The Siege

The Weldon Railroad

August 21, 1864

The Yankees have got hold of the Weldon Railroad down below the city, the line that brings supplies up from home, and for three days we’ve been trying to pry ’em off it at a place called Globe Tavern. Rain and mud and heat all mixed. We couldn’t shake ’em loose. That railroad was our own country’s road to us, and now it’s cut.

Reams Station

August 25, 1864, night

Today we paid some of it back.

The Yankees were tearing up the railroad further south at Reams Station, and they put three North Carolina brigades at ’em, Cooke’s and MacRae’s and Lane’s. It was a hot, still evening when we went in, and I went in too, cartridges and all, left-handed and bent over and hollering with the rest.

They had works. We went at ’em anyhow, over the logs and into ’em, and this time they broke and not us. We took their works and their guns and more prisoners than I could count, Yankees standing there with their hands up and their faces gray.

We lost men. Eight dead in our regiment and a heap of wounded. But tonight the boys are talking like Tar Heels again, proud and a little bit wild. Somebody said, “They can’t say New Bern to us no more.”

He’s right. They can’t.

The Petersburg lines

October 3, 1864

Grant keeps sliding west around us like water feeling for the low place. We fought him at Jones’s Farm the last day of September and again on the Harman Road two days back, plugging holes in the line as fast as he could poke ’em. Every time we hold, the line gets longer and thinner, and there aren’t any more men to stretch over it.

Winter quarters

December 25, 1864

Christmas. It doesn’t feel like it. A little meal, a scrap of fat back, and coffee that ain’t coffee. The boys sang some, and that helped.

I thought about Sarah and the young’uns, and William getting big enough to work the field without me. Four Christmases gone now. Folks at home are hungry too, the letters say. Deserters are slipping off at night, and I can’t hate ’em for it, though I ain’t going.

I made it through one more year. I don’t know as I’ll make it through another.

Hatcher’s Run

February 7, 1865

Three days of fighting in sleet and ice along Hatcher’s Run, west of the city. Men’s clothes froze to ’em. Some of the boys were taken prisoner, more than twenty, cut off in the woods. Some I think went over on purpose. Hunger will do that.

The Petersburg lines

March 25, 1865

Before light this morning a part of our army made a rush on the Yankee fort they call Stedman. For a little while it looked like we’d broke their line. Then they came back on us from every side and took a heap of our men. Our regiment lost twenty-some more prisoners.

The end is coming. Every man in these trenches knows it, even if nobody says it out loud.

Maps from the printed book