Petersburg: The Longest Siege in American History

The trenches around Petersburg held for two hundred ninety-two days, the longest siege in United States military history. Ulysses Grant's army reached the city in mid-June of eighteen sixty-four, needing this rail junction to strangle Richmond twenty-three miles to the north. Lee's defenders would not budge.

The armies dug more than thirty miles of earthworks and settled into a grinding campaign of trench warfare that foreshadowed World War One by fifty years. In July eighteen sixty-four, Union troops tunneled under Confederate lines and detonated four tons of explosives, blasting a crater about thirty feet deep, then watched the assault collapse in catastrophic confusion. Lee finally broke and fled west on April second, eighteen sixty-five, surrendering at Appomattox one week later.

The battlefield preserves many of those original earthworks today.