John J. Fox's The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg's Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865 may well be the definitive account of one of the fights on Battle Sunday, April 2, 1865, the day the Federals also broke through the Confederate lines southwest of the Cockade City. At least a whole Northern division spent several hours taking a Southern fort manned by the 12th and 16th Mississippi and fragments of other Secessionist units. Fox's book gets down among the soldiers and puts you with the Unionists huddling in the cold water at the foot of the fortifications, as well as the Rebels desperately trying to hold the fort. Fifty-five Confederate corpses remained in the fort when the fighting was finished. My relative in the 12th Mississippi (Pvt. Thomas Mulkaha, Co. B) claimed to have been wounded at Fort Gregg, but he appears neither among prisoners taken by the Federals nor among the ranks of his unit at Appomattox. I suspect that he just went to his wife's farm a mile or two to the southwest--he had married a Dinwiddie County girl at Dinwiddie Court House December 29, 1864.
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