Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865 415
compost” to muffle the sound of their leather soles on the boards. “We marched
all night,” Chaplain Johnson told his brother. “The next day we marched & broke
camp as many as three times in the rain and laid down with no shelter, or fire,
through a cold, rainy night.” On Wednesday morning, they crossed the Wilmington
and Weldon Railroad tracks and went into camp near a stream called Hatcher’s
Run. “Waiting anxiously,” Lieutenant Califf wrote in his diary on Thursday, 30
March, “for the morning and the morrow’s events.” 82
The next day did not bring the anticipated attack. “Occasionally a shell
would burst or a bullet whistle near our heads but none of us hurt,” Califf wrote
on Friday. “A great deal of skirmish fire and considerable shelling most of the
time.” The firing continued all through Saturday, increasing until almost one
hundred fifty Union cannon were firing on the Confederate lines. “The Earth
shook & trembled like a frightened brute,” Califf wrote. “Our batteries were in a
semicircular range of hills and were pouring in a continual shower of shell into
the rebel works.” Unknown to Califf and most of the others in Birney’s division,
Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s cavalry drove Confederate troops from the South
Side Railroad that day, defeating them near a junction of country roads called
Five Forks, some fifteen miles southwest of Petersburg. 83
The victory blocked one possible route out of Petersburg and Richmond for
Lee’s army, which by mid-March was losing more than one hundred men each day
by desertion, the troops either going over to the Union lines or returning to their
homes. On 2 April, the day after Five Forks, Lee wrote to the Confederate secretary
of war: “I see no prospect of doing more than holding [Richmond and Petersburg]
till night. I am not certain that I can do that.” The Confederate government at once
began preparations to abandon its capital, and Lee to withdraw the Army of Northern
Virginia from its trenches and march to Amelia Court House, some fifty miles
to the west. There he expected to find supplies and a railroad that would allow him
to unite his army with the remaining Confederate force in North Carolina. Evacuating
Petersburg, Confederates set fire first to warehouses full of leaf tobacco, then
to military stores, and, last of all, to the bridges by which they left the city. 84
So it was that in the predawn hours of 3 April, Union troops discovered the
Confederate trenches empty and began to move cautiously, piecemeal, into Petersburg.
Lieutenant Califf of the 7th USCI was on picket duty. “No firing occurred
after 12 o’ck,” he recorded in his diary. “A heavy explosion took place about 2 1/2
& then several large fires. . . . About daylight . . . our skirmishers entered the city
of Petersburg. I missed it myself. They were the first troops in without a doubt.”
Thomas Morris Chester agreed, telling readers of the Philadelphia Press that Califf’s
regiment and the 8th USCI, raised in Philadelphia, “were the first to enter
Petersburg”; but reports from the IX Corps show that some Michigan troops had
run up their regimental colors in the city an hour before first light and were patrolling
the streets by sunrise, when Califf said that his own men reached the city. A
82 Ibid., pt. 1, p. 1160 (“moist straw”); T. S. Johnson to My Dear Brother Barnabas, [3] Apr 1865,
Johnson Papers; Califf Diary, 30 Mar 1865.
83 Califf Diary, 30 Mar (“Occasionally”) and 1 (“The Earth”) and 2 Apr (“Our batteries”) 1865;
A. Wilson Greene, Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2006), p. 243.
84 OR, ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 3, pp. 1353, 1378 (quotation); Greene, Civil War Petersburg, pp. 245, 249–51.