By the fall of 1864, Union armies under General Ulysses S. Grant were locked in a brutal struggle with General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia for Richmond and Petersburg. Encouraged by recent Union successes in the Shenandoah Valley, Grant planned a late-September blow against Lee's supply lines outside Petersburg while also staging a diversionary attack toward Richmond north of the James River. He assigned the operation to General Benjamin Butler's Army of the James, and Butler chose a two-pronged infantry offensive: General Edward Ord would attack Fort Harrison, while General David Birney crossed at Deep Bottom to capture the Confederate position at New Market Heights. This high ground lay north of modern VA Route 5, the New Market Road. Birney's force was strengthened by General Charles Paine's 3,800-man division of United States Colored Troops, organized in three brigades under Colonels Samuel Duncan, Alonzo Draper, and John Holman. The United States Colored Troops embarked after nightfall on September 28, 1864, reached their destination shortly after midnight, and waited in tension for the rest of Birney's command to arrive. Just after 3 A.M. the Union troops rose, formed for battle within the hour, and sent skirmishers to disperse Confederate pickets along the Kingsland Road before the United States Colored Troops advanced at 5 A.M. New Market Heights gave these troops an opportunity to prove their battlefield ability. After President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, authorizing the U.S. government to accept Black men into army service, the United States Colored Troops who fought here were battling for their own freedom as well as the freedom of thousands.
