Winslow Homer, a Special Artist for "Harper's Weekly" magazine, accompanied Brig. Gen. Francis Channing Barlow on his reconnaissance toward the Weldon Railroad south of Petersburg on June 21, 1864. This was at the beginning of the battle of Jerusalem Plank Road, a Federal disaster during the first attempt to envelop the Cockade City from the plank road to the Appomattox above the city. Barlow, a Harvard educated New York lawyer, was a brave soldier but an unlucky general wounded at Antietam and Gettysburg. He was ambushed about a mile short of the tracks by Brig. Gen Rufus Clay Barringer, who had studied law with his brother in North Carolina after graduating from the University of North Carolina. Barringer, nicknamed "Aunt Nancy," repulsed Barlow.
After the war, Homer drew on his sketches of the period to paint "Prisoners from the Front", in 1866. This painting established his reputation.
There follow excerpts on the June 21, 1864 fight from my forthcoming book on Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's second offensive at Petersburg.
Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front (1866), Metropolitan Museum of Art
***
After
the United States Army had crossed the James, it failed to take Petersburg by
assault. On the morning of June 21,
1864, the army set out to invest Petersburg from the army’s left on Jerusalem
Plank Road to the Appomattox River above the city. II Corps, the army’s crack formation, led the
way.
The corps moved out from the Avery house with Barlow’s division in the van. Troops of II Corps units prior to the March
23, 1864 consolidation of II Corps with the former III Corps wore as their
insignia a club or clover, with a different color for each division. Barlow’s division wore a red club. Inadvertently left on the fog-covered picket
line until five that morning, Pvt. William Horton of the 26th Michigan in
Miles’ brigade of the Red Club Division began the hike with little sleep. “We come up with the regt about 8 o’clock,”
he recorded. “We eat our Breakfast and
lay Down for a little rest. We are
routed up and ordered to march….” Major General David Bell Birney, an Alabama-born Philadelphia lawyer, led the corps that day because Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock was suffering from his Gettysburg wound. At 10 a.m., Birney ordered Mott's division back at the Avery house to dispatch
the 2nd United States Sharpshooters to lead the column of Barlow’s
division. Shortly after 10 a.m., Barlow's division crossed the Norfolk & Petersburg Railroad near the deserted, white
Southwell house while V Corps moved its left up to Jerusalem Plank Road south
of the Dimmock Line.
Gibbon’s
division departed the Avery house next. Mott’s
division left the Avery house last. Shortly afterward, Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman
III, who had studied at Harvard before joining Meade’s staff as archivist, fell
in with the men of Mott’s division as they plodded along the road past
the Southwell house. Major General George Gordon Meade, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, had sent
Lyman to accompany II Corps and report on its progress. “The road was narrow and full of troops, and
led by several clearings where young corn was growing—small, it seemed to me
for the season,” Lyman recalled. The column marched through a gently
undulating landscape of fields and woods, affording little opportunity for the
employment of artillery and parched by the sun.
“The weather is very hot, and we cannot
procure anything to drink but warm, muddy water, made so by men, mules and
horses all rushing into it,” Second Lieutenant George Augustus Armes of the corps staff remembered. “Canteens and tin cups by the hundreds can be
seen by the side of a mule's or horse's front or hind leg or nose in the water,
and other men hurrying out of their way, so as to dip their caps in and drink,
as if the water was from a nice cool spring.”
***
About
noon on June 21, Barlow’s division reached a wide road—Jerusalem Plank Road--at
right angles to the division’s march route.
To the left lay a big cornfield and a large white wooden house with
several dependencies, deserted by the Williams family, which had fled to
Petersburg taking their furniture but leaving some slaves, some cows and, most
importantly to Lyman, some ice.
