Battle of Fort Stedman: Lee's Last Offensive

By the early days of March eighteen sixty-five, Robert E. Lee was running out of options. His army had been pinned in the trenches around Petersburg for nine months. Desertion was gutting his regiments. Rations had shrunk to almost nothing. Grant's lines were creeping westward, threatening to cut the last rail line keeping the army alive. Lee called in his most trusted corps commander, Major General John B. Gordon of Georgia, and the two men made a desperate plan.

They would strike east. Fort Stedman was a Union strongpoint about two hundred yards from the Confederate line, and Gordon argued that a swift pre-dawn assault could overrun it, seize the high ground behind it, and threaten Grant's supply base at City Point on the James River. If successful, the move might force Grant to contract his lines and give Lee the room to pull his army south to link up with Confederate forces in North Carolina.

In the dark hours before dawn on March twenty-fifth, roughly ten thousand Confederate troops crept across the two hundred yards of no man's land. The assault began at four in the morning. Gordon's men overwhelmed the garrison at Fort Stedman and seized Batteries Ten, Eleven, and Twelve alongside it. For a brief time it appeared the gamble might pay off.

But the follow-on attacks that were supposed to exploit the breakthrough never materialized. Union General John G. Parke rallied the Ninth Corps and counterattacked within hours. By midmorning the Confederates had been driven out of everything they had taken. Lee lost approximately four thousand men, including about one thousand captured, against Union losses of around one thousand.

Fort Stedman was the last offensive action of the Army of Northern Virginia. Seven days later, Grant struck at Five Forks. Eight days later, Petersburg fell. Fifteen days later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.