For others this may be the day of the battle of Waterloo in 1815, but for me it's the day in 1864 when the Petersburg Regiment returned to its city after its departure on May 14, 1862.

I chose to begin the history of the regiment in media res on June 18, 1864 to pique the readers' interest enough to get them through the two chapters on the regiment's garrison duty in Norfolk from April 20, 1861 to May 7, 1862, to the nearly nonstop fighting in the subsequent 18 chapters.

The Prologue covers June 18, 1864.  My account benefitted not only from Mrs. Charles E. Waddell's account of that day (two versions, one from her diary and the other that appears in MacRae's The Americans at Home, but with a surviving portion of the diary of her husband Capt. Charles E. Waddell of the 12th's Company A, the Petersburg City Guard (courtesy of John Coski of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, God bless him!).

Flag of the 12th Virginia's Company A, the Petersburg City Guard

Virginia Historical Society

            Mrs. Charles E. Waddell lay in the darkness, listening to shells burst around her house on Bollingbrook Street.  Just before one in the morning on June 18, 1864, a shell exploded so near that its flash startled her.  The crash shook her.  A shell fragment struck her back porch, terrifying her sister.  The two women hurriedly dressed.  With a pair of slaves, they scurried into a neighbor’s basement, huddling there for the rest of the night as shells burst outside.

            After sunrise, Mrs. Waddell’s sister and their mother packed and left for Raleigh, North Carolina.  Short on food, low on money and weak from a recent illness, Mrs. Waddell remained home. 

            She knew that at any moment a cannonball might kill her.  She could not imagine what would become of her if the Yankees succeeded in storming her city.  Until she learned the fate of her husband in the terrible campaign that had opened in northern Virginia a month and a half earlier, though, she refused to leave.  She the rest of the city expected his unit to arrive momentarily.

            At four o'clock that bright, hot afternoon, Mrs. Waddell sat down to dinner.  Amid her meal, the sound of approaching fifes and drums rose above the cannon fire and musketry.  She ran to the front door.

            The Petersburg Regiment had come home.  “Sure enough,” she recorded that evening, “our own gallant 12th Va. Regiment” led the column turning into the street.  She could scarcely recognize the dusty, ragged veterans as the impeccably dressed recruits who had gone off to war more than three years earlier. “It made one's heart ache to look at them,” wrote Mrs. Waddell, “and oh! how many familiar faces we missed…..”  The 12th consisted mainly of men from Petersburg.  Hardly a family in the city lacked a relative or friend in the regiment’s ranks.  Fathers and mothers, sisters and sweethearts rushed out of their houses to greet their dear ones as the 12th passed.  Down the street from Mrs. Waddell’s house, a mother and daughter ran up a Confederate flag in honor of the regiment’s return.  The tired soldiers cheered feebly.

            The column swung up Bollingbrook Street.  Mrs. Waddell saw a poor, thin figure step out of the ranks and wave his battered hat to her.  Despite his dust, rags and emaciation, she recognized her husband, Capt. Charles E. Waddell, commander of the 12th’s Company A, the Petersburg City Guard.  “For a moment I felt frantic with joy to know him that near me and safe; and then overwhelmed with grief to see him in such a sad plight, and to know he was then marching towards death and danger,” she recorded.[1]  He passed so quickly that “Fan,” as he called her, could not get through the crowd to him, but their slave Becky found an unobstructed route.[2]  Rushing into the ranks, Becky seized the captain's hand and cheered him with news of home and loved ones.

            The regiment turned left onto Sycamore Street.  Friends and relatives of the 12th’s soldiers almost blocked this street.  Private George Bernard of the 12th’s Company E, the Petersburg Riflemen, recorded finding it “difficult to realize that we were within 2 miles of the enemy’s shells & that we were preparing to take position in line of battle.”[3]  The numerous ladies greeting the troops made them feel as if they were going to take part in some festivity.

            Near Sycamore's intersection with Tabb Street, the column passed between the courthouse, with its four-faced clock tower on the eastern side of Sycamore, and the Iron Front Building opposite.  From the Iron Front Building’s windows, people threw plugs of tobacco to the veterans.  The owner of one home farther south on Sycamore brought to his front gate a bucket of water and two gourds for the soldiers.  Another homeowner allowed the 12th’s men to fill their canteens with warm coffee out of a hogshead in one of his wagons.

