Chester Station: The Railroad Grant Would Not Cut

In early May of eighteen sixty-four, Ulysses Grant launched the bloodiest month of the Civil War with two simultaneous offensives. While he drove south through the Wilderness against Lee, he sent General Benjamin Butler and forty thousand Union troops up the James River by boat, landing at Bermuda Hundred on May fifth. Butler's assignment was to sever the railroad between Richmond and Petersburg and cut off the Confederate capital's supply line from the south.

For five days Butler moved cautiously. On May tenth, he finally pushed a force west toward the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad near a depot called Chester Station. Three Federal infantry regiments tore up track and skirmished with Confederate pickets.

That same day, May tenth, Confederate General Robert Ransom led two thousand soldiers south from Drewry's Bluff to drive the Federals back. They attacked in temperatures approaching one hundred degrees. The Union line, stretching from the Winfree farmhouse east to the turnpike, held through two Confederate assaults. The result was a draw. Some railroad track was destroyed. The larger line was not cut.

Butler never managed to sever the connection. Within days he would find himself outmaneuvered, bottled up behind defensive works at Bermuda Hundred by General P.G.T. Beauregard with a force half his size. Grant, receiving news of the situation, wrote famously that Butler was as if in a bottle, corked by a small Confederate force and unable to act decisively.

The Richmond-Petersburg corridor held. Chester Station was a small fight in a campaign of missed opportunities, but it marked the moment Butler's great offensive turned into a siege that would last until April of eighteen sixty-five.