The Battle of White Oak Road

The Battle of White Oak Road. Four Years of War, Ten Months of Siege. It was March 1865. The Civil War had raged across battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania for four desperate years. More than three million men had fought and more than 600,000 men had died but, finally, the war was winding to a close. The Federal armies had essentially won the War in the West; Major General William T. Sherman’s men had captured Atlanta, marched to the sea to take Savannah, and moved up through South Carolina and into North Carolina. In the East, Federal Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant faced off against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee’s men were pinned in the siege lines around Petersburg, Virginia where they had been trapped by the Federals for almost ten months. Though his lines grew thinner every day from illness, battle casualties, and desertion, Lee could not abandon Petersburg. Petersburg was the gateway to Richmond, and the capital of the Confederacy., On January 25, 1865, James Barrow of the 18th Virginia wrote to a kinsman that, “the dull monotony of camp life is now experienced by us all to its fullest extent. We have nothing around us to engage our attention other than the discharge of regular routine of military duty. We can only indulge in reveries of the past, think of the happy hours we have spent with loved ones at home…” Barrow’s “dull monotony” would soon end. With the coming of better weather in the spring, Grant prepared his army for a new offensive.