            The ecstatic greeting accorded the Petersburg soldiers awakened pangs of sadness and bitterness in one of the regiment’s men from enemy-occupied Norfolk.  Sergeant John Sale of the 12th’s Company H, the Norfolk Juniors, recorded, “These attentions (which of course were to be expected) made me feel how easily our home was given up to the enemy.”[4]  On the way to Petersburg, the 12th’s soldiers had heard a rumor that the invaders were in possession of the heights southeast of the city.  “I, and I reckon most of the command, fully expected to charge the Federals on the heights,” recalled the Riflemen’s Pvt. Putnam Stith.  When the regiment reached Marshall Street, about half a mile south of Bollingbrook, the men saw riding toward them Lt. Col. Gilbert Moxley Sorrel of the staff of Anderson’s Corps.  The soldiers called out: “Lead us, Sorrel!  Lead us as you did in the Wilderness!”[5]  Sorrel doffed his hat and bowed low.  Remarking that nothing would please him better than to lead them in another charge, he told them they would do no fighting that evening.  They had only to go out a short distance from the city, form a line and rest.

            At 5 p.m., the troops bivouacked in a pine grove near the Wilcox farm, known as Walnut Hill, two miles south of Petersburg.  Many looked among the trees for a place to sleep after their tramp of nearly thirty miles, which had begun at four o’clock that morning.  “I saw a pile of small brush…so I used it as a mattress by putting my blanket on it and I got on it and it was a nice spring mattress sure enough,” recalled First Lt. James Phillips of the 12th’s Company G, the Richmond Grays.  “I slept on it…as comfortable as could expect.”[6]  Soldiers remaining awake enjoyed a barrel of coffee and copious crackers sent by the townspeople.  “Our ration of late has been so good & abundant I rather think we live quite as well as the citizens,” remembered Bernard.[7]

            Roused in the middle of the night along with the rest of Weisiger’s brigade, the 12th’s men staggered into the fortifications on the right of Anderson’s Corps at 2 a.m.  Weisiger’s brigade belonged to Mahone’s division, which was manning Petersburg’s earthworks between Jerusalem Plank Road and the Petersburg & Weldon Railroad.

            Since the war's beginning, the 12th, its brigade and its division had not consistently distinguished themselves.  In the months of fighting that remained, while many of the regiment’s men literally fought for their homes, the 12th, Weisiger’s brigade and Mahone’s division would become some of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most renowned shock troops.[8]

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[1] Mrs. Charles E. Waddell Diary, June 18, 1864, Papers of Miss Georgia Hicks, Collection of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, North Carolina Division, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.  Punctuation, capitalization, emphasis and spelling in quotations have been left alone whenever possible.

[2] Charles E. Waddell Diary, August 8, 1863, American Civil War Museum (ACWM), Richmond, Virginia.

[3] George S. Bernard Diary, June 19, 1864, George S. Bernard Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville, Virginia.  This collection also includes all Bernard’s letters.

[4] John F. Sale Diary, June 18, 1864, John F. Sale Papers, Library of Virginia (LV), Richmond, Virginia.

[5] John R. Turner, “The Battle of the Wilderness:  The Part Taken By Mahone’s Brigade; An Address Delivered By Comrade John R. Turner Before A. P. Hill Camp Of Confederate Veterans, Of Petersburg, Va., On The Evening Of March 3rd, 1892,” in George S. Bernard, ed., War Talks Of Confederate Veterans (Petersburg, 1892), 95.

[6] James Eldred Phillips Memoir, James Eldred Phillips Papers, Virginia Historical Society (VHS), Richmond, Virginia.

[7] Bernard Diary, June 19, 1864.

[8] Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants:  A Study In Command (3 vols.) (New York, 1942-1944), 3:xxxviii.

From The Petersburg Regiment in the Civil War:  A History of the 12th Virginia Infantry from John Brown's Hanging to Appomattox, 1859-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2019), Winner of the 2019 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for Unit History.