In the late afternoon and evening of 24 April 1781, about 1,000 Virginia militia of Brigadier General Peter Muhlenberg’s Corps marched into Petersburg to counter an expected attack the next day by Major General William Phillips’s invading British army of 2,500 men. That evening, Major General Frederick von Steuben, the overall American commander in Virginia, ordered Muhlenberg’s Corps and other gathering militia to the north side of the Appomattox River in the community of Pocahontas and onto the heights overlooking the river for the night. On the morning of 25 April 1781, von Steuben and Muhlenberg began deploying their force to defensive positions on the eastern edges of Blandford and Petersburg, while von Steuben left Colonel Robert Goode’s Chesterfield County militia regiment and Captain Robert Bolling’s cavalry company in Pocahontas to secure the militia’s rear and provide covering fire for operations south of the river. The initial British attack began near 1:00 o’clock, and around 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, after intense fighting against overwhelming odds, von Steuben ordered a general withdrawal of the militia from Petersburg into Chesterfield County. The Americans had held their principal defensive position along what is now Madison Street against several assaults by Phillips’s British regulars, but with ammunition running low and British artillery battering the militia lines, von Steuben determined that his force had accomplished as much as it could to defend the town. With British forces in close pursuit, the militia fought a bitter hand-to-hand delaying action along the waterfront while individual units crossed the narrow Pocahontas Bridge to safety, and the last units across took up the bridge planks to delay the enemy. Although the Americans withdrew from Petersburg, the Virginia militia impeded the British invasion and remained intact to fight another day.