Shock Troops of the Confederacy at Petersburg: Petersburg Video Tour!

hey everybody man i i we have only been at petersburg a short time shooting videos and i've already stood at something like six places uh i've never even been before and this is probably my 40th trip to petersburg or so so this is just great going around with our good friend will green now what we are doing here is we we've already explored thoroughly you've probably seen the first offensive the stuff june 15th through the 18th and now we're going to get into the second offensive that people know a little bit less about but the union still thinks it has an opportunity to maybe you know cut communications get into petersburg so will where are we what's going on thanks gary it's good to be with you again we're standing at the edge of confederate battery 36 which was part of that demock line of defenses around petersburg the 10-mile line that had 55 artillery batteries numbered sequentially from downstream or east of petersburg around to the south side where we are now and then swinging around to the south and to the west where battery 5 anchored on the appomattox river above petersburg we're here at battery 36 and the reason that we're here is this feature that you can see behind me now this looks like a lake and it is an artificial lake now called wilcox lake named after the wilcox farm which was general mahone's headquarters uh during june of 1864. the lake wasn't here but the deep ravine that i hope you can see on camera was here drained by a stream called lieutenant run which ran into the appomattox river and the significance of this ravine is that it provided the gateway the avenue for two major successful flank attacks by the confederates led by william mahone now many of you know william mahone a little guy five feet one inches tall barely weighed 100 pounds was slightly wounded early in the war his wife was told it was only a flesh wound and she responded by saying well it must be serious for william has no flesh one of uh his soldiers described mahone as a small man talks very fine and is ugly enough to scare any set of men that did not know him he is very sociable and will talk with a private as quick as he would a lieutenant general he was much liked by his men and by the time of the petersburg campaign mahone was kind of the go-to guy for robert e lee his division of of five brigades were the shock troops of the army of northern virginia at petersburg now grant's second offensive june 22nd and 23rd 1864 was comprised of three different components the first was a huge cavalry raid led by james wilson and august v coutts designed to destroy all the confederate railroads from the weldon railroad to the south side railroad to the richmond and danville railroad to cut off lee's supply that was a that's a different story it was a long exciting raid which didn't wind up too well for wilson the second component was an attempt by the army of the james to make a foothold on the north side of the james river at deep bottom that was successful and the federals did establish their toe hold on the north side of the james at deep bottom which would lead to a number of different offensives north of the james but the major portion of the second offensive was general grant's effort to interdict the both the petersburg and weldon railroad and the south side railroad in what i think is a rather geographical ludicrous attempt to make that huge swing to the west with only two cores the sixth core and the second core now there hasn't been a real book written about the second offensive so it's kind of difficult to find out a lot of information i have a chapter or two on it in my book campaign of giants but in a nutshell what the idea is is the sixth core is going to go to the south and to the west the second core is going to go to the north and the west and their design is to move as far to the west to break these railroads as possible very quickly the sixth core and the second core lose contact with one another the sixth core is very timid and it's advanced the second core doesn't go much farther than what the sixth core goes to and by the afternoon of june 22nd the second quarter now commanded by david bernie because winfield hancock is suffering from his gettysburg wound his left flank bernie's left flank is exposed about a mile and a half behind me a mile a half to the south of us general lee this is there's a debate about who really orchestrates who really initiates this attack mahone says he's the one who has the idea others say it was lee's idea lee ordered mahone to do this irrespective of that mahone gets the assignment to take three of his brigades to move secretly down this ravine where he can't be seen and that will lead him around the left flank of bernie's second core which is in the air because it's not connected with the sixth core and that's exactly what mahone does on june 22nd this is one of the most amazing offenses of the civil war that nobody knows anything about because mahone has three brigades he has his georgia brigade under under a man named william gibson he has his alabama brigade under john c c sanders and he has his old virginia brigade under david whissicker three brigades and he's going to attack the three divisions of the second core and he moves down this ravine he pops out of the defilade of this ravine he attacks the second core and sequentially rolls up nine of the ten brigades in that core captures more than 1700 men inflicts more than 600 casualties of killed and wounded on the second quarter captures the first battery the second core loses in the civil war and