Battle of Petersburg

The Battle of Petersburg from the American Civil War serves as a vivid example of how sluggishness, poor planning, and indecision can cause a fleeting critical vulnerability to become a missed opportunity.

In mid-1864, Robert E. Lee s beleaguered Army of Northern Virginia built five miles of interlocked trenches and heavily fortified, sprawling earthworks to defend the city of Petersburg against the well-supplied, much larger Union Army. After numerous unsuccessful attacks and heavy casualties, a Union volunteer infantry unit composed primarily of coal miners, the 48th Pennsylvania, developed a plan to create a critical vulnerability in the Confederates formidable defense.

Working around the clock, the 48th dug a five-hundred- foot mine shaft under the center of the Confederate lines, loaded it with eight thousand pounds of explosives, ^[6] and blew a hole, thirty feet deep, seventy feet wide, and two hundred feet long, in the center of the Confederate lines. The blast eliminated the Confederates primary line of defense, destroyed many heavy guns, and buried men alive . The already-shorthanded Confederates were suddenly vulnerable at the most critical point in their defense.

But poor planning, weak leadership, and disorganized execution delayed the Union exploitation of this newly created gap. First, poorly devised Union attack plans failed to account for the need to remove the obstacles in front of the Union s own trenches, which slowed the advance of Union troops. Second, command of the attacking force was assigned to Brigadier General James Ledlie, who was reportedly drunk at the time of the attack and caught hiding in a bunker. Third, the effect of the blast was so devastating that many of the attacking Union forces were left in shock . Some stopped to help dig out their enemy counterparts who were buried alive; others simply turned and ran back to their own lines.

This delay afforded the shocked Confederates precious time to regroup, reconstitute, and bolster their shattered defense. Orienting all remaining firepower on the crater and relocating reserve cannons from other parts of the line, the defenders devastated the jumbled mass of Union soldiers attempting to breach the gap in their line. Within hours the Union, which had experienced nearly four thousand casualties, called off the attack.

Leadership Lessons

Petersburg was the last line of defense between the Union Army and the Confederate capital of Richmond. The men of the 48th Pennsylvania formulated a clever plan to crack the Confederate defense, and a timely passage through the crater would have paved the way to Richmond for the nearly-seventy-thousand-strong Union force sitting in reserve. But Union leaders failed to formulate and execute a clear, swift, and seamless plan that minimized the lag time between identification and exploitation of the Confederates critical vulnerability and, thus, missed an ideal opportunity to end the war seven or eight months early. Again, breakthrough , the breaching of a line of defense, must be followed by breakout ”follow-on efforts to exploit the initial breakthrough ”and this will occur only if forces are marshaled rapidly to exploit initial success.

^[6] Foote, Shelby, The Civil War ”A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox , 535.