LEE’S LAST OFFENSIVE

By Carole E. Scott

Early in March, 1865, General Lee told Confederate President Jefferson Davis that the evacuation of the Army of Northern Virginia from Petersburg was just a matter of time. Preventing him from immediately withdrawing was that his starving artillery and draught horses were too weak to deal with the roads at that time of year. Later, when the condition of the roads improved, his starving army would withdraw. Lee feared Grant was planning another assault. (He was). Lee expected General William Sherman to arrive soon with the army that had subdued Georgia and South Carolina; thereby increasing Grant’s 128,000 to 44,000 man advantage over Lee.

Lee’s conversations with Davis indicated the war would not be ended by a political initiative, so he concluded his job was to preserve his army. This is why he called on General John B. Gordon to propose an attack on Grant’s lines that would enable Lee’s army to withdraw from Petersburg and join with General Johnston’s army in North Carolina.

Gordon, a 33-year-old who before the war operated a coal mining company mined coal in his native Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee, was one of the most successful commanders in Lee’s army. After the Battle of the Wilderness, Lee had made Gordon a major general and put him in command of a division. Gordon was one of only three non-professionals so honored by Lee.

The origin of the dire straits Lee was in dated back to June 15, 1864 when General Grant’s army had attacked Petersburg, whose 5,400 Confederate troops consisting of old men and boys under the command of General P. G. T. Beauregard were outnumbered and outgunned by16,000 Federals. On June 18, General Lee arrived with his army, and Petersburg was saved.

Grant had turned his attention to Petersburg after he had failed to capture Richmond or destroy the Army of Northern Virginia during his Overland Campaign of May 4 through June 12, 1864. If he captured Petersburg, Lee would either have to give up Richmond or fight Grant’s much larger army on open ground. After failing to capture Petersburg in June, 1864, Grant didn’t go away, he stayed to besiege Petersburg. The key to winning the war, Grant believed, was to pin down Lee’s army and destroy it by attrition. Pining down Lee’s army was advantageous to Federal armies fighting elsewhere.

Earlier, Lee in a letter had said, “We must destroy this Army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege and then it will be a mere question of time.” The James merges with the Appomattox at Petersburg.

Because it produced nearly half the Confederacy’s factory output, keeping Richmond out of the hands of the Yankees was more than symbolically important. To protect Richmond, Petersburg, a vital rail hub, located 23 miles South of Richmond had to be held so that Richmond would not be cut off from supplies.

The balance of power had steadily tipped in the Federals’ favor. They cut the roads and railroads connecting Petersburg with the rest of the Confederacy until Lee’s only way to bring in supplies was a makeshift one via the Boydton Plank Road and the Southside Railroad. Grant had a massive Federal supply base at City Point (now Hopewell) built that large ships could reach by river. He also had a 30-mile-long railroad built to deliver supplies to the Federal lines. City Point was also the site of his headquarters.

The fortified lines at Petersburg was an area of battle scared, rolling hills largely denuded of trees. Facing the 37 miles of Confederate works at varying distances were Federal works consisting of a front line of earthen redoubts or forts connected by a chain of earthen breast works. At intervals there were smaller, unenclosed fortifications called lunettes or batteries.

Grant gradually decimated Lee’s army by repeatedly striking it with his larger, better equipped and supplied army. The Confederate and Federal lines were so close together that it was almost certain death for a man to show his head above the front line works. Because it would expose a man to enemy sharpshooters, it was even dangerous to expose oneself for several hundred yards in the rear unless you were out of musket range. There were a number of deep trenches extending to the rear beyond musket range. Some were covered with timber overlaid with earth. Shelling took place daily.

The Federal troops in the front line were relieved by fresh troops every few days, so that they were not subjected to the wear and tear of constant harassing duty and danger all the time, both day and night, as were the Confederates, who had only enough men to thinly occupy their one line of work. A very short distance in front of their front line of works, each side had placed a heavy line of chevaux de frise, with an occasional opening sufficient to allow a man to pass through.” Confederates slept in covered holes behind their works.

