The Battle of White Oak Road

In March 1865, after four desperate years of Civil War fighting from New Mexico to Pennsylvania in which more than three million men had fought and more than 600,000 had died, the conflict was nearing its end. Federal armies had essentially won in the West as Major General William T. Sherman’s troops captured Atlanta, marched to the sea to take Savannah, and advanced through South Carolina into North Carolina. In the East, Federal Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant confronted Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which had been pinned for almost ten months in the siege lines around Petersburg, Virginia. Though illness, battle casualties, and desertion thinned Lee’s ranks daily, he could not abandon Petersburg because it was the gateway to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. On January 25, 1865, James Barrow of the 18th Virginia wrote of the “dull monotony of camp life” and of soldiers occupied only with routine duty and memories of loved ones at home, but with the arrival of better spring weather, Grant prepared a new offensive and that monotony was about to end.

Virginia · United States