At
the plank road, the Red Club Division encountered videttes from Barringer’s
North Carolina Cavalry Brigade of William Henry Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee’s
division. The videttes came from picket posts about a
mile east of the Weldon Railroad for the first few miles south of
Petersburg. Troopers of the 3rd North
Carolina of Barringer’s brigade manned the picket posts. The body of the 3rd encamped by the railway
near the Davis house about five miles south of Petersburg. The rest of Barringer’s brigade tented by the
railroad near Globe Tavern, just over a mile farther south. Dearing’s brigade of Local Defense Troops,
horsemen temporarily assigned to Rooney Lee’s division, picketed the railroad
still farther southward, to the vicinity of Reams Station, about 12 miles south
of the Cockade City. Both Confederate
brigades had orders to drive off any raiding party attempting to damage the
railway.
Birney
had to make a choice when he reached the plank road. His orders left him with some
discretion. He could extend as far to
the left as practicable, hopefully to the Weldon Railroad, and then close up to
the Confederate line as closely as possible.
Or he could close up to the Secessionist line as closely as possible,
and then extend as far to the left as practicable, hopefully to the Weldon
Railroad. Birney explored the first option, sending Barlow’s division alone toward
the railroad and holding back Gibbon’s and Mott’s divisions near the Williams
house.
Barlow’s
division crossed the plank road and slowly advanced along the lane beyond the
Williams farm throwing up rifle pits during pauses. Crowninshield’s
detachment of Bryan’s ad hoc cavalry brigade led, supported by Miles’
brigade. Bryan’s brigade consisted of
the 1st Massachusetts, the 3rd New Jersey and the 18th Pennsylvania. Brigadier General Nelson Appleton Miles, a
former crockery store clerk wounded at Chancellorsville, deployed as
skirmishers the 61st New York, the Clinton Guards, to the right of the lane,
and the 81st Pennsylvania to the lane’s left.
The
3rd North Carolina’s videttes resisted the advance of Barlow’s division. “The firing began to grow very lively as soon
as we reached the Jerusalem plank road, where we were obliged to halt, and feel
our way slowly, and fortify as we advanced,” remembered Lieutenant Armes. Soon the lane entered woods near the Browder
farm, and wounded began to come in, some walking and others on stretchers. Companies H and K of the 116th Pennsylvania
in Moroney’s brigade skirmished on the flank of Barlow’s column. “I shot at a reb cavalry man I thought I had
killed him, I went down and found the Johnnie gone, but I found where he had
been the most beautiful double barreled shot gun I ever seen,” noted First Sgt.
Samuel A. Clear of Company K. “I kept it
a while and then I had to lay it down in the woods and leave it lay. I would have given fifty dollars to of had it
sent home.”
On
the Browder farm, Barlow’s division reached a fork in the lane and took the
track leading first to the left and then northwestward past the Aiken farm
toward the 3rd North Carolina’s picket post on the Risdon farm. By 12:55 p.m., the divisions of Gibbon and
Mott had reached the Williams farm and were massing there. They could still either support support the Red Club Division if it ran into trouble or head northward to take position on the right of V Corps. At about 1 p.m., a contraband informed Brig.
Gen. Francis Channing Barlow that his division had arrived within two and a
half miles of the railway. “The cavalry
report the enemy in force and have had a little firing,” reported Barlow. “It is nothing.”
Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow (Library of Congress)
***
Meanwhile, the 2nd United States Sharpshooters
was still hustling from Mott’s division at the rear of Birney’s column to
Barlow’s division at its head. The
marksmen had started off almost at the double quick. As they hurried along, they left behind First
Sgt. Wyman Silas White of Company F, one of the regiment’s New Hampshire
companies.
Infantrymen
were marching abreast of the sharpshooters on the other side of a high fence in
the slightly rolling fields, interspersed with woods, streams and swamps. White had lost his rifle’s tompion, a wooden
plug designed to keep the water out of the rifle barrel. As he hastened along, he noticed an
infantryman’s tompion just hanging in the muzzle of his rifle. “I called Captain [Samuel F.] Murry’s
attention to it and told him that when the [tompion] dropped, I was going to
get it,” remembered White. “I climbed
over the high fence and had just gotten over when the coveted [tompion] hit a
fence stake and fell to the ground.” Picking up the tompion, White walked along
the fence hoping to find a place with the boards down so that he could get back
into the road without climbing over the fence again.
