“Our Line of Battle was so Thin”

Confederate troops defending this portion of the works were Brigadier General James H. Lane’s North Carolina Brigade, which took over here on March 30 after McGowan’s Brigade moved several miles west to fill a gap in the overstretched Southern defenses. Lane’s four regiments, perhaps 1,200 men on the morning of April 2, held about half a mile of entrenchments, including part of their old sector to the northeast and McGowan’s former front. The soldiers stood three or four feet apart in a single rank with no reserves. Along the Sixth Corps battlefront of a little more than one mile, 14,000 Union soldiers faced 2,800 Confederates. The outmanned Southern infantry relied heavily on artillery in prepared positions such as this two-gun redan, whose crews fired scores of rounds across open ground. Most of the nearly 1,100 casualties suffered by the Sixth Corps on April 2, 1865, occurred on the exposed fields before the fortifications, though hand-to-hand combat on the works also took its toll. Exact Confederate losses are unknown, but the Sixth Corps reported capturing about 3,000 prisoners during April 2, many of them during the Breakthrough itself. Civil War artillery used several kinds of ammunition for defense against close massed attacks, including spherical case, an iron cannonball filled with smaller iron or lead balls that exploded and scattered at ranges of 500 to 1,500 yards, and canister, a tin container packed with 48 iron balls that made cannons act like giant shotguns at short distances and could destroy a line of battle at less than 600 yards. James Henry Lane, a Virginian who moved before the Civil War to teach at North Carolina’s military institute, was 31 years old at the time of the Breakthrough. He rose to brigade command in 1862, was admired by his troops as “The Little General,” suffered three wounds during the war, and led a brigade that fought in all the army’s campaigns. One of his regiments, the 16th North Carolina, fired the volley that wounded Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, and it defended this part of the works during the Breakthrough.

Virginia · United States