The dirty smoke of Union artillery fire and burning wagons hung in the air, but the battlefield was temporarily quiet as the dug-in Confederates watched lines of Federal infantry coming toward them. At a little-known Virginia stream called Sailor's Creek, U.S. cavalry had cut off three of the four infantry corps of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. It was Thursday, April 6, 1865. Three Union armies under General Ulysses S. Grant had brought the gray lion to bay on the Rebels' retreat from Petersburg and Richmond. The quiet was soon shattered and men began to die. In three independent and almost simultaneous battles, the fighting along Big and Little Sailor's Creek often devolved into a monstrous savagery of hand-to-hand combat and cold steel carnage. "I saw men kill each other with bayonets and the butts of muskets and even bite each other's throats…rolling on the ground like wild beasts," a Confederate officer recalled. By day's end, Lee lamented the loss of some eight thousand men and turned those still alive, starving, decimated columns of scarecrows, toward the west. Appomattox Court House awaited. This is the story of the events at Sailor's Creek that bloody spring day when Lee's vaunted army was finally and forever ruined.

About: Derek Smith

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