The Federal forts, said General James Walker, commander of the Third Division of the Army of Northern Virginia’s Second Corps, “were filled with artillery and infantry, and so arranged that the fire from the guns or one would sweep not only over the ground in its immediate front, but in front of the breastworks and the neighboring forts to the right and to the left; so that an attacking force would have to face not only a direct fire from the artillery of at least three forts. In the rear of this first line, on the hills beyond Harrison’s creek, the Federals had a second line, very much like the first, and so constructed that the forts in this line commanded the forts and breastworks composing the first line.” It was the original, east of Petersburg line of the Confederates that the Federals had captured on the evening of June 15, 1864. The second line wasn’t always occupied, but troops camped nearby could quickly occupy it.

After surveying the lines at Petersburg, Gordon saw that the Confederate and Federal front lines were exceptionally close to each other between the Federal works on Hare’s Hill, where the relatively weak Federal Fort Stedman was located, and the Colquitt Salient, one of the Confederate strongest points. Also playing a role in him selecting this as where to attack was how long it would take to cut a path through the obstructions protecting Stedman and how wide and deep were ditches his men would have to leap to get to it.

Fort Stedman was a seven-sided, earthen redoubt that had four, light 12-pound guns manned by the 19^th New York. It was garrisoned by 300 men of the 29th Massachusetts Infantry. Covering about three quarters of an acre, it had a moat and a nine-foot wall. It was located about 150 yards from Colquitt’s Salient and two miles from the center of Petersburg.

To the North of Fort Stedman were Battery 9, Battery 8, and Fort McGilvary. To the South of Fort Stedman were Battery 11, Battery 12, and Fort Haskell. Located 2,200 yards behind Stedman was Meade’s railroad station, the Federal Ninth Corps supply depot. This railroad was the first one built exclusively for military use.

Colquitt’s Salient was located on the continuation of the ridge upon which Fort Stedman stood. It was a heavily fortified position located on Spring Hill. The batteries in and around it mounted 20 guns. A triple row of chevaux-de-frise protected it from assault.

Only at night did an attack stand a chance of success. If a breakthrough was achieved, General W. H. F. “Rooney” Lee’s cavalry would gallop beyond Fort Stedman and destroy Grant’s railroad and telegraph lines and cut away his pontoons across the river. Hopefully, the cavalry could reach City Point and capture Grant and destroy the supplies stored there. Gordon hoped he could bring about the disintegration of the whole left wing of the enemy army or at least deal it such a staggering blow that it would make it possible for Lee’s armyto safely withdraw and join General Johnston in North Carolina.

Both Lee and Gordon believed a night attack on Fort Stedman and adjoining works was a desperate strategy, but they thought it was better than any alternative. “To wait,” Gordon said after the war, “was certain destruction. It could not be worse if we tried and failed.” To carry out this attack, the Army of Northern Virginia’s last offensive action, Lee gave Gordon nearly half of his army

That Lee stripped the rest of his front in order to provide these troops to Gordon indicates how very desperate he was. In addition to Second Corps troops, Gordon had the Fourth Corps brigades of Matt W. Ransom and William H. Wallace, giving him a total of 11,500 men. He also had the support of A. P. Hill’s Third Corps. George Pickett was supposed to come with his First Corps from Richmond, but train break downs prevented him from doing so. Leading a three pronged attack would be Second Corps division heads Generals Bryan Grimes, Clement Evans, and James Walker.

On March 24 Lee told General James Longstreet to be ready to attack on the North side of the James River in order to prevent troops from being sent to the other side to assault Gordon’s men. Also taking place on March 24 was Grant issuing orders whose objective was to destroy the Danville and Southside railroads, turn Lee’s right, and force Lee to abandon his entrenchments there.

