F
our hundred Confederate sailors
and marines, their small arms
loaded and ready, awaited their
orders. Some men had their cutlasses
within easy reach. Their commander,
Navy Flag Officer John Randolph
Tucker, watched as the enemy
approached within pistol shot. Tucker,
excited but confused, shouted, “Pre-
pare to repel boarders!” These Rebel
tars were in strange waters indeed on
April 6, 1865. Far from the briny blue
Atlantic, Tucker’s quarterdeck was a
spot of high ground overlooking a
small Virginia stream called Sayler’s
Creek. Wading and splashing through
the creek, the Federals’ boarding party
was the vanguard of Maj. Gen. Hora-
tio Wright’s VI Corps infantry.
The odd spectacle of Wright’s foot
soldiers facing cutlass-wielding Con-
federate sailors reflected the extreme
circumstances leading to the Battle of
Sayler’s Creek. After months of siege
warfare, the Army of Northern Vir-
ginia was driven from its fortifications
around Richmond and Petersburg at
the beginning of April. General Robert
E. Lee’s army, cast from its moorings
just as surely as Tucker and his seadogs,reacted to a whirlwind of disasters
unfolding around it. The men needed
time to catch their breath, reorganize
their scrambled units, and forge new
plans in the quickly unraveling Con-
federacy. And time was the one thing
that Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his
cavalry leader, Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan,
intended to deny them.
After the Battle of the Wilderness in
May 1864, Grant had proved to be a
different kind of general for the Union’s
Army of the Potomac. There were no
more long stretches of idling in camp
and no more withdrawals after defeats.
Constant pressure punctuated with fre-
quent attacks kept Lee’s army hemmed
in against Richmond. The Confeder-
ates settled in behind a complex andS ayler
’
s Creek
BY DAVID A. NORRIS
Art © Keith Rocco; http://www.KeithRocco.comCWQ-Sum16 Sayler's Creek_Layout 1 4/20/16 4:28 PM Page 15