Petersburg by the Book
Reading-Walking Tours Give Voice to Civil War Ghosts
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Wednesday, November 7, 2001
When it comes to great Civil War sites, the names roll easily off the tongue: Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. Petersburg usually doesn't make the list, even though this railway hub south of Richmond was the scene of the bitter standoff between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee that occupied the final 10 months of the war. As for City Point, 10 miles away at the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers -- well, I confess to never having registered its existence before.
"This isn't a place people come to as often as they should if they want to understand what happened," says Robert Freis, our guide for this historical excursion.
Perhaps 30 people, ranging in age from the gray-haired to the barely toddling, are gathered around Freis in the late October sunshine. We're part of an annual battlefield tour that he and a shifting collection of interested friends have conducted for more than a decade now, and we've got the place pretty much to ourselves.
With its broad lawns and sweeping river views, City Point would be worth a visit even if it had no history attached. But there's plenty here, as it happens, and that's why the 11-year-old and I have come. Lizzie's been a Civil War buff ever since I dragged her along on a Freis-led pilgrimage to Spotsylvania two years ago. (The trip got immediate results: I'm pretty sure she was the only kid in her class to turn in a free verse poem describing the fighting there.) This year, we're looking to escape the plague of current events by immersing ourselves in a military drama that's 137 years in the past.
Driving south past the shattered Pentagon on a Friday afternoon, I tried to set the scene: how the Army of the Potomac was hounding Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, whose defeat Grant believed would end the war. How in the spring of 1864, the two armies had fought one bloody engagement after another to the north and east of Richmond -- at the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor -- and how, after each of these costly setbacks, Grant had persevered. How he had pushed his troops farther and farther south, drawing the Confederates after him, until the armies were both dug in outside of Petersburg. How this stalemate made the demise of the Confederacy, as Lee put it, "a mere question of time."
City Point was the supply depot for the Union forces besieging Petersburg from June 1864 to April 1865. As such, it was transformed into one of the busiest seaports in the world, with as many as 200 ships at a time riding at anchor. Grant had his headquarters in a modest cabin that's been reconstructed on the lawn. "That tree was here," Freis notes, pointing to a thick-trunked sycamore that loomed over the Union commander when he received the famous telegram from Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman announcing Atlanta's fall and that shaded him as he hosted a hopeful Abraham Lincoln, just weeks before the war's end and the president's death.
But never mind all that. What Freis really wants us to understand is the critical, if unglamorous, role that operational bases like City Point play in the successful prosecution of wars. Everybody likes to talk about strategy and tactics, he says. But if one army is eating and the other is not, it's not too hard to predict the end result.
He can't resist a more dramatic kind of story, though.
Shortly before noon on Aug. 9, 1864, a massive explosion "sounding like a thunderclap, only sharper" destroyed an ammunition barge, a nearby ordnance vessel and a portion of the City Point wharf. It caused approximately $2 million in property damage and killed (as Grant's telegram to Washington would put it) "12 enlisted men, two civilian employees, one citizen not employed by the government [and] 28 colored laborers," while wounding 126 more. All the witnesses being dead, the disaster was labeled an accident until after the fall of Richmond, when the true story emerged.
It turned out that the explosion had been caused by a "horological torpedo" -- today we'd call it a time bomb -- smuggled onto the barge by John Maxwell, a Confederate secret agent. Maxwell believed that "a party of ladies" had been killed in the explosion. This wasn't true, but he thought it was, says Freis, who then reads us a passage from the agent's self-justifying report:
"'It is saddening to me to realize the fact that the terrible effects of war induce such consequences; but when I remember the ordeal to which our own women have been subjected, and the barbarities of the enemy's crusade against us and them, my feelings are relieved by the reflection that while this catastrophe was not intended by us, it amounts only, in the Providence of God, to just retaliation.'"
Freis's listeners are quiet.
"Does this sound familiar?" he asks.
Our next stop takes us to the front lines. After ducking briefly into the Petersburg National Battlefield visitor center, where I pick up a copy of "The Last Citadel," Noah Andre Trudeau's comprehensive narrative of the Petersburg campaign, we walk out to a portion of the Confederate earthworks known as Battery 5. The smaller children climb around on a display of variously sized cannon barrels as Freis reads us more testimony from contemporary witnesses.
"What we've got here is another of those you-are-there moments," he says as he begins an account by a Union lieutenant of the early fighting around the city. It seems that a dozen or so frustrated bluecoats stormed over the walls -- just a few yards from where we're standing -- only to discover, as they looked down, that Battery 5 was manned by "a full hundred of the enemy." No problem. They calmly demanded and received the Confederates' surrender before the Southerners could discover that there were no more Yanks coming up in support.
You-are-there moments are what Freis's tours are all about. Walking a battlefield while hearing the voices of the people who fought, he says -- it's a technique he picked up from military historian and legendary battlefield-walker Jay Luvaas -- can make history "leap out of one dimension into three."
Over the course of the weekend, Lizzie and I made a number of such leaps. We were plunged into "the battle of the old men and boys," in which the hopelessly outnumbered Petersburg militia managed to hold off the Union attackers long enough for Lee's veterans to arrive. We heard from an enterprising Yankee colonel, Henry Pleasants, who figured out how to tunnel under the Confederate lines -- no thanks to the Union army's pigheaded brass, which declined to supply him with tools -- and managed to blow a huge hole in those lines, which should have led to a Union breakthrough. And we learned how the Battle of the Crater instead turned into a horrific Union defeat, in large part because that same pigheaded brass had decided, at the very last minute, that the attack should be led not by the black soldiers who'd been carefully trained for that purpose, but by untrained white troops instead.
Saturday afternoon we spent a couple of hours at the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier at nearby Pamplin Historical Park, where we got a you-are-there experience of the more packaged kind. We wandered through impressive displays of artifacts and tableaux of army life, equipped with headphones and a CD player that let us customize our tours. Lizzie, who was thoroughly engaged, would mime her reactions to me as we went along -- to the banter from the soldiers' poker game, to the gory realism of the amputation video, to the booming guns of the high-tech "Trial by Fire Experience."
This last turned out to be a melange of trembling floors, piped-in sound effects and grainy videos that made me appreciate our low-tech Petersburg walks even more. For it is impossible, of course, to simulate the true experience of combat, and it seems far better to leave such things to one's historical imagination -- stimulated by the battlefields themselves.
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