Battle of Peebles' Farm: Grinding the Confederate Flank

The Battle of Peebles' Farm, fought September thirtieth through October second, eighteen sixty-four, is not one of the famous battles of the Petersburg siege. It did not produce the drama of the Crater or the finality of the April second breakthrough. What it produced was something Grant valued more: ground.

By late September eighteen sixty-four, Grant had been probing the Confederate left flank southwest of Petersburg for three months. His objective was the Boydton Plank Road and the South Side Railroad, the main supply line still open to Lee. He sent the Fifth Corps and the Ninth Corps southwest from their existing lines on September thirtieth, aiming to seize the Squirrel Level Road and push toward the railroad.

The Union force captured Confederate Fort Archer that afternoon with surprising speed, routing its garrison. But the Confederate response was rapid. A.P. Hill rushed reinforcements south, and determined counterattacks on October first pushed the Union troops back from their furthest gains. The Federals dug in and held their new position, which extended Grant's siege lines by roughly two miles to the southwest.

Two miles sounds modest. But this was how Grant operated throughout the Petersburg campaign: not dramatic breakthroughs but steady extensions, each one forcing Lee to stretch his lines thinner, pull troops from one place to plug another. Lee had roughly fifty thousand men defending forty miles of fortifications by the spring of eighteen sixty-five, a ratio that made eventual collapse inevitable.

Peebles' Farm cost about twenty-nine hundred Union casualties and somewhere between nine hundred and thirteen hundred Confederate. The ground gained was incorporated into the permanent Union siege lines, another link in the chain that was slowly strangling Petersburg.