Battle of Lewis's Farm: The Last Week Begins

The Battle of Lewis's Farm, fought on March twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-five, was the opening engagement of the Appomattox Campaign, the final offensive that ended the Civil War in the Eastern Theater eleven days later.

Grant launched his final offensive on March twenty-ninth, sending the Fifth Corps and Sheridan's cavalry southwest from the Union lines in a sweeping move aimed at the Confederate right flank and the South Side Railroad beyond. The Fifth Corps, pushing through dense pine forest and swampy terrain along Quaker Road, encountered Confederate infantry at the Lewis farm and fought a sharp engagement that lasted a couple of hours.

The Confederate force, a brigade under Henry Wise, a former governor of Virginia, fought tenaciously to hold the road. The Union force eventually drove them back, but the fighting was harder than expected through the dense terrain. Modern estimates put Union losses at about three hundred eighty and Confederate losses at about three hundred seventy.

What made Lewis's Farm significant was not the fight itself but what it opened. The road now belonged to Grant's army, and the Fifth Corps could continue its march west. Two days later the Fifth Corps seized White Oak Road. The day after that, combined Union forces destroyed Pickett's command at Five Forks. The day after that, April second, Grant broke through the main Confederate line.

Henry Wise, whose brigade fought here, had been governor of Virginia when John Brown was captured after Harpers Ferry in eighteen fifty-nine. He had personally signed Brown's death warrant. At Lewis's Farm he was defending the same Confederacy Brown had tried to destroy. Eleven days after this battle, Wise and his men surrendered at Appomattox Court House.