Siege of Petersburg: Nine and a Half Months

From June of eighteen sixty-four to April of eighteen sixty-five, the two greatest armies in American history stared at each other across a labyrinth of earthworks that stretched for more than thirty miles around Petersburg, Virginia. What the newspapers called a siege was really something new in American warfare: a grinding, industrial war of attrition that prefigured the trenches of the Western Front by fifty years.

Petersburg mattered because of its railroads. Five lines converged here, feeding men and supplies north to Richmond, the Confederate capital just twenty-four miles away. Ulysses Grant understood that if he could strangle those supply lines, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia would wither and die. Lee understood the same thing. Both men dug in.

Grant launched eight major offensives, probing east, west, and south of the city, severing one rail line after another. The Weldon Railroad fell in August of eighteen sixty-four. The Boydton Plank Road was cut. With each Union extension of the trench lines, Confederate forces were stretched thinner. Lee's army, once numbering around sixty thousand fighting men, dwindled through attrition, desertion, and starvation to perhaps half that by winter.

The total human cost staggers: approximately forty-two thousand Union casualties and twenty-eight thousand Confederate over the campaign's nine and a half months. When Lee finally abandoned the city on April second, eighteen sixty-five, Richmond fell the same day. He surrendered at Appomattox Court House just one week later. Petersburg was not merely a battle in the Civil War. It was the place where the Confederacy ran out of time.