White
found such a place near a fork in the road.
He discovered that his regiment had outmarched him and gotten out of
sight. He could not tell which road his
comrades had taken. “I took the right
hand road for it led more towards the enemy’s lines and I heard firing in that
direction,” White remembered. “I knew
General Barlow had borrowed our regiment to do skirmishing where he was
intending to attack the enemy.” White hurried on expecting to overtake his
regiment, passing infantrymen who were forming a line at right angles to the
road. Expecting to strike his regiment
deployed in a skirmish line, he followed the road until he reached a
curve. Two or three hundred feet ahead,
he saw a Rebel picket post. “There were
three of them around a small fire right in the road and they were doing some
cooking for there was no other use of a fire that hot June day,” he
recalled. “They did not see me at all.”
White
turned and put as much distance as he could between the Southerners and
himself. “The firing became quite brisk
at that time,” White remembered.
***
Shortly
before 3 p.m., “what was
left of the Regt…were placed in the advance, as advance guard,” recalled Pvt.
William B. Greene, a former student in New Hampshire in the 2nd United States
Sharpshooters’ Company G. “The men were
nearly played out with fast marching but no rest was granted them.” Barlow employed the sharpshooters, known as
Green Coats because of their uniforms, to replace the cavalry, which he
considered useless. Lieutenant
Colonel Homer Richard Stoughton, a Vermonter and former railroad man wounded at
Po River that May, had just rejoined the 2nd and assumed its command that
morning. The landscape the sharpshooters
threaded their way through, remembered First Lt. Charles A. Stevens, “was
covered with deep woods, tangled brush, creeks and swamps, making the movement
tedious and unsatisfactory.” The marksmen soon pushed the sentinels of the
3rd North Carolina back from their picket post on the Risdon farm.
***
Brigadier General Rufus Clay Barringer (Library of Congress)General Robert Edward Lee had written off the Weldon Railroad as indefensible because of its proximity to the Federal lines. Despite his negative prognosis for the railroad, the advance of II Corps toward
the tracks surprised the Confederates.
Brigadier General Rufus Clay Barringer, a lawyer known to his troops as
“Aunt Nancy,” led the Tarheel cavalry brigade of Maj. Gen. William Henry
Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee’s cavalry division.
Captain John Marion Galloway of Company D in the 5th North Carolina
Cavalry of Barringer’s brigade considered Barringer, “Brave enough, but of a
prudent, methodical, cautious temperament.” Another Tarheel trooper thought Barringer old
and slow but a good officer.
Barringer
and his staff “had mounted and were only waiting for the Bugle to sound, the
signal to march, when a courier dashed up at breathless speed from Col. John
Algernon Baker, who, with his regiment, the 3rd, was on picket duty about three
miles away, reporting that he was being hard pressed by the enemy and was in
dire need of quick re-enforcements,” recalled First Lt. Fred C. Foard, recently
appointed aide-de-camp to Barringer. Aunt Nancy hurriedly formed his line. “We were wholly without support, but the
thick undergrowth and other surroundings favored a vigorous resistance in a
dismounted fight,” Barringer recalled.
Map by Hal Jespersen
The
Tarheel, who had read law with his elder brother and suffered wounds at Brandy
Station and Bristoe Station, prepared an ambush for Barlow, a Harvard-educated New York lawyer wounded at Antietam and Gettysburg
who liked to wear a red flannel shirt and carry a cavalry sabre with which to
swat skulkers. Barringer had McGregor’s
battery, the 2nd Stuart Light Horse Artillery, unlimber at a high yet screened
spot near the Davis house on the railroad at the junction of Vaughan and
Halifax Roads, about two and a half miles south of Petersburg. Aunt Nancy kept the 5th North Carolina
Cavalry in reserve behind the guns. He
dismounted the 1st and 2nd North Carolina Cavalry and formed two heavy skirmish
lines. The men 2nd formed the first line, concealed
in the undergrowth on the eastern border of the Davis farm, about a quarter
mile behind the 3rd North Carolina’s picket post and three quarters of a mile
from the railroad. The 2nd’s troopers
received instructions not to fire until the Federals came within 100 yards of
them. Then these Tarheels would fire a
single volley. In the trees a short
distance to the rear, Barringer’s first line would join the 1st North Carolina
in his second line and they would make a stand along the lane that led to the
railway round a half mile to the west.
