Quick Look

While researching the Battle of Reams’ Station last year, I chanced across the Confederate list of enlisted prisoners captured in the Battle. The following is a quick look at the Battle and the list.

Second Ream’s Station

On August 24th, 1864, Confederate General Robert E. Lee directed the Third Corps under A.P. Hill and the Cavalry under Wade Hampton to conduct a surprise attack on the Union Second Corps. The Second Corps under Major General Winfield Scott Hancock was in the process of tearing up the track of the Petersburg and Weldon railroad and was using Reams Station as a base as it proceeded south towards Rowanty Creek. As it moved south, the Union force became detached from the rest of the Union Army, which was eight miles away. Hancock’s troops represented the extended left of the Union line around Petersburg.1 Figure 1 describes the strategic context.

Figure 1: The Strategic Context.2

To keep the Union command blind as to his intentions, Lee ordered an early morning assault on the right of the Union line south of Richmond. The Confederate attack near Ware Bottom Church began at 6 AM on August 25th. The attack came as the 18th Corps relieved the 10th Corps on picket. The southerners General broke and seized a portion of the Union, holding it all day. In the evening, the Union counterattacked and retook the lines. Grant summed up the result as, “1 killed, 16 wounded, and 14 missing on our side. Two commissioned officers and 59 men were captured from the enemy.” The other result was it made General Meade in command of the Army of the Potomac cautious.3

Lee intended that the Confederate assaults coincide on the right and the left. Hill wasn’t able to get his Corps into position to attack Hancock at Reams until late morning. On the day of the battle at Ream’s Station, the Union Second Corps consisted of 16 pieces of artillery, two divisions of infantry, approximately 6000 men, and three brigades of cavalry at about 2,000 cavalrymen. The Confederates had 25 pieces of artillery, a reinforced infantry Corps, but with straggling, it probably numbered at best 5,000 effectives at the battle. Hampton had about 3,000 cavalrymen who mostly fought dismounted. In combat power, the forces were about even. Although, the Confederates had the advantage in artillery and well-trained and proficient sharpshooter battalions armed with Enfileds. They could consistently hit targets at 1000 yards and in this battle did.4

Hancock’s 1st division was already manning the Western and Northern portions of the fortifications at Reams’. At the southerners’ approach, Hancock recalled his Second Division, which was tearing up the railroad track to the south. The recall, coupled with pressure from Hampton’s cavalry moving north from Rowanty Creek, forced the Second Division back into the southern line of the Ream’s horseshoe-shaped defense. After three unsuccessful assaults, a little after 5 PM, the Confederates using a combination of intense artillery fire from the west, and a massed rush of infantry from the woods closest Union breastworks, broke through at the northwest angle after a resistance that became hand to hand combat. The Union line that broke retreated to the east while the Confederates raced down the railroad cut to the south and cut off and captured whole regiments of Union infantry. The remaining Union line regrouped about 300 yards back to the east, and a series of counterattacks and attacks ensued. See Figure 2 for the map of the battlefield and disposition of forces at the time of the Confederate breakthrough.5

Figure 2: Confederate Breakthrough.6

The interactive map in Figure 3 identifies the location of Union regiments within the Ream’s Station breastworks at the time of the breakthrough at the northwest angle. The map circles show the relative number of soldiers captured for each Union regiment. Placing the cursor over the circle enables a pop up that identifies the regiment. One can select a base map from 1864 or from today. (Note:Sometimes the 1864 overlay map is slow to load.)

Figure 3: Union Captured by Regiment.7

After stabilizing his lines, and with two successful counterattacks along the northern breastwork, Hancock held a council of war with his division commanders. Miles and Gregg were for an attempt to recapture the western front since it seemed the Confederates were disorganized and unable to follow up on their success. Gibbon, the Second Division commander, demurred. His division was demoralized and scattered. It had taken fire from Hampton’s cavalry in the south, the artillery to the west, and the infantry from the north. Hancock reluctantly decided to retreat. It was dusk, reinforcements were too far away to help, and Gibbon’s division was too disorganized and demoralized to attempt an attack. Hancock ordered a retreat under cover of darkness and into the protective shield of Mott’s division that was close by on the Plank road but still too far away to support an attack. The Corps was able to bring off most of the wounded but not the bodies of those those killed, as it retreated to the northeast in a severe thunderstorm and reentered Union lines.8

The blame for the loss.