Gordon assigned the task of getting the obstructions protecting Colquitt Salient removed the night of the 24th before the attack to a few select men who would do so making as little noise as possible. Gordon planned to initiate the attack before sunrise with a sudden, quick dash of his men across ditches to capture or, if necessary, bayonet the enemy’s pickets. Then the Federal chevaux-de-frise protecting Stedman would be removed.

The chevaux-de-frise consisted of sharpened rails buried deep in the ground held together with chains, spikes, and horizontal poles. Because the only way to rapidly create a passage way was to have axemen chop through the horizontal poles, Gordon recruited 50 particularly robust men to serve as axemen, who, still wielding their axes, would rush forward through the gap they created. After they and three groups of 100 sharpshooters would take Fort Stedman and nearby batteries. They would then move forward to capture three forts Gordon thought were behind Fort Stedman.

Waiting at the Colquitt Salient for the axemen and sharpshooters to deal with the chevaux-de-frise and Federal pickets were the rest of Gordon’s infantrymen. The cavalry was held in reserve until a way was cleared for them. Because the signal to start the attack was gunshots, the sharpshooters assigned to overpower the Federal pickets carried unloaded guns.

To keep his sharpshooters from killing each other in the dark, Gordon had his wife, who was staying in Petersburg, tear white cloth into strips for his men to wear on their arm. (She stayed as close to him as possible throughout the war, her nursing possibly saving his life after the often wounded Gordon was shot five times at Antietam and developed an infection.)

Gordon and Walker say that Federal pickets thought Confederates preparing to attack were gathering never harvested corn and tolerated them being so close to them. Federals claim the Rebels posed as deserters. In one five-week period that winter nearly eight percent of Lee’s troops had deserted. Those who deserted were paid by the Federals for any arms they brought with them. One column of Confederates swept across the low ground towards Fort Stedman and Battery 10; one moved directly of Fort Stedman; and oe moved toward a point between Fort Stedman and Battery 11.

Initially the attack on Fort Stedman exceeded Gordon’s “most sanguine expectations.” Asleep or playing cards and drinking, its garrison was caught by surprise. The guns of Fort Stedman and the captured batteries were turned on the enemy’s troops. Within minutes it and Batteries 10 and 11 were taken, and a gap nearly 1,000 feet long in the Federal line was opened up by using captured guns to clear the entrenchments both to the North and the South. Two Federal regimental encampments located nearby were also taken. Hundreds of Federal troops were captured.

Made aware of success by the cheers of the successful axemen and sharpshooters, the rest of Gordon’s troops, crossed Colquitt’s breast works and moved into the Federal works. It took over an hour for General Walker’s entire division to come up and form a line, so it was sunrise before they were ready to advance.

After the Fort Stedman was taken, the sharpshooters were to pretend to be Federal soldiers and dash to the rear, shouting that, “the Rebels have captured Fort Stedman”. They were to claim they had been ordered by Federal General Napoleon B. McLaughlin of the Ninth Corps, who was in command of Fort Stedman, to go to the rear to fend off the Yankees. Some of them had been given the names of Federal officers who they were to claim they were. They wasted their time looking for three nonexistent forts behind Fort Stedman.

The Confederates crowded into the encampments of the 29^th and 57^th Massachusetts regiments located behind the front line. “It was a complete surprise,” declared a North Carolina Confederate. “Many were killed coming out of their tents by our men using their guns as clubs.”

Because Gordon’s men cut the telegraph lines, Grant didn’t know about the attack until someone showed up to tell him.

Confederate artillery at Colquitt’s Salient bombarded Fort Haskell. Federal artillery returned fire. Repeated attempts by Gordon’s men to storm Fort Haskell and Battery 9 failed. Federals at Fort Haskell fended off the Confederates with canister.

Hearing the sound of the attack, General McLaughten went to Fort Haskell before moving on to Battery 12, which was then also in Federal hands. Because Battery 11 had been captured by Gordon’s men, he ordered Battery 12 to fire upon it, and the 59 Massachusetts briefly retook it.