When the Federals reached that defile in the timber, the four 3-inch
rifles of McGregor’s battery would open fire.
***
Soon
after 3 p.m., having pushed back the pickets of the 3rd North Carolina Cavalry,
the 2nd United States Sharpshooters arrived at the border of the Davis
farm. Stoughton “was marching along in
his shirt sleeves singing I haven’t got long to stay etc.,” Greene recalled. Dismounted troopers of the 2nd North Carolina
in Barringer’s first skirmish line and fugitives from the 3rd who had fallen
back to that line, hidden along both sides of the lane, poured a volley into
the Green Coats. Stoughton reacted
immediately. ‘When the volley came in he
sung out to the boys to go over the fence and give it to them,” Greene
remembered. “Over the boys went and
pitched into them & drove them in to their entrenchments near by.” Stoughton sought support from the 111th New
York’s Col. Clinton F. MacDougall, a former banker whose brigade had by this
time deployed on the left of the lane while Miles’ brigade had shifted to the
lane’s right. The Vermonter told the New
Yorker that the Rebels outnumbered the sharpshooters.
“Go
on,” replied MacDougall, treating the Green Coats with the same contempt with
which his division commander had treated Crowninshield’s cavalry, “there is
nothing in your front.”
Stoughton
resumed his advance without support for his sharpshooters. They soon struck the second line of
Barringer’s skirmishers. The Secessionists loosed another volley and
McGregor’s guns opened. Shells burst
over the Red Club men following Stoughton’s troops. In the 57th New York, one projectile killed three men and a second
killed one and wounded others. 
Map by Hal Jespersen
Led
by Colonel Baker and Lieutenant Foard, the Tarheels counterattacked. The Green Coats faltered and fell back. “Our boys met them but it was a dear old meet
for they came right up near enough to use the bayonet,” Greene remembered. Soon Companies A and B of the sharpshooters
reported themselves in danger of capture because the Rebels were overlapping
their line. Stoughton directed his men
to break for the rear on their respective flanks. “Some of the boys run & in fact, most all
of them,” recalled Greene. The North Carolinians surged back across the
Risdon farm and seized many prisoners from the Green Coats, including Stoughton,
who remembered, “I
heard what I supposed was support coming on mv left and rear, and in attempting
to adjust and join the line, fell into the hands of the 2d N. C. cavalry,
dismounted.”
“The
ground over which we…fought was wooded with dense undergrowth, the opposing
lines were very close together, not more than 15 or 20 yards apart,” recalled
Lieutenant Foard. “Captain Henry Coleman
of the 1st Regiment perceiving a field Officer mounted and close up to his line,
dashed throught [sic] both skirmish lines, seizing his bridal rein and with the
muzzle of his pistol against the Officer’s body, brought him in to our lines a
prisoner,” recalled Foard.
Rallying quickly near the captured
picket post, the Union sharpshooters charged again. Some of the men in the 2nd’s Company B, a
mostly Michigan unit, captured Lieutenant Foard and Colonel Baker, a Harvard
educated lawyer, near the Risdon barn.
The pair had had gotten too far ahead of their troops. “In the surging of the battle back and forth,
I suddenly found myself entirely surrounded by the enemy and was taken prisoner
just at the close of the battle,” Foard recalled.
Fire from the dismounted Tarheels at
short range cut down many Green Coats.