The blame for the loss started almost immediately. MG Hancock, the Second Corps commander, partially blamed the loss on a lack of cohesion in units with recruits and bounty men compounded by language difficulties with foreign-born officers and men. In his report, he explicitly blamed the 7th, 39th, 52nd, 125th, 126th, and 152nd N.Y. regiments for poor behavior in the battle. He also cited the overuse and exhaustion of his troops from continual combat and the shoddy construction and poor siting of the defensive breastworks at Ream’s, and he no longer had enough officers due to casualties and illness.9

Historians generally support Hancock’s assessment of the poor quality of his Corps, with the caveat that the General could have put much more effort into clearing his front of tree cover, and on improving the fortification. Beyond that, they agree that General Meade inappropriately assigned Hancock the mission of tearing up the Weldon railroad. Meade saw, commented on, and ignored the poor condition of Hancock’s troops after returning from the long and hot fight at Deep Bottom. Historians assess Miles as having fragmented the command and control of the 1st Division. The fragmentation contributed to the Confederate breakthrough. The Second Division Commander, General Gibbon, counterattacked too fast. He did not realign his force to face the Confederate advance in the west. The failure to do so subjected his line to an enfilading fire that caused most of the counterattack to collapse. Although the northernmost units did recapture and held a section on the north return, the Cavalry, Artillery, and the various staff officers were the most aggressive in the battle and prevented a significant reverse from becoming a disastrous route.10

The Captured

The captured Union soldiers were taken in groups by the southern infantry or cavalry troops that seized them and turned over to the Confederate Third Corps provost marshall. Along the way, Union soldiers began to experience the loss of personal belongings that would be a consistent experience of their capture. The poorly supplied Confederates took food, money, tobacco, pipes, clothes, or shoes. After Hancock, retreated leaving over 100 dead lying on the battlefield, Confederate scavenger parties roamed the area with lit torches in the dark, grimly stripped the dead of all their belongings, and left them lying naked in the field.11

For the living, Hill’s Provost Marshall herded the approximately 1800 prisoners, into an area behind Confederate lines and bedded them down for the night. There was a campfire, but it didn’t help much since they were in the open and exposed to a thunderstorm and drenching rain. The next morning they were marched to Hog island in the Appomattox River before Petersburg, stripped searched, and spent another night in the open. The next day, August 27th, they were loaded onto cattle cars and taken by train to Richmond. Unloaded in town, turned over to a militia guard made up of fifteen to eighteen-year-olds, they marched through jeering crowds down the main street to Libby Prison.12

The map in Figure 4 shows the trail of the captives from Ream station to Richmond. The map also shows the path of the one soldier in the list captured at Ware Bottom. The scene of the morning feint by Lee. Private Solomon Crist was in Company K, Fifty-fifth Pennsylvania Infantry assigned to picket the Union line to the east of Richmond on the Bermuda Hundred line at Fosters Farm. Crist had been in the Army for five months. Although during the crisis of Gettysburg in 1863, he served for a month in the Pennsylvania militia. A 6-foot tall farm laborer from Union Township in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, he enlisted at the age of 42, along with a younger relative in February 1864, and joined the unit in March. Now he found himself thrust into the mass of prisoners captured at Ream’s Station.13

Figure 4: The Path to Prison.14

The formation of enlisted prisoners stood outside Libby prison. The Richmond Provost Marshall’s clerks recorded the name, rank, unit, where and when captured, and the country of birth for each prisoner. Solomon was the 1,340 soldier entered on the list. In a minute or two, the clerk recorded Crist, Sol, Pvt, K, 55, Penn, U.S.15 See figure 5.

As the only man from the Army of the James in the list, Solomon was one of the missing mentioned in Grant’s report about the action at Ware Bottom. Evidence of Lee’s feint. Over 50 years later, in 1909, as the residents of Pavia, Pennsylvania charted a memorial to those who died or were missing from Company K, the Bedford Gazette still listed Solomon as missing. His family and friends never knew what happened to him. The Union Army, however, did know what happened to Solomon, but the news never made it to Bedford County. Solomon didn’t last long in captivity. He died less than a month after his capture from diarrhea, probably dysentery, in Richmond Hospital No. 21 on September 20th, 1864. He was paid last on June 30th, 1864, and the government still owed him $30.92 at war’s end.16

At Libby Prison, the guards separated the enlisted from the officers. The remaining mass of enlisted soldiers stood in formation while two to four clerks of the Provost Marshall’s office sat and recorded who they captured. The National Archives has the record of the enlisted soldiers they made. At an average of a minute or two per prisoner to call up, interview, and make the record of each prisoner, with two to four clerks assigned, the recording process took between seven to fourteen hours to complete. One assumes that once identified; the guards took each prisoner into one of the overcrowded and dank cells in Libby prison. The officers remained at Libby. The enlisted initially went to Belle Island surrounded by Richmond’s James river, and eventually to prisons further south, Andersonville, Georgia, Salisbury, North Carolina, or Florence, South Carolina.17

Making the Prisoners List

After the intake of prisoners completed, a clerk gathered records and bound them together at some point into a single document. Found in Figure 5 is the cover page of the list, and as an example, the page has Private Solomon Crist’s entry.

