Battle of Blandford: The Day Petersburg Refused to Break

By the spring of seventeen eighty-one, the American Revolution had come to Virginia with uncomfortable force. Benedict Arnold, now fighting for the British, had raided Richmond in January. His superior, Brigadier General William Phillips, arrived in March with additional regulars and swept through the Chesapeake region destroying tobacco warehouses, the economic lifeblood of the colony.

On April twenty-fifth, Phillips turned his force of roughly twenty-three hundred seasoned British soldiers toward Petersburg, one of Virginia's most important trade centers. Opposing him was Major General Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian drillmaster who had transformed Washington's army at Valley Forge, now commanding approximately one thousand Virginia militia.

The numbers were not in Steuben's favor, and everyone knew it. But the militia fought from the hills east of the old village of Blandford with a tenacity that surprised the British. The fight lasted for hours. Steuben's men gave ground only yard by yard, conducting a disciplined fighting withdrawal rather than a rout. When the Appomattox River bridge offered no hope of defense, they crossed it in good order, denying Phillips the destruction of his force.

The British occupied Petersburg and burned four thousand hogsheads of tobacco waiting on the wharves, then withdrew. Phillips himself died of typhoid fever on May thirteenth, and Arnold resumed command of the British forces in Virginia. The campaign rolled on toward its conclusion at Yorktown that autumn.

The fight at Blandford is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the war's final act just months later. But the militia's performance that April afternoon demonstrated that Virginia's amateur soldiers had absorbed the lessons Steuben had drilled into the Continental Army three years earlier.