Brett Schulte, whose website
beyondthecrater.com is a highly helpful resource for students of the fighting
around Petersburg in 1864-65, thinks Grant’s Second Offensive (June 20-July 1)
is the least understood of his nine offensives around the Cockade City. I agree, and June 22 may well be the least
understood day of the fighting around Petersburg.
I’m working on a history of the Second
Offensive up to June 22 and probably beyond.
At first I thought, like A. Wilson Greene in Volume 1 of his A Campaign of Giants, that Grant failed
to allocate sufficient troops to the task of enveloping the Cockade City from
the Appomattox below town to the Appomattox above. Indefatigable researcher Bryce Suderow,
however, pointed out to me that on June 20, Grant and Meade planned to use not
only II and VI corps to envelop Petersburg, but also the three white divisions of IX Corps. And I had already, pouring
through the correspondence in the Official Records, seen that on June 21, Grant
suggested to Meade that V and XI corps thin their lines east of the Cockade
City to provide reserves to assist in the town’s envelopment. By June 22, the day of the disaster known as
“Barlow’s Skeddaddle” or “The Petersburg Affair,” V Corps had at least two and
probably four brigades in reserve and IX Corps had at least one and probably
three brigades in reserve though Meade summoned only two reserve brigades from
V Corps and waited until the disaster had already occurred. He ordered up Willcox’s division from IX
Corps that night and employed it to relieve Crawford’s division of V Corps,
which he used to relieve Gibbon’s division of II Corps. Instead of employing Gibbon’s division to
extend the Federal line toward the Weldon Railroad, however, Meade stationed it
at the Williams house on Jerusalem Plank Road to guard the left rear of VI
Corps—the kind of passive defense in which he engaged during Second Reams
Station, as I pointed out in The Battles
for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864.
Furthermore, a change in my perspective on the
forces allocated to the Cockade City’s envelopment leads me to think that I
underestimated the allocation in quantifying it by divisions rather than by
brigades. Initially, I compared the
divisions allocated to the Second Offensive with those eventually allocated to
the Fourth Offensive south of the James.
I thought the six divisions of II and VI corps (out of twenty infantry
divisions in Grant’s army group) inadequate compared with the nine divisions of
V, IX and II corps (out of seventeen in Grant’s army group) at Globe Tavern on
August 21, 1864.
But I ought to have looked at the allocation in
terms of brigades, more uniform in strength than divisions, which included from
two to four brigades. II and VI corps in
June fielded twenty-two infantry brigades.
Add the planned three white divisions from IX Corps to II and VI corps
and we get twenty-eight brigades allocated to envelopment in June, leaving
twenty-nine in the trenches. Or add the
estimated seven reserve brigades in V and IX corps and we get twenty-nine
brigades allocated to envelopment in June, leaving twenty-eight in the
trenches. The Federal infantry at Globe
Tavern on August 21, 1864 numbered twenty-one infantry brigades (twenty-three
on paper but the equivalent of at least two V Corps brigades had been destroyed
on August 19). This left twenty-one
brigades to hold the trenches.
Just as the Civil War was not fought in a phone
booth, neither was the Siege of Petersburg.
On February 12, 1862, Grant had enveloped Fort Donelson with about
15,000 men in seven brigades on a front of almost three miles against light
resistance. On May 18, 1863, Grant had
enveloped about six and a half miles of Vicksburg’s defenses with 35,000 men in
twenty brigades against no resistance. At
Petersburg he had only to extend his lines around five miles, from Jerusalem
Plank Road to the upper Appomattox.
Even facing Lee rather than Floyd or Pemberton, Grant could reasonably
have expected to envelop the Cockade City employing around 45,000 men in twenty-eight
or twenty-nine brigades. Maybe not in a
day, but surely in less than nine months.
The problem as I see it was not a lack of men
in the Second Offensive, but that Grant and Meade improvised their plan in such
as way that the Confederates did not have to face II, VI and IX Corps at
once. The Federals advanced their troops
piecemeal and were defeated in detail, II Corps on June 21 by Barringer and June
22 by Mahone, then VI Corps on June 22 by Cadmus Wilcox and June 23 by Mahone. IX Corps was not deployed west of Jerusalem
Plank Road.
