Observations on Grant's Second Offensive at Petersburg, Part I

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.