Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
This view of General Butler’s progress up the James River on 5 May 1864 captures
the bustling scene as two Union ironclads guard side-wheel transports and tugs and
rowboats ply back and forth between the flotilla and Fort Powhatan, on the bluff above
the water.
on the north bank, several miles beyond the mouth of the Chickahominy River. Farther
along, the 10th and the recently arrived 37th USCIs with four guns of Battery
M, 3d New York Light Artillery, landed at Fort Powhatan on the opposite shore. The
three remaining regiments of Col. Samuel A. Duncan’s brigade and two guns of
each battery disembarked at City Point, on the south bank of the James, just below
the mouth of the Appomattox River and about seven miles from Petersburg, the rail
junction that connected Virginia with the states south of it. 13
Having split Hinks’ division into three parts, Butler landed the rest of the
expedition, some thirty thousand white troops organized in five divisions, on
a peninsula called Bermuda Hundred just across the Appomattox from City
Point. Not until the day after the landing did he push one of those brigades west
toward the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad. Four more brigades followed
the next day. By that time, the Confederates had been able to add twenty-six
hundred men to the garrisons of the two cities. Five days after the Union landing,
reinforcements that arrived by rail from North Carolina doubled the defenders’
numbers to more than fourteen thousand. 14
Here began the collapse of the campaign. Rather than move at once up the
James toward Richmond against a Confederate garrison that numbered barely
seven thousand at first, Butler entertained the idea of moving on Petersburg.
13 OR, ser. 1, 33: 1009 (“Start your”), 1053; vol. 36, pt. 2, pp. 165, 398, 432 (“Crowd on”), 956;
NA M594, roll 205, 2d U.S. Colored Artillery; Fleetwood Diary, 4 May 1864. Robertson, Back Door
to Richmond, pp. 57–60, conveys a vivid sense of the festive air on the morning of 5 May.
14 Union strength from OR, ser. 1, 33: 1053–56, and Robertson, Back Door to Richmond, p.
59. Confederate returns from the Department of Richmond, 20 Apr 1864, show 7,265 officers and