Figure 5: Prisoners’ List Cover and Page 50.18

Figure 6 shows a somewhat complex visualization of the prisoners’ list. The visualization represents each one of the 1,746 prisoners with a single point. The x-axis shows the order number where each prisoner entered the list. The y-axis gives the name of the prisoner’s regiment. The regiment name reflects the Unions’ command hierarchy for precise identification. The Union Command hierarchy was Corps, Division, Brigade, State, Regiment number, and type of unit. For example, the first unit on the y-axis, 9TH-3RD-2ND-MI2I, reads 9th Corps, 3rd division, 2nd brigade, Michigan, 2nd Regiment, Infantry. At Reams’ Station, the Union had Cavalry, Infantry, and Heavy Artillery units that since May 1864 Grant used as infantry.19

Figure 6: The Sequence Soldiers were recorded in the Prisoner List.

The visualization shows that there was some level of disorganization among the prisoners. However, the display can be misleading. If one clerk recorded all of the prisoners in a single list and the units were fully cohesive, the ideal visualization would show a continuous line for each regiment—no breaks in any regiment entry. The display of the real list shows units with several breaks. But those breaks may have been induced by the method the Confederate clerks used to divide the formation to process them into the prison. The prisoners arrived at Libby about 2 PM on the 27th. If prisoner intake completed on the 27th, then it would need to be done by dark. Four clerks working in parallel could achieve that. We know that the Provost Marshall’s office had three clerks and three lieutenants assigned in June 1864. The visualization shows that the small units are mostly cohesive and that there few units with more than four breaks. The probability is that the regiments were cohesive. They re-formed as units in captivity. Any apparent fragmentation in the list is a function of recording the prisoners in parallel and then compiling the record. The prisoner list does not support Hancock’s sense of a lack of cohesion.20

The Foreign born.

New York regiments have the most significant number of prisoners and dominate the list. The majority of prisoners were born in the United States. Foreign-born prisoners were mostly from Ireland, Germany, or Canada. English speakers except for the Germans. The proportion of Germans does not appear large enough for a language barrier to have been a factor, as Hancock claimed. Indeed, the units he complained had officers that could not speak English were in units that were composed of German immigrants, and those regiments were so from the start of the War. On other fields, they had distinguished themselves, and the language had not been a problem there.

Most of the foreign-born are in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin units. New York, again, represents the most significant number. A large number of the New York regiments are majority foreign-born. A number of those units were always German or Irish regiments, like the 69th New York from the Irish Brigade. The regiments with the most significant amount of prisoners, the 4th and 8th New York Heavy Artillery, are almost 50% foreign-born. But in total, there are more prisoners born in the United States than were born overseas. The capture of a large number of foreign-born prisoners in the Heavy Artillery regiments has more to do with their position on the field than foreign origins. Anyone caught in the southwest angle surrounded and trapped by Confederates on all sides was going to be captured. Figures 7 and 8 describe the state and country origins of the prisoners.

Figure 7: Prisoners by State and Country of Birth.

Figure 8: Foreigners in New York Regiments.

Quick Conclusion

The prisoners’ list does not support the contention that foreigners and bounty men caused the loss at Ream’s Station. It doesn’t argue for aggressive combat effectiveness either. The units that broke did not have many captured; they had more wounded and killed. The regiments with the most captured were the victims of being in the wrong part of the fortification. The units that broke were most likely overwhelmed by massive force at the point of the breakthrough and were pushed back relatively intact. Those who weren’t critically wounded or killed retreated the 300 yards back to where the line stabilized.

The units with the largest number captured were those surrounded in the southwestern portion of the works. See, again, the map in Figure 3. Those regiments in the southwest corner were trapped front and rear, forced to surrender. Significantly, there is no blame from Hancock or his division commanders for their surrender. The commanders knew the difficulty on the ground and with the position.

An open question is how many of the prisoners captured at Ream’s Station and recorded that day in Richmond survived captivity. How many were already old like Private Solomon Crist? Was age a factor in Union combat effectiveness. The Union’s records make it likely that most, if not all, of the prisoners on the list, will be identified. At that point, one can address the age and survival questions.

