ON THIS DAY ·
Battle of Five Forks
1 Apr 1865 — Sheridan crushes Pickett at the crossroads guarding the last railroad into Petersburg. The next morning Grant attacks along the whole line, and the ten-month siege ends in a day.
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The moment in context
Petersburg was a struggle over supply more than a siege of fortifications, and reading it that way explains its sudden end. Grant kept extending his lines west to cut the railroads feeding Richmond, and Lee had too few men to cover each additional mile while desertion and hunger thinned his ranks. Sherman’s advance north through the Carolinas increased the pressure by threatening to join Grant. After the Union victory at Five Forks on 1 April, Petersburg and Richmond could no longer be supplied and were abandoned.
From Appomattox and the end of the war, chapter 11 of The American Civil War, 1840–1877 (APR 1865).
The place: Battle of Five Forks — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Why the end came fast. Four years of siege logic collapsed in a fortnight because Petersburg was never a siege of walls but of railroads: when the Southside line fell at…
- The turn — Appomattox Court House, 9 April 1865. Not the largest surrender (Johnston’s was), but the decisive one: the Confederacy’s legend-army and its indispensable general accepting that the…
- What it changed — Assassination changes the peace. Lincoln dies at the exact hinge between war powers and reconstruction, replaced by Andrew Johnson. A Unionist Democrat with a white-supremacist’s…
Then ask the room: Grant’s terms at Appomattox are universally praised — and Reconstruction failed anyway. Was the “soft peace” a mistake? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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