In the spring of 1864, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia still held the line against every Union thrust toward Richmond. Outnumbered and running short of nearly everything except grit, the Confederacy’s legendary force had turned back seven Union commanders in three years. Across the Rapidan River, however, a new man had taken command of all Union armies.
Ulysses S. Grant was short, rumpled, and perpetually chewing on a cigar, with none of the dash that had made Lee a legend. But Grant understood something his predecessors never grasped. Battles alone would not win this war, not in the East, where Lee could always slip away, regroup, and strike again.
Grant had come east with a simple, brutal directive from Abraham Lincoln. Destroy Lee’s army. Not capture Richmond first, not win a glorious field victory, but destroy the army. To do that, Grant knew he had to fight a different kind of war.
He would keep constant pressure, never letting Lee rest, never giving him the chance to choose the time and place of battle. Even more than that, Grant understood that Lee’s army lived and died by its supply lines. Cut those arteries, and the army would bleed out without a single decisive clash. The Overland Campaign had already cost the Union more men than any commander before Grant had been willing to spend.
From the Wilderness in early May, where smoke and tangled underbrush turned day into night and the wounded burned alive in the flames, to Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle, where men clubbed each other with rifle butts in trenches so packed with bodies you could walk across them without touching the ground. Cold Harbor in early June was the worst. Grant ordered a frontal assault against entrenched Confederates, and in less than an hour nearly 7,000 Union soldiers fell. Grant later said he regretted it more than any order he ever gave.
But he did not retreat. Instead, on the night of June 12th, he quietly slipped his entire army away from Lee’s front, crossed the James River on pontoon bridges, and marched south toward Petersburg. Lee, expecting another move, was caught flat-footed. For once, Grant had stolen a march on him.
Petersburg was not Richmond, but it might as well have been. A sleepy town of 18,000 before the war, it sat at the junction of five railroads. The Richmond and Petersburg line brought supplies straight up from the capital. The Southside Railroad reached west toward Lynchburg and the farms of the Shenandoah.
The Weldon Railroad stretched south to Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy’s last major open port, where blockade runners still slipped through with rifles, powder, and precious foreign goods. Without Petersburg, Richmond could not eat. Without Petersburg, Lee’s army could not fight. On June 15th, Union forces under General William F.
Smith slammed into the thinly held outer defenses east of Petersburg and nearly took the city that day. Lee, still unsure exactly where Grant had gone, hesitated just long enough. By the time he rushed his men south, the chance for a quick Union victory had slipped away. Grant, having learned the bitter lesson of Cold Harbor, refused to order another bloody frontal assault.
Instead, he dug in. Trenches began to snake across the landscape, and by late June the two armies faced each other across a line that would eventually stretch more than 30 miles. The siege had begun. Grant’s first move was to make sure his own army would never go hungry.
While Lee’s men scraped together what they could from a collapsing supply system, Grant turned City Point, a landing on the James River just north of Petersburg, into the largest military supply depot the world had ever seen. Steamboats and oceangoing ships arrived day and night unloading hardtack, salt pork, coffee, ammunition, medical stores, even prefabricated hospitals and railroad track. At its peak, City Point handled more tonnage than the Port of New York. For Lee’s men, watching from across no man’s land, it was a daily reminder of what they lacked.
The Confederates were already hurting by midsummer. Rations had been cut again and again. Cornmeal mixed with ground peas or acorns became the staple. Fresh meat was a memory.
Men boiled wild onions and poke just to fill their stomachs. Desertions, once rare in Lee’s army, began to climb. A man from North Carolina slipped away at night because his wife’s last letter said the children were starving at home. Grant did not sit idle.
He began stretching his lines westward, one cautious mile at a time, forcing Lee to stretch his own thinner and thinner. Every time Lee extended his trenches to cover a new threat, he pulled men from somewhere else. And every time Grant reached a new railroad, he tore it up. In late June, Union infantry pushed toward the Weldon Railroad.
A few weeks later, Grant sent two cavalry divisions on a deep raid that tore up miles of track on both the Weldon and Southside railroads. August brought the decisive strike. On the 18th, Union General Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps slammed into the railroad at Globe Tavern just south of Petersburg. Lee counterattacked hard, but after three days Grant’s men held the line.