Believing that Fort Stedman had been also been retaken, McLaughten rode across a parapet from Fort Haskell into FortStedman. Assuming the men there in the darkness that made it difficult to distinguish blue from gray were Federal troops, he began giving them directions, which they obeyed because they knew they were firing at Yankees. McLaughten thought they were firing on Rebels until he realized that one of the men had a Confederate uniform on. McLauthten was taken prisoner and conducted to Gordon, who he gave his sword to. The Federal officer of the day who was looking for McLaughlen, made the same mistake and ended up a prisoner.

Bringing order to the chaos among their troops were Federal Generals John G. Parke, commander of the Ninth Corps; General O. B. Wilcox, commander of the First Division of the Ninth Corps; and General John F. Hartranft, commander of the Third Division of the Ninth Corps, whose men were in reserve. Hartraft was notified by McLaughlen’s headquarters at 5:10 AM that a portion of the Federal lines had been captured. Moments later General Parke ordered him to move his brigade at Meade’s Station to reinforce General Orlando Willcox in order to recapture a battery taken by the enemy.

Hartranft, whose Pennsylvanians were spread along the ridgeline from Stedman to Meade’s station, said that the sudden and impetuous Confederate attack carried the line from Battery 9 to Fort Haskell; thus putting into the hands of Gordon’s men Fort Stedman and Batteries 10, 11, and 12 along with the bomb proofs and covered ways connecting them. Fire from Fort Haskell and Battery 9 drove the Confederates into the bomb-proofs.

Some Confederates lost sight of their duty as they entered the booty-rich bomb proofs where men lived like troglodytes. One Confederate wrote that some of the half-starved Confederates were soon busy searching the bomb proofs and covered ways for rations.

By 7:30 AM Batteries 11 and 12 had been lost, and artillery shells were raining down on the Confederates in Fort Stedman and Battery 10, both of which were captured. Stedman was recaptured in a 28 minute fight. When General Walker’s skirmishers fell back to Fort Stedman, they found it occupied by the Federals, and they were forced to surrender.

General Walker said that by sunrise the Federals had sent out from their camps in the rear four times as many men as the Confederates had. They filled the works of the second line with infantry and artillery and sent out a heavy skirmish line.

General Hartraft organized Federal troops that surrounded the Confederates and by 7:30 AM had halted them just short of Meade Station. Helping the Federals was the slow advance of Gordon’s infantry after Stedman was taken. Hartranft believed that if Haskell and Battery 9 had been lost, Gordon would have been able to destroy the railroad and the Federals’ supplies.

In his account of Gordon’s attack, General James Longstreet said that Gordon’s men “advanced before daylight, gained quiet possession of the enemy's picket line, carried his works between Batteries 9 and 10, moved to the right and left, captured Fort Steadman and its garrison, and turned the guns there and at Battery 10 against the enemy. But the alarm spread and the enemy was afield, feeling his way towards the assailants, for it was not yet light enough to see and direct his artillery fire over his own men. Batteries 11 and 12 were taken….Redoubts constructed on the main line had commanding positions over Fort Steadman, and a sweeping fire along its lines, in anticipation of a surprise attack, but their fire was withheld for daylight to direct it.

Light broke and the fire opened. [Federal] General Parke called his field artillery under [Colonel William L.] Tidball into practice from high ground over the Confederates, put the divisions of Hartranft and Willcox against the Confederate flanks, and held them back near the troops crowding in along the breach, and called for a division from the Second Corps.

The Confederate columns were strong enough to repel the attack of two divisions,—were put there for that purpose,—but so far from breaking up and pushing back the ninety thousand men in front of them, they were not so handled as to check two divisions long enough for the forces to get back to their lines.”

The artillery fire not only tore the Confederate ranks, but crossed fire in their rear, cutting off reinforcements and retreat. Our side was without artillery, except captured guns, which were handled by infantry. As the sortie was noised along the line, General Humphreys and General Wright advanced the Second and Sixth Corps against the Confederate lines along their fields to learn if troops had been drawn from their fronts to join the attack. Batteries 11 and 12 were recovered before eight o'clock, and General Parke ordered Hartranft's division to regain Fort Steadman and Battery 10, which was done with slight loss before nine o'clock.”

