Before heading to DC, we managed to stop in at Manassas National Battlefield Park, where the first official battle of the Civil War was fought. It was a cold, crisp and windy day, so we didn’t venture out too far, this park not having a “drive through” tour like the one at Antietam. It was interesting to see this place and to know that both sides had thought it would be a quick and decisive victory for them and a quick end to the war. Didn’t turn out quite as they had planned, did it? There were actually two battles fought here – one at the beginning and one later on. As with Antietam, people have different names for this area. Folks from the North refer to it as Bull Run (the little river running through the area) and from the South, Manassas. Interesting that the official name of this park is Manassas (southern reference) and yet Antietam is the northern reference. I’m not sure about the reasoning behind the naming rights of these parks.

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After leaving DC, we headed southwest towards the town of Petersburg, wanting to stop and see the battlefield park there. According to their website “Nine and a half months, 70,000 casualties, the suffering of civilians, thousands of US Coloured Troops fighting for the freedom of their race, and the decline of Gen. Robert E Lee’s Army of No. Virginia all describe the Siege of Petersburg. It was here that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant cut off all of Petersburg’s supply lines ensuring the fall of Richmond on April 3, 1865. Six days later, Lee surrendered” The Siege of Petersburg: The Longest Military Event of the Civil War (nps.gov).

It was quite the site, knowing all of this, but we were interested in one thing in particular. During the siege, Grant tried to dig a mine under the Confederate line and blow it up. It took weeks to dig the mine and pack it with explosives. On July 30 at 4:45 in the morning, they hit the switch and blew a 200 foot crater in the line. Unfortunately, instead of going around the giant hole in the ground, the Union troops poured into it. After recovering from initial shock, the remaining Confederate troops there, lined the top of the crater and proceeded to pin down the Union troops, leading to tremendous loss of life on the Union side. This unsuccessful attempt to end the siege early has left an interesting sight to see, although to be honest, it wasn’t quite the giant crater that we had expected. Time has changed the landscape to where you have to use your imagination to really appreciate this part of the battle, but it was worth seeing, nonetheless.

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Our last stop on this part of our tour was at Appomattox Court House, where Lee formally surrendered on April 9, 1865. We found out that this was actually the name of the town at that time – Appomattox Court House, as opposed to the new town of Appomattox. The town moved when the old courthouse burned down, to be located near the railway lines and renamed just Appomattox. The old town is now a national park and although many of the original structures are now gone, the actual house where Lee surrendered to Grant is still standing. When we arrived, we learned that many years after the war, the house had been taken apart, with every piece of wood and brick marked so that it could be reconstructed in DC as a museum. However, those plans fell through and the packed up house remained that way until the US Parks purchased it and the land around it to create the park that is there today. The same company who dismantled it won the contract to reconstruct it, using the plans they had made man years before. Of course, over time as it sat, people from surrounding areas helped themselves to some of the bricks just sitting there, so that there are only a small number of original bricks used, and some wood needed to be replaced, but the house stands today where it did on that day, which makes it a pretty special place to visit.

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Seeing the place where this terrible war ended was a nice way to finish up our tours of American Battlefields. It is now, as are all of the battlefield parks, a peaceful and beautiful place to visit. We left hoping that never again would people throw away the lives of young people like this.