Battle of Boydton Plank Road: The October Reach

The Battle of Boydton Plank Road, fought on October twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-four, was Grant's most ambitious attempt to cut the South Side Railroad before winter set in. It came close to succeeding, and its failure illustrated just how difficult it was to break a determined defense across miles of difficult terrain.

Grant sent three corps, roughly thirty thousand men, in a coordinated westward push. The Second Corps under Winfield Scott Hancock actually reached Boydton Plank Road, about six miles short of the railroad. For a few hours on October twenty-seventh it appeared the supply line might finally be threatened.

But coordination broke down. The Fifth Corps and Ninth Corps, advancing on Hancock's flanks, lost contact with each other in the dense woods and swampy bottomlands near Hatcher's Run. Confederate forces of A.P. Hill's corps, led in the field by Henry Heth, and Wade Hampton's cavalry found the gap between Union columns and struck Hancock's exposed flanks hard. With his position turned on both sides and no support arriving, Hancock was forced to withdraw.

The Union suffered roughly seventeen hundred casualties; the Confederates around thirteen hundred. Grant's lines did not advance. The South Side Railroad kept running for another five months.

What the battle demonstrated, again, was the problem of fighting through the tangled terrain southwest of Petersburg. The ravines, swamps, and dense second-growth forest of the region neutralized Union numerical superiority and made coordination nearly impossible. Grant would eventually solve this problem not by penetrating through that terrain but by extending so far around it that the Confederate line simply could not follow. The solution arrived the following March, when he had enough men and enough road to swing entirely around the Confederate position.