Second Battle of Petersburg: The Missed Opportunity

On June fifteenth, eighteen sixty-four, Ulysses Grant had Petersburg within his grasp. He would spend the next nine and a half months trying to get it back.

Grant had executed a brilliant strategic maneuver, slipping the Army of the Potomac across the James River and moving it southeast toward Petersburg before Lee fully understood what was happening. The city's critical rail connections made it the jugular of the Confederacy's supply network, and on that summer afternoon, only a few thousand Confederate troops stood inside its earthworks. Grant sent tens of thousands of Union soldiers toward it.

Union General William Farrar Smith, known as Baldy Smith, led the vanguard. His Eighteenth Corps hit the eastern defenses at dusk and actually broke through a section of the Dimmock Line, capturing several artillery batteries. Petersburg was momentarily his for the taking. But Smith stopped. He waited for General Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps to arrive, worrying about the darkness and the unknown ground ahead. Hancock arrived around nine that night, but Smith still did not attack.

The delay handed Beauregard the hours he needed. Confederate reinforcements began trickling in through the night and the following days. By the time the full Union assault resumed on June sixteenth and seventeenth, the window had closed. Three more days of hard fighting failed to crack the lines.

Grant himself wrote afterward, and the admission stings with what might have been: he believed then, and still believed, that Petersburg could have been easily captured at that time. Baldy Smith's caution on the evening of June fifteenth transformed what should have been a decisive blow into the opening move of a nine-month war of attrition that would drain both armies dry.