First Battle of Petersburg: Old Men and Young Boys

On the morning of June ninth, eighteen sixty-four, Petersburg nearly fell without a siege. The Union's Army of the James, under General Benjamin Butler, dispatched roughly four thousand five hundred soldiers toward the city from the east. Standing between them and Petersburg was one of the most improbable defensive forces of the entire war.

General P.G.T. Beauregard scraped together approximately twenty-five hundred defenders, and the word defenders barely does them justice. Most of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was still north of the James River, locked in combat after the Overland Campaign's bloody conclusion at Cold Harbor. So Beauregard called up whoever was left: old men who had long since aged out of regular service, teenage boys who had no business on a battlefield, and a thin scattering of Home Guard militia. History remembers this fight as the Battle of Old Men and Young Boys.

The attackers pushed in from the east along the Dimmock Line, a roughly ten-mile arc of earthworks that should have been defended by far more soldiers than Beauregard could muster. Union General Quincy Adams Gillmore led his infantry cautiously, hesitating when resistance stiffened, and Butler ultimately called the assault off before it achieved a decisive breakthrough. Petersburg held.

The cost of that failure would compound over the next nine months. When Ulysses Grant and the full weight of the Army of the Potomac arrived at Petersburg about a week later, the city's defenders had been reinforced. What could have been a quick capture became one of the longest sustained sieges in American military history. The old men and young boys who turned aside that June ninth assault bought the Confederacy a window of time that would cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides before Petersburg finally fell in the spring of eighteen sixty-five.