“The full light of the morning,” Gordon wrote, “revealed the gathering forces of Grant and the great preponderance of his numbers. It was impossible for me to make further headway with my isolated corps.” Gordon reported that, “A consuming fire on both flank and front during this withdrawal caused a heavy loss to my command.”

Viewing the action from the Colquitt Salient, Lee saw that the Federals had rallied; called up reserves; and were pouring into Fort Stedman and the adjoining works. To remain was useless and would cost more lives. At around 8 AM he ordered Gordon to withdraw. Later in the day, assuming that the attack had weakened the Confederate line where the attack took place, parts of the Federal Second and Sixth Corps captured the entrenched Confederate pickets there; thus weakening the Confederate line. Gordon’s failed attack may have reduced Lee’s army by 4,000.

When the command for the Confederates to fall back arrived, General Walker said, “the retrograde movement, which was a thousand times more hazardous than the advance because it was now in the full blaze of daylight, and the seventy-five yards that lay between Fort Stedman and our shelter was swept by the direct and cross fire of many pieces of artillery posted in both the first and second lines of the enemy’s works.” Rather than face it, many men surrendered.

One Federal observer was appalled by the sight of fleeing Rebels being picked off by the dozens as they fled into no-man’s land. “My mind sickens a memory of it—a real tragedy in war—for the victims had ceased fighting and were now struggling between imprisonment and death or home.”

Before Gordon launched his attack, President Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his wife and son, Tad, had arrived at City Point on the “River Queen” steamer so Lincoln could confer with Grant. A division-size parade Lincoln was supposed to review on March 25 was post phoned to the afternoon. Grant and Lincoln and his wife and son were taken to General Meade’s headquarters, where Lincoln saw some prisoners from Fort Steadman. Pointing at them after was handed a dispatch about Steadman having been retaken, he declared, “Ah, there is the best dispatch you can show me from General Parke.”

General James Longstreet said of Gordon’s attack that, “For an army of forty thousand veterans, without field batteries, to dislodge from their well-chosen and strongly fortified lines an army of ninety thousand well-armed and thoroughly-appointed veterans was impossible.”

After the Southside Railroad was cut at Five Forks on April 1, Lee told Davis Petersburg and Richmond would have to be abandoned that night. Gordon spent April 1 defending Fort Mahone. Petersburg fell on April 2, but it was not occupied until April 3 because of the exceptional defense put up by the possibly no more than 300 Confederates occupying Fort Gregg, the Confederate Alamo.

The men in Fort Gregg faced thousands of Federals rushing through a gap in Gordon’s lines. Their ferocious resistance and refusal to surrender bought enough time for their army to retreat across the Appomattox River. Only about ten percent of the men in Fort Gregg survived.

At 5 AM on April 9, Gordon led the last attack made by Lee’s army in an unsuccessful attempt to break through the Federal lines. Lee surrendered on April 9. Gordon led the Confederate troops in the surrender ceremonies.

Many believed that after the war Gordon was the first head of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgie, but his has never been proven conclusively. In 1871 Congressional testimony Gordon said, “I do not know anything about any Ku-Klux organization, as the papers talk about it. I have never heard of anything of that sort except in the papers and by general report.” However, he admitted that he was approached and asked to “attach myself to a secret organization in Georgia” that was organized for self-protection in response to the “sense of insecurity and danger, particularly in those neighborhoods where the negro population largely predominated.”

“We knew,” Gordon testified, “of certain instances where great crime had been committed; where overseers had been driven from plantations, and the negroes had asserted their right to hold the property for their own benefit….Men were in many instances afraid to go away from their homes and leave their wives and children, for fear of outrage….We were afraid to have a public organization; because we supposed it would be construed at once, by the authorities at Washington, as an organization antagonistic to the Government of the United States.”

