Petersburg National Battlefield

Beginning on June 15, 1864, eighteen thousand Union troops attacked the Confederate defensive fortifications surrounding Petersburg less than three miles east of this location. When direct assaults failed by June 18, General Ulysses S. Grant began a siege of Petersburg that became one of the longest campaigns of the Civil War. Along the lines, the armies were sometimes only yards apart, exposing soldiers to constant sharpshooting and mortar fire, and fighting there included the Battle of the Crater and the Battle of Fort Stedman, General Robert E. Lee’s only major offensive of the campaign. As the siege continued, Southern soldiers and civilians suffered serious hardships while Union forces systematically tried to cut Petersburg’s supply lines, supported from City Point ten miles east, which for almost ten months served as the Federal army’s logistic and supply base and as Grant’s main headquarters; President Abraham Lincoln visited twice and spent two of the last three weeks of his life there. On the western front south and west of Petersburg’s defenses, Grant pressed attacks against supply routes from North Carolina and points west while Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia struggled to protect them as it diminished, and in the spring of 1865 Grant made a determined push for the last of Petersburg’s supply lines. The campaign also encompassed Five Forks, about twenty miles southwest, where Union generals Philip H. Sheridan, Gouverneur K. Warren, George Armstrong Custer, and Joshua L. Chamberlain fought Confederate generals George E. Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee over the intersection that guarded the South Side Railroad, prompting Lee to order Pickett to hold Five Forks at all hazards.

Petersburg, Virginia · United States