pushes almost all the way to the jerusalem plant growth three brigades destroying almost three divisions of the union's second corps the most shameful day of the second course history but mahone finally runs out of gas near the end of the day he brings up his mississippi brigade they cover his withdrawal back to the main confederate line and the second core is basically out of action as far as this offensive is concerned the postscript to all of this there's another attack the next day on june the 23rd led by wilcox's brigade as well as more of william mahone's brigade down along the railroad where the sixth corps has stopped and that attack rolls up a portion of the sixth corps as well and the second union offensive is uh is ended in disaster absolute disaster one post script to the story here this same ravine will be the axis of advance for another attack by william mahone's division portion of his division this will take place two months later on august the 19th and this is the successful confederate a counter-attack at the battle of the weldon railroad or globe tavern on august the 19th in which mahone captures 2 700 union troops using with three brigades another amazing assault but in this case mahone doesn't really drive the federals back and a couple of days later as we'll talk about in another video the federal will redeem the situation that's great well this is so cool and four things real quick if i can remember four things which is a rarity i assure you one um just the idea here that will would characterize only two core of what 30 000 soldiers maybe upwards of 40 000 as as ludicrously insufficient really speaks to the scale of the campaigns for petersburg i mean we're talking about a lot of troops here too he also talked about the uh how uh you know this campaign is characterized and it's been for a while not for the whole time for the south but confederate brigades against union divisions confederate divisions against union core and consistently using interior lines at petersburg lee is throwing one or two divisions against one or two union core and somehow it works you know at least holds off um for 292 days in total three you know make sure when you get a chance volume one of of will's three volume series from uh unc press is already out campaign of giants volume two before too long i don't wanna make any promises here and then volume three so so we're gonna have a great opportunity to really understand this stuff and fourth and finally at least for me um doug doug allman behind the camera i mean while we walked out here for a quarter mile or so there were works on one or both sides of our path the whole way we could go further there's works all over this is the battery here and and the moat is next to it over here it never shows up on camera as well but trust me these are incredible works and yet i've never stood here till today i've never seen it as part of the park tour route and i may already know why but let me pretend why i can't figure this let me pretend otherwise i can't figure this out will straighten out why isn't this parkland well this is all still preserved gary but it used to be part of the national battlefield which originally was called petersburg national military park many of uh of your viewers are familiar with the antietam plan of land acquisition in the 1920s fredericksburg in spotsylvania was acquired that way and so was petersburg in which in order to save money the government simply bought the lines of fortifications and then built a tour road next to them rather than buying the whole battlefield under the premise that the land would always be rural and there was no need to buy all that extra land so that's how this land came into the national park service however by the early 1970s the park administration here at petersburg got tired of investigating traffic accidents and other law enforcement issues along the tour roads out here and in in order to shed themselves of that responsibility they struck a deal with the city of petersburg by which they would donate their land out here to the city with a protective easement on the earthworks so that they would be devoid of any responsibility for law enforcement action so what we have here is a city park with preserved earthworks not as well interpreted as they might be by the park service but at any rate they are preserved but they are not part of the park anymore thanks will and you know make no mistake the american battlefield trust we deal with this with some frequency i mean you know do we hang on to land do we transfer it to another entity usually to the park service we feel great about that usually state entity we feel great sometimes private entities and we make sure we put reverters in there where if they ever you know can't protect the land anymore that we get it back but do you put a road in do you provide signage do you put a parking area in that might disturb some historic things if you can't put it anywhere else these are decisions that every land steward of battlefields have to go through there's no perfect answer a lot of the time so i appreciate all of that will uh we'll see you in another place before long thank you will thanks doug and thank you for supporting battlefield preservation and education you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 9,278

Rating: 4.9702048 out of 5

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, Petersburg Civil War Tour, Confederate Petersburg, Petersburg Live, Petersburg Battlefield Tour, A. Wilson Greene, Will Greene, Garry Adelman

Id: n-Ez7pvKTjI

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021