banner to tiny shreds so it would not be
captured with him. One of Hoke’s men,
echoing his commander’s earlier com-
plaint, bitterly wrote, “The dead were
buried under the flag of truce, but the
artillery horses were saved.” Fighting
around Fort Harrison ended about 4 PM
on September 29. Butler’s army had suf-
fered about 3,300 casualties among its
20,000 men. The Confederates, who even-
tually threw about 16,000 into the battles,
lost 2,000 men.
While Field and Hoke made their attacks
on September 30, Meade charged the Con-
federate entrenchments southwest of
Petersburg. They captured a section of
works around a redoubt called Fort
Archer. Under Lt. Gen. A.P. Hill, Confed-
erates dug new fortifications and repelled
the Union forces from further progress.
Fighting continued until October 2, when
each side settled into their newly estab-
lished lines of entrenchment. Another
2,800 Union and 1,300 Confederate casu-
alties were added to the cost of Grant’s
fifth offensive.
Fourteen men from Draper’s brigade
and other USCT regiments in the Army
of the James received Medals of Honor
for their actions on September 29. Butler
was so impressed with the conduct of his
USCT regiments at New Market Heights
that he supplemented the Medal of
Honor awards with a citation of his own,
known as the Army of the James Medal
or the Butler Medal. Butler himself
ordered and paid for the specially
designed medals and ribbons. They were
manufactured by Tiffany & Company
and modeled on the Crimean War Medals
issued by Great Britain. “I record with
pride,” wrote Butler, “that in that single
action there were so many deserving that
it called for a presentation of nearly two
hundred.” The Army of the James Medal
was the only military honor created for a
specific battle during the Civil War.
The fifth major offensive by Grant
against the Richmond-Petersburg defenses
was part failure and part success. The
Confederate capital and its satellite
stronghold, Petersburg, were still in Con-federate hands. But Union
gains forced the Confederates
to further stretch and distort
their defensive lines and spread
their troops ever thinner. The Fed-
erals, in turn, strengthened the
captured Fort Harrison, renam-
ing it Fort Burnham after the
Maine general who was killed there.
South and north of the fort, Union engi-
neers dug new entrenchments with
abatis facing the Confederates
on the west. AdditionalUnion works
were built and
anchored on
the James River
at newly con-
structed Fort Brady,
where heavy guns kept
the Confederates’ James
River Squadron bottled
up higher in the river.
The Confederates abandoned
the segments of the old line that
were now covered by Fort
Burnham and consoli-
dated a new line of
works that served as a
sort of scar tissue to
contain the sore spot of
Fort Harrison. To make
up for the lack of soldiers
to man the new lines, they
planted hundreds of “sub-
terranean shells” supplied by
the navy’s Torpedo Bureau in front of
their works. Red warning flags, planted
three feet behind the mines to warn off
their own men, would be removed in the
event of a Union assault.
As the dust settled from the loss of Fort
Harrison and the failure of the desperate
effort to recapture it, the seriousness of
the South’s deteriorating military situa-
tion became all too clear. Lee wrote Sec-
retary of War James Seddon on October
4 from his headquarters at Chaffin’s
Farm. Unless substantial numbers of new
soldiers could be found by a heavy call-up
of exempted men, he warned, “It will be
very difficult for us to maintain our-
selves.” Without reinforcing the Army of
Northern Virginia, Lee said, the govern-
ment faced the dreaded prospect of “the
discouragement of our people that would
follow the fall of Richmond.” Lee’s grim
premonition would come to pass seven
months later. Butler’s attacks north of the
James on September 29 and 30 were an
important link in the parlous chain of
events that ultimately led to the final col-
lapse of the Petersburg lines, the evacua-
tion of Richmond, and the end of the
Confederacy.TOP TO BOTTOM: Maj.
Gen. Benjamin Butler’s
privately commissioned
Butler Medal; Medal of
Honor recipients 1st Sgt.
Powhatan Beaty, 5th
USCT; 1st Sgt. Alexander
Kelly, left, 6th USCT; and
Sgt. Maj. Christian Fleetwood,
4th USCT.CWQ-EW16 Chaffins Bluff_Layout 1 10/23/15 2:42 PM Page 29