Five Forks • Tour the Battlefield • The Armies • Battle Maps
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Strategic Situation • Confederate Position • Union Forces Arrive • Union Infantry Form Up
Union Infantry Attacks • Crawford Goes Astray • Confederate Line Crumples • Confederate Last Stand
Strategic Situation on April 1, 1865
Since June of 1864 Robert E. Lee’s Confederates had been backed into defensive positions around the capital of Richmond and its railroad center of Petersburg. Ulysses S. Grant’s Union armies had repeatedly tried to outflank the Confederate line to the west to choke off the critical roads and rail lines that kept Lee’s army supplied. In nine months Grant had never enjoyed complete success, although the trenches of both sides stretched farther and Lee’s lines thinner with each attampt.
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By the end of March in 1865 only one railroad – the Southside Railroad – remained to keep Lee’s men fed. Grant sent out yet another in the long series of attempts to run around the Confederate entrenchments and cut the railroad. Warren’s Fifth Corps of three infantry divisions moved west from the end of the Union lines, clashing with the Confederates of Anderson’s Division along White Oak Road on March 31.
To the southwest three strong cavalry divisions under Philip Sheridan moved north from Dinwiddie Court House. Lee sent his last reserves to stop them – a reinforced division of infantry and three divisions of cavalry under George Pickett. Pickett in a series of attacks managed to push Sheridan back to Dinwiddie Court House on March 31. But Warren’s movement west along White Oak Road threatened to cut him off, so Pickett fell back to Five Forks, a road junction in the woods only three miles south of the Southside Railroad. Lee was disappointed that Pickett had been unable to hold his position at Dinwiddie and ordered him to hold Five Forks “at all hazards.” But Warren’s and Sheridan’s forces were converging on him there with more than twice his strength.