Noah Andre Trudeau - The Last Citadel: Petersburg, June 1864 - April 1865

Also by Noah Andre Trudeau

Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May-June 1864

Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865

Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865

Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage

Southern Storm: Shermans March to the Sea

Robert E. Lee: Lessons in Leadership

Copyright 1991 by Noah Andre Trudeau /
New material copyright 2014 by Noah Andre Trudeau

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trudeau, Noah Andre, 1949
The Last Citadel: Petersburg, June 1864-April 1865 / Noah Andre Trudeau. 150th anniversary edition
revised and expanded.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61121-212-9 ISBN 978-1-940669-56-4 (ebook)
1. Petersburg (Va.)HistorySiege, 1864-1865. 2. VirginiaHistoryCivil War, 1861-1865. I. Title.
E476.93.T78 2014
973.7'37dc23
2014019217

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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works:

George R. Agassiz, ed., Meades Headquarters 1863-1865. Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman, copyright 1921 by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall, copyright 1940, 1968 by The University of North Carolina Press.

Ruth L. Silliker, ed., The Rebel Yell and the Yankee Hurrah: The Civil War Journal of a Maine Volunteer, copyright 1985 by Ruth L. Silliker.

To Christine Malesky,

valued friend, adviser, critic, and fellow author

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.

Samuel Johnson

Contents

List of Maps

Photos and illustrations are positioned throughout the book for the benefit of the reader, with a gallery following page 270.

Preface

The Last Citadel is a direct sequel to my first book, Bloody Roads South. It picks up the action immediately following the conclusion of Grants Overland campaign of May-June 1864 and follows it to early April 1865 the very threshold of Union victory in the East.

No campaign of the Civil War equaled the siege of Petersburg, Virginia. Petersburg was the object of the longest military action ever waged against an American city. More battles were fought and more lives lost in its defense than over any of the other, better-known Southern citadels: Richmond, Atlanta, and Vicksburg.

For 292 days one of the great dramas of the Civil War played out over the fate of the city that historian Fletcher Pratt called the last bulwark of the Confederacy. Petersburg, wrote Richard J. Sommers, was the guardian of Richmonds lifeline to the Southern heartland. Through it channeled supply lines vital to the Confederate capital. Without Petersburg, Richmond was doomed: it was that simple. Ulysses S. Grant wanted Petersburg; Robert E. Lee was equally determined that it would not succumb. When someone remarked to Grant that the Petersburg siege brought to mind the legendary Kilkenny cats, which fought until only their tails were left, he replied bluntly, Our cat has the longer tail.

Beyond the story of warfare, the siege of Petersburg is emblematic of the very clash of cultures that brought on the Civil War. Petersburg was the Souths Gethsemane, the place where its moral character and its belief in its righteous cause faced their ultimate testing. Time and again outnumbered Confederate armies had won incredible victories. By the summer of 1864, despite a preponderance of men and materiel, despite the attrition brought about by the bloody campaign waged from the Wilderness to the gates of Petersburg, victory for the North seemed no closer than it had been in the spring. It was at Petersburg, Southerners believed, that their God-blessed cause would prove stronger than the Norths stomach for further bloodletting. We heard much about the demoralization of Grants army, and of the mutterings of discontent at home with the conduct of the campaign, Confederate officer E. M. Law declared, and we verily believed that their patience would soon come to an end.

Southern hopes had a real basis in fact. Abraham Lincoln faced a difficult reelection in the fall of 1864; his decision to try again for the presidency flew in the face of the popular notion that no President should occupy the office for more than one term. (The last to do so had been Andrew Jackson.) There was reluctance on the part of the Radical Republicans to support him, and even the members of his partys mainstream were uncomfortably aware of newspaper editor Horace Greeleys declaration that Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He can never be elected.

Lincoln looked in vain to the rutted battlegrounds of Petersburg for a victory. Press coverage of the campaign was without precedent. Each move and countermove was reported in detail, and each failure exposed in blaring headlines. Public opinion became a force to reckon with as the siege continued for month after month without a major Union victory. The response of the Democratic party was to nominate military hero George B. McClellan for President, on a platform that denounced the war as a failure. So likely did Lincoln think his defeat at the polls that he secretly prepared his administration to relinquish power. More than flesh and blood was on the line at Petersburgthe belief in union itself was given a severe testing.

The human side of the Petersburg siege is a dramatic tale of civilians under fire. The hundreds of men, women, and children in the city learned to cope with shelling, shortages, and the tension of living with the enemy at their gates.

Southern morale was surprisingly high at the beginning of the siege, but the military situation at Petersburg meant a slow death for the once mighty Army of Northern Virginia. Disease, starvation, desertions, and the incremental attrition of trench warfare all combined to sap the living spirit of the Confederate soldier. A sallow-faced Confederate veteran summed up service on the Petersburg front with the comment, Living cannot be called a fever here, but rather a long catalepsy. By the spring of 1865, thousands of Rebel soldiers had deserted, and hundreds more were leaving every day. In a last, desperate search for men to fill their ranks, the Confederate leaders voted to arm and train slaves. But it was too latethe final actions of the war were at hand.