They had seized a stretch of the Weldon Railroad. Supplies now had to be unloaded 16 miles south and hauled by wagon over terrible roads, a 30-mile round trip for every load of corn and bacon. Horses died by the hundreds. The trickle of food into Petersburg slowed to a drip.
By September the pattern was clear. Grant would probe west. Lee would rush men to meet the threat, and the Union line would grow longer while the Confederate one grew thinner. In October, another Union push toward the Boydton Plank Road failed to take the last rail line, but it stretched Lee’s defenses even further.
His army now covered more than 40 miles of trench with fewer than 35,000 effective men. Many were barefoot. Many were sick. All were hungry.
Winter came early and hard. Rations dropped to a quarter pound of meat a day when it came at all. Men boiled their shoes for soup. One soldier from Alabama wrote home that his company had eaten every dog in the regiment and were now eyeing the rats along the parapets.
Desertions became a flood. By February 1865, Lee was losing more men to the rear every week than to combat. He wrote desperately to Jefferson Davis that unless something changed, the army would melt away. Davis could do nothing.
Sherman had marched through Georgia and was now in the Carolinas. The ports were closing. The railroads that still ran were being torn up faster than they could be repaired. Grant watched it all from City Point.
He did not gloat. He simply kept the pressure on. While Lee’s men shivered and starved, Union soldiers received new overcoats, new blankets, and regular mail from home. Grant knew that every day the siege continued was another day Lee’s army grew weaker.
He did not need to storm the trenches again. He only needed to wait and maneuver. By March 1865, the end was in sight. Lee’s last hope was to break out, swing west, and join Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina.
But to do that, he needed the railroads. Grant knew it. On March 29th he launched his final offensive. Sheridan’s cavalry and the Second, Fifth, and Sixth Corps swung wide to the southwest, aiming for the last rail line and the roads that led west.
Lee scraped together every available man, including George Pickett’s division, and sent them to Five Forks, a lonely crossroads that controlled the approach to the Southside Railroad. On April 1st, Sheridan smashed into Pickett’s force. The Confederates were routed. The Southside Railroad fell the next day.
On April 2nd, Union troops broke through the main line south of Petersburg in a massive assault. Lee sent word to Richmond. Evacuate. The government fled that night, setting fire to warehouses.
Petersburg itself fell the following morning. Lee’s army streamed west along the Appomattox River, trying to reach supplies that had been ordered to Amelia Courthouse. When they arrived on April 4th, the rations were not there. The trains had been delayed, the orders lost in the chaos.
For two days the men waited in the rain, chewing on whatever they could find in the empty fields. Grant’s forces pursued relentlessly, cutting off every road south, burning bridges, capturing wagon trains. At Sailor’s Creek on April 6th, thousands more Confederates were surrounded and forced to surrender. Lee’s army, once 80,000 strong, was down to fewer than 30,000, many too weak to carry their rifles.
On April 7th, Grant wrote a simple letter to Lee. The results of the last week, he said, must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance. Lee read it by the side of the road, surrounded by his starving men. Two days later, in the parlor of a brick house in the village of Appomattox Court House, the two generals met.
Lee, immaculate in his best gray uniform, asked for terms. Grant, still in his mud-spattered private’s blouse, offered them generously. Officers could keep their sidearms. Men could keep their horses.
Everyone could go home and not be disturbed so long as they observed their paroles. Then Grant ordered 25,000 rations sent forward immediately from his own supplies. The men who had been living on acorns and boiled leather for weeks would eat that night. The Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms on April 9th, 1865.
There had been no grand decisive battle that ended the war in the East. After Cold Harbor, Grant had refused to play that game again. Instead, he had used the railroads, the wagons, the endless flow of supplies, and the steady westward creep of his trenches to do what bayonets could not. He had starved Lee’s army into surrender.
Years later, Grant reflected on the campaign with characteristic understatement. He had not set out to fight a war of starvation, he said. But once the army settled into the trenches around Petersburg, the logic of the situation had become clear. Lee could not feed his men indefinitely.
Grant could. And so the end had come not with a roar, but with the slow, grinding collapse of supply lines and empty stomachs. The Confederacy’s last great army dissolved, not in fire and glory, but in the quiet agony of empty bellies and broken railways. Grant’s real genius in the final year of the war was understanding that sometimes the deadliest weapon on the battlefield is not a rifle or a cannon.
Sometimes it is the empty plate.