Fair Oaks and Darbytown Road: The Last Gamble on Richmond
Near Richmond, Virginia
By late October of eighteen sixty-four, Ulysses Grant had been hammering at Richmond and Petersburg for five months, and the Confederate lines were holding. Grant needed to stretch those lines thin, and he needed to do it on two fronts at once.
On October twenty-seventh, he ordered a two-pronged strike. At Petersburg, Union forces pushed toward the Boydton Plank Road. Simultaneously, farther north, Major General Benjamin Butler was to assault the Richmond defenses along Darbytown Road while the Eighteenth Corps swept north to Fair Oaks to threaten the city from the east.
What followed was one of the worst-executed Union operations of the campaign. At Fair Oaks, the same ground where two years earlier Johnston had been wounded and Lee had taken command, the Eighteenth Corps was soundly repulsed by Major General Charles Field's Confederate division. At Darbytown Road, Butler's Tenth Corps fared little better. The Confederates counterattacked and seized roughly six hundred Union prisoners. Federal casualties topped sixteen hundred men; Confederate losses numbered fewer than one hundred.
The Richmond defenses did not budge.
Grant noted the failure coldly and moved on to other plans. The significance of Fair Oaks and Darbytown Road is not in what it achieved, it achieved nothing, but in what it confirmed. Richmond would not fall to direct assault. The city would survive until Lee's army in the field could no longer hold. That moment would come the following April, but not here, not this way.
For the men who fought and fell on these fields in October eighteen sixty-four, the battle stands as a reminder that even Grant's methodical pressure produced defeats. War on the Richmond-Petersburg front was not a steady march. It was a grinding, expensive series of probes, most of which came up short.
