here than anyplace else on the line so it makes a lot of sense gordon says he needs lots of men so not only is he going to commit his second core troops but he's going to get four brigades from ap hills third quarter and he's going to get a couple of brigades from richard anderson's fourth core and he's going to get as much of george pickett's division down here from north of the appomattox river as he can lee is going to agree to commit 19 700 infantry to this attempt so this is going to be a major major assault now gordon gets down to the micro tactics and here's what he's going to plan to do he's going to send out 50 axemen to cut down the obstructions between the line the abba t and the other obstructions that were blocking access to the federal force he's also going to send out a hundred men acting as deserters because there had been scores and hundreds of confederate deserters all through the winter so the idea of confederate soldiers coming across the lines carrying their weapons was not a novel idea that did not immediately trigger the idea that this is going to be an attack these hundred men after the axemen had cut down the abba t would be responsible for capturing the fort with club muskets and bayonets not firing a shot then they would be followed by three battalions of troops who would go through the captured fort and back up to the high ground where the woods exist today didn't exist then where gordon was under the impression there was another series of union batteries that could play on his attack here and once all of that had been accomplished and all of this right before dawn on march the 25th 1865 then gordon would set forward the bulk of his troops to widen the breach including some cavalry that might if things went really well might get all the way to the u.s military railroad at meade station and disrupt the union supply system and of course all of this was designed to create a crisis in the union force that would compel grant to take troops from his left flank and bring them over here to try to redeem the lost situation opening up an escape route for lee thanks will you're with the american battlefield trust we're with doug allman behind the camera will green i'm gary edelman and we are talking about lee's last real deal offensive here at petersburg here at fort stedman continue sir well the day for the attack is set for march the 25th and uh everything seems to go off as planned now this is a story that gordon tells and if you've read george john gordon's memoirs you know that you need not a salt shaker but a whole can of salt to shake on the pages to separate the the truth from the embellishments but gordon says something that is plausible if not provable because the relationship between the pickets on the lines that petersburg was always not always but very frequently very cordial lots of informal trading and courtesies offered to one another and as gordon tells the story one of his men that is supposed to be the initial attackers leaves the colquin cinnamon area and gets up and yells to the his counterparts on the union side watch out billy yank we're coming and with that these forces come across this this was a stubble cornfield at the time open ground and they come across this open ground from a strong point there at kolkwood city and of course the front is again 500 yards wide but they come across first only three or four hundred of these men they immediately dispatch the union pickets they get through the abati they go up and over the parapet of fort stedman and they capture the conf the federal artillery there and many of the federal garrison who was who were sleeping this is all right before dawn so it's practically pitch dark general mclaughlin the commander of this sector of the line comes up in the semi-darkness and starts giving orders to the confederates and then he realizes that these are the enemy and mclaughlin becomes a casualty he becomes a prisoner and is taken away so so far so good then some of gordon's men go forward to try to find these forts that are on the high ground behind fort stedman that's the pre that's the preliminary the last preliminary before all of the major infantry attack is going to take place but they can't find these forts because they really didn't exist and therefore time was wasted eventually more confederates come across the open field but by this time the federals have had a chance to react they start getting on filet fire from something called fort mcgilvery which is over by the appomattox river and battery nine which was not visible to us today because of that tree line but battery nine would have been about 600 yards 500 yards to our north here they also begin getting fire from the fort that you can see from here that's off to the south that's fort haskell so the confederates now are coming under fire from both flanks and then a fresh division of troops under the command of a pennsylvanian named john hart a ninth core division composed of relatively new pennsylvania units which has been in reserve on that high ground behind this tree line here comes down off of their camps and makes a counter-attack so between the firing from both flanks and heart tramps counter-assault here gordon's men are placed in a very tough position many are shot down probably about 600 are shot during this attack many others surrender and some run the gauntlet of fire back to the confederate line by nine o'clock in the morning the battle is over the federals have restored all of their law temporarily lost ground they've lost the federals lose about a thousand soldiers most of them prisoners in this assault confederate casualties again are a little bit unknown about 600 killed and wounded and some 2000 are made prisoners of war and i love this story about a confederate prisoner who is marched to the rear to city point in order to get on board a ship to go to a northern prison and he writes after the war that up until this time march 25th 1865 he like many of his comrades were still optimistic about the confederates winning the war but then he saw that there was a dress parade back in the rear by city point there were so many yankee troops back here that they could afford to defeat the strongest blow that lee could deliver to the union army and at the same time have enough excess men to have dress parades and at that point he said i realized that our cause was lost and you know if lee is outnumbered i don't know the exact number it doesn't matter but if lee's got 60 or 70 000 troops left i'm not sure if he does by march 1865 i don't think he does uh you know and he loses another three percent of his army here or something like that in this one assault and grant in command overall you know i don't know that a lot of his subordinates would have been looking globally at this right grant is this kind of guy that always likes to see the big picture here right remember will talked about anderson coming over to help gordon and pickett coming over to help gordon and grant correctly surmises that lee must have weakened other parts of his line to launch such a big assault and quickly orders assaults on other portions of the lines and those assaults on march 25th same day the battle of jones farm for instance over near what would later be called the breakthrough the union is going to capture key confederate picket lines okay and those picket lines will then bring the union closer to the confederate lines and that will be one of the things that will help to set up success in the final union offensive in late march and into early april that's exactly right and that may be the most important outcome of this entire action on march 25th because of course grant is waiting for as gary said in his intro grant is ready to start a spring offensive all they're waiting for are the roads to be sufficiently dry in order to be able to move large numbers of troops and wheeled vehicles and that time in late march uh is has arrived and so this is lee's last grand offensive as it's called and it fails and now the initiative will return to you to ulysses s grant who will meet with general sherman and president lincoln and admiral farragut at a little cabin at city point to discuss their plans for the final spring offensive of the american civil war and that will begin on march 29th just four days after lee's failed offensive here at fort stedman you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 13,203

Rating: 4.9929452 out of 5

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, Petersburg Civil War Tour, Petersburg Battlefield Tour, Petersburg Tour, A. Wilson Greene, Garry Adelman, Fort Steadman Petersburg

Id: iIx-_YXgvNs

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021