“The Federal officers dashed bravely forward and called upon their
troops to follow,” remembered Pvt. Paul B. Means of the 5th North Carolina
Cavalry’s Company F. “But volley after
volley thinned their ranks and they broke and fled.” MacDougall deployed the 111th, 125th and the
126th New York in support of the Green Coats and the New Yorkers along with
Miles’ brigade gradually drove the Confederates back toward the Davis
farm.
The Red Club commander considered
his brush with the dismounted enemy cavalry “quite a skirmish.” The Federals lost at least 20 killed and
wounded. Barringer lost five killed, 23 wounded, one
wounded and captured, and eight more missing for a total of 37. The contraband with Barlow’s column now
informed the division commander that he had arrived within two miles of the
railroad. In fact, only about a mile separated the
Federals from the tracks. Barlow,
believing his division isolated, slowed his advance and sought orders from his
corps commander. “It is for you to
decide whether it is safe for us to advance so as to separate this division
from farther from the rest of the corps,” Barlow wrote to Birney, who had
established his headquarters at the Williams house. “We cannot both advance and keep up
connection with the rest of the corps.
Is General Gibbon close behind me, as I understood he was to be?”
Barlow’s message to Birney
illuminated the problems now faced by the Federal high command in its attempt
to sever the Weldon and Southside railroads and invest Petersburg to the
Appomattox west of the city. The commander
of the Army of the Potomac was pushing piecemeal into unfamiliar territory with
roughly half the troops contemplated by the Federal plan. Birney could not connect with both the Weldon
Railroad and V Corps. Barlow could not
both advance and connect with the rest of II Corps. The only force otherwise available to extend
Birney’s line or assist Barlow—Ricketts’ division of VI Corps—remained in
reserve near the trenches which the other divisions of its corps occupied.
While Barlow’s courier rode toward
Birney, White found his regiment. “I was
soon on the left hand road and came into an open field and there found my
regiment, or what was left of it,” he recalled.
“I was lucky enough to escape being in the frazzle of a skirmish, all
through the picking up of the lost [tompion]. I was pleased for I could have been of no use
if I had been there and I might have been either killed, wounded or
captured. As it was, I was spared to
fight another day.”
***
Around the time Barlow’s courier
reached Birney, Meade rode up to the Williams house, where he found Birney and
Lyman. In light of the ambush Barlow had
endured and the unforeseen distance between Jerusalem Plank Road and the Weldon
Railroad, Meade authorized Birney to terminate Barlow’s reconnaissance toward
the railway, swing all three divisions of II Corps into position on the left of
V Corps, get as close as possible to the enemy’s line of fortifications, and
extend as far to the left as practicable—which could be no farther than the
Weldon Railroad even if the corps stretched westward in a single line, and
could under no circumstances be to the Appomattox above Petersburg. Meade ordered VI Corps to reinforce Birney with Ricketts’ division.
Birney ordered Barlow to withdraw
and directed Gibbon and Mott to move up beside V Corps. Barlow would have to wait to join them until
Ricketts’ division arrived to take the place of the Red Club Division, which
withdrew by a more northerly route than on the way out and threw up another
line of pits northwest of the Browder farm. Ricketts’ division started moving out from
its bivouac and was crossing the Norfolk & Petersburg and turning south on
Jerusalem Plank Road by 4:40 p.m.
***
The battle of Jerusalem Plank Road
had begun inauspiciously for the Federals.
Without Barringer’s repulse of Barlow, the Northerners would have
reached the Weldon Railroad on June 21.
Now the parried Federal thrust had alerted the Southerners to the danger
to their right. Subsequent attempts to
turn it would encounter more resistance.
Barlow's repulse at Barringer's hands forfeited the element of surprise and insured that subsequent Federal attempts to reach the Weldon Railroad would meet with more formidable resistance. The
defiant attitude of one of the prisoners in Winslow Homer's painting may be the only indication that they had defeated Barlow, and not vice versa.
Copyright John Horn 2022
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