Endnotes

  1. United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 42, part 1, 128 vols., series 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880), 1202, John Horn, The Petersburg Campaign: The Destruction of the Weldon Railroad: Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, and Ream’s Station (Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc., 1991), 120.↩

  2. U.S. Coast Survey, Section of Military Map of Southeastern Virginia, 1864, 1:200000, 1864.↩

  3. United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, vol. 42, part 1, 128 vols., series 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880), 19-20, Price, Isaiah, History of the Ninety-Seventh Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, During the War of the Rebellion, 1861–65. (Philadelphia: B & P., Printers, 1875), 319-320.↩

  4. Horn, John, The Siege of Petersburg: The Battles for the Weldon Railroad, August 1864, First (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2015), Chapter 12. Kindle., Dunlop, W. S. , Major, Lee’s Sharpshooters (Little Rock, AK: Tunnan & Pittard, Printers, 1899), Chapter 13. Kindle.↩

  5. Horn, The Siege of Petersburg, Chapter 12. Kindle.↩

  6. Headquarters, Second Army Corps, Plan of Battlefield of Ream’s Station, August 25, 1864 in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume 42, Part 1, Page 229, 1:800 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880).↩

  7. Weyss, John E. and U.S. War Department, Petersburg And Five Forks. From Surveys under the Direction of Bvt. Brig. Gen N. Michler, Maj. of Engineers By Command of Bvt. Maj. Genl. A.A. Humphreys, Brig. Genl. & Chief of Engineers. 1867. Surveyed & Drawn by Maj: J.E. Weyss, Assisted by F. Theilkuhl, J. Strasser & G. Thompson, 1:42240 (New York: N.Y. Lithographing, Engraving & Printing Co., 1869), Rumsey Collection, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2262~170079.↩

  8. Horn, The Siege of Petersburg, Chapter 12. Kindle↩

  9. Official Records, Series 1 Volume 42, Part1, 221- 228.↩

  10. The historians are Edwin C. Bearrs, Charles R. Bowery, Earl J. Hess, and John Horn. The most concise and compelling argument on the causes for the loss is still in John Horn, The Petersburg Campaign: The Destruction of the Weldon Railroad: Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern, and Ream’s Station (Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc., 1991), 177-189.↩

  11. Kirk, Hyland C., Heavy Guns and Light: 4th New York Heavy Artillery (New York: C.T. Dillingham, 1890), 400-401.↩

  12. Ibid, 400-403.↩

  13. Pennsylvania (State), “Muster Out Roll, Fifty-Fith Infantry, Company K” (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1865), Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Records of the Department of Military and Veterans’ Affairs, Civil War Muster Rolls and Related Records, 1861-1866, Record Group 19, Series 19.11 (153 cartons).↩

  14. U.S. Coast Survey, Section of Military Map of Southeastern Virginia, 1864, 1:200,000, 1864.↩

  15. War Department. The Adjutant General’s Office. Prisoner of War Division, “List of Federal Troops Captured at Reams’ Station, Virginia and Received at Confederate Military Prisons in Richmond, Virginia, 1886 - 1886” (Richmond, VA, 1864), Record Group 249: Records of the Commissary General of Prisoners, 1861 - 1905 Container Identifier: Volume 68, National Archives at Washington, DC, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/616054. 50. The list doesn’t say where the Confederates captured Solomon, but the 55th Pennsylvania was not at Ream’s Station. The 55th was part of the Army of the James, Eighteenth Corps on the line southeast of Richmond at Bermuda Hundred, and the unit muster-out roll says he went missing at Foster’s Farm. He probably was captured on the morning of the 25th as the Confederate attack commenced, and the Union command realized he was missing with the morning report on the 26th. The Confederate’s list him as captured on August 25th, 1864. The Union records show the 26th.↩

  16. “Soldiers Monument,” Bedford Gazette, March 26, 1909, 1., “Registers of Deaths of Volunteers, Compiled 1861–1865, Pennsylvania A - C” (National Archives at Washington, D.C., n.d.), Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780’s–1917. Record Group 94, 851.↩

  17. Golden, Alan Lawrence, “Castle Thunder: The Confederate Provost Marshal’s Prison, 1862-1865” (Richmond, VA, University of Richmond, 1980), 35-36., UR Scholarship Repository, http://scholarship.richmond.edu/masters-theses?utm_source=scholarship.richmond.edu%2Fmasters-theses%2F442&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages., Kirk, Heavy Guns and Light, 403-404, 415-416.↩

  18. List of Federal Troops Captured at Reams’ Station, Cover, 50.↩

  19. Horn, 1991, 203-207.↩

  20. Golden, 35-36.↩