Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865 395
tion,” he wrote, “that it will dry up the roads and we will get our supplies regularly and
the ration will be full.” 38
By the third week in October, Grant had conceived a plan that he would put into
action at the end of the month. Attacking from its trenches around Petersburg, the Army
of the Potomac would seize the South Side Railroad, a line that ran west more than one
hundred miles to Lynchburg, where there was a further rail link to Tennessee. Taking
part in this movement would be Ferrero’s nine-regiment division of the IX Corps. To
prevent Confederates around Richmond from sending reinforcements to help defend
the railroad, Butler’s troops would launch a simultaneous attack north of the James
River with the X Corps, which included Brig. Gen. William Birney’s division of seven
black regiments, and the XVIII Corps, with its all-black division of nine regiments led
by the senior officer, Col. Alonzo G. Draper. 39
Compared to earlier attacks that year, especially the fiasco at Cold Harbor in June,
the move against the South Side Railroad was almost tentative. “Let it be distinctly
understood . . . that there is to be no attack made against defended, intrenched positions,”
Grant told Butler on 24 October, and sent a similar warning to Meade. Butler’s
men were to “feel out” the enemy line “and, if you can, turn it.” In Meade’s army, the
IX Corps commander in particular, “if he finds the enemy intrenched and their works
well manned,” was “not to attack but confront him, and . . . advance promptly” if the
other two corps, operating on either flank, were able to shift the Confederates. With
the presidential election two weeks away, Grant did not want to risk following recent
Union successes in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley with a bloody defeat. 40
Southwest of Petersburg, Ferrero’s division was awake and on the road at 3:30,
three hours before sunrise on 27 October. Each man carried six days’ rations and two
hundred rounds of ammunition. The ammunition alone weighed about sixteen pounds.
When daylight came, the division formed line of battle and plunged into what Col.
Delavan Bates called “the worst piece of woods I ever saw.” Bates, who had been
captured in a forest near Chancellorsville in 1863 and had led the 30th USCI through
some of the same country the next spring, commanded a brigade in the division. His
men struggled forward to within one hundred yards of the enemy position. “The underbrush,
briars, logs &c. made it . . . almost impenetrable,” he told his father, “and when
we halted in front of the enemy works a line of breastworks had to be thrown up and
the timber slashed to prevent a surprise and be able to resist an attack if the rebs should
undertake one. It was an awful job. . . . But fortunately the affair terminated without
great loss to our Division or corps. . . . As usual when we make a move it rained like
fury all night.” On the west end of the Union advance, the II Corps failed to turn the
38 E. F. Grabill to Dearly Loved One, 3 Oct 1864, E. F. Grabill Papers, Oberlin College (OC),
Oberlin, Ohio; C. A. Fleetwood Diary, entries for Oct 1864, C. A. Fleetwood Papers, Library of
Congress (LC); S. A. Carter to My own darling, 17 Oct 1864, S. A. Carter Papers, U.S. Army
Military History Institute (MHI), Carlisle, Pa.; R. N. Verplanck to Dear Mother, 8 Oct 1864, R.
N. Verplanck Letters typescript, Poughkeepsie [N.Y.] Public Library; Robert K. Krick, Civil War
Weather in Virginia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 140–41.
39 OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3, pp. 317–18, 331–32, 463, 465–66.
40 Ibid., pp. 317 (“if he finds”), 331–32 (“Let it be”); Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant:
Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 386–87.