Petersburg Battlefields

In the hours before dawn on April 2, 1865, the fields at Petersburg were filled with soldiers wondering what their fate would be as the Union Sixth Corps prepared to attack in this sector. General Horatio G. Wright assembled some 14,000 men in forty-two infantry regiments and ordered them to move silently from their main line of earthworks to the picket line captured on March 25. Careful planning over several days showed that Wright considered the operation perilous and victory uncertain. On the night of April 1, dozens of Federal cannons pounded the Confederate lines for nearly three hours, and when the bombardment ended Wright's troops moved quietly to their jump-off points across a front nearly one mile wide. The assault was larger in scale than Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Union General George W. Getty, commanding the Second Division of the Sixth Corps, led the attack in this sector, and his troops made the initial breakthrough on the morning of April 2. Opposing them, General Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox had only ten regiments covering the mile-wide front.

Virginia · United States