One of the first members of the Klan was Confederate General George W. Gordon, a Pulaski, Tennessee attorney who was Tennessee’s fist KKK Grand Dragon.

After the war John B. Gordon used slave labor to mine coal. That he was able to do so was the result of the fact that the war destroyed Georgia’s economy. A great many commercial and manufacturing enterprises and farms had been destroyed. Railroad engines, cars, and tracks were destroyed. For a while there was the threat of starvation. Among the vast number of buildings destroyed was the state penitentiary. Former slave laborers were free; had to be paid wages; and could not be whipped. The state government’s potential tax revenue and loans didn’t amount to much, and the Federal government didn’t aid its defeated enemy like it did after World War II.

The new Thirteenth Amendment offered the State relief because it said: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States. So, in 1868 Georgia’s military provisional governor, Thomas Ruger, instituted a convict lease system modeled on Massachusetts’ 1798 system. Leasing out convicts provided the State with revenue and reduced its costs because those who leased convicts were responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing them. To obtain convicts to lease to coal mining companies is it has been claimed that a concentrated effort was made by sheriffs and judges to arrest and impose excessive sentences on blacks.

Before the war enslaved laborers were property, so there was an incentive to keep them alive and healthy. It was not rare for slaves to live beyond the years when they were capable of working. There was no incentive to spend more on leased convicts in order to keep them healthy. As a result, they were poorly fed, clothed, and housed. Their death rate was high. Pre-war slaves were whipped, but some convicts were spared whipping because it was more efficient to punish them with what today is called waterboarding.

Those who got convict lease contracts could, as Gordon did, provide convicts to sub-contractors. It has been claimed that an increase in what you had to bid to get a contract is what eventually made it possible to get the General Assembly (Georgia’s legislature) to eliminate it in 1908. Instituted at that time was the state working prisoners as roadside chain gangs.

The most significant politicians in Georgia for decades after the war were Gordon, Alfred H. Colquitt, an old friend that the salient was named for, and Joseph E. Brown, who was Georgia’s governor during the war. All three were involved in railroading, coal mining, and other businesses. Cheap convict labor was said to have turned Brown’s coal mine into a gold mine. In 1886, a rebellion of convict miners at Brown’s Dade Coal Company exposed the horrors of the system.

A friend of Gordon, Robert A. Alston, who was a member of the General Assembly, was the first man in Georgia to expose the horrors of the convict leasing system. In 1879, Gordon gave Alston a power of attorney to sell his interest in Penitentiary Company No. 2. Edward Cox, who, like Alston was a Confederate veteran, subleased 60 of Gordon’s convicts to work on his farm. He claimed he would be ruined if Gordon’s contract was sold to who Alston planned to sell it to. When Cox ran into Alston in an Atlanta barber shop and Alston refused not to make this sale, Cox pulled a knife and threatened to cut Alston’s throat.

Later that day Alston and Cox met in the State Treasurer’s office and began to argue. Both of them pulled out pistols and shot each other. Alston received a fatal bullet in the head. Alston was given a life sentence and sent to Brown’s coal mine to serve it. He was not sent there chained like other convicts were, and at the mine he milked cows and looked after livestock on the farm which supplied food to the convicts. In 1880, when Gordon resigned from the U.S. Senate to become a railroad attorney, Governor Colquitt appointed Brown to replace him. In 1882, Cox was pardoned by Governor Alexander H. Stephens.

By the time he became Georgia’s governor in 1886, Gordon had decided that convict leasing, once a “necessary expedient,” had outlived its usefulness, and he proposal abolishing it. When his proposal was turned down by the General Assembly, he inaugurated the most thorough investigation of the system ever conducted. It revealed, he believed, there was excessive whipping and in some cases unreasonable and excessive labor; so he fined each convict lease company $2,500.

For more information see http://www.beyondthecrater.com/resources/bat-sum/petersburg-siege-sum/the-battle-of-fort-stedman-summaries/