By the spring of 1865 the war in Virginia had narrowed to a single, grinding fact: the siege of Petersburg. For nine months the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee had been pinned in a long arc of trenches around the city, the rail town just south of Richmond through which nearly all of Lee’s food and ammunition had to pass. Across from him, Ulysses S. Grant kept stretching the Union lines west, mile after mile, reaching around Lee’s right to cut the last railroads. Lee did not have the men to match the reach. He could only stretch his own thinning line until it tore.

Lee’s army was coming apart from the inside. The men in the trenches were hungry, ragged, and increasingly sick, and they were deserting by the hundreds, slipping across to the Union lines in the dark night after night. Every week the line grew thinner and the enemy’s grew longer. Lee could see the arithmetic as well as anyone: if he simply waited, Grant would either starve him out or work all the way around his flank, and the army would be trapped against the city with its escape routes cut.

The cause that army had been raised to defend was, at bottom, the preservation of slavery, and that cause was now visibly losing. Sherman was driving north through the Carolinas. The Confederate government in Richmond was making frantic, late gestures, even debating whether to put enslaved men into the ranks as soldiers. Lee’s one hope was no longer to win. It was to get his army out of the Petersburg trap intact, march southwest, and join General Joseph E. Johnston (South), who was trying to scrape together a force in North Carolina to face Sherman. Two Confederate armies together might last a while longer. One trapped army would not.

The man who thought he saw a way out was Major General John B. Gordon (South), one of Lee’s hardest-fighting corps commanders. After studying the Union works in his sector night after night, Gordon came to Lee with a plan. There was a Union fort, Fort Stedman, that sat unusually close to the Confederate line, in places only about 150 yards (140 m) away. If a column could rush it before dawn and break through, Gordon argued, his men could pour into the rear, seize the forts behind it, and drive on toward Grant’s great supply base at City Point, about 8 miles (13 km) to the northeast.

The point was not to hold the ground. It was to force Grant to pull troops away from his far left, the end of the line that was slowly strangling Lee, to deal with the sudden hole in his center. Contract the Union grip even for a day or two, Gordon reasoned, and Lee might be able to disengage the whole army and slip away south to Johnston. It was a long shot stacked on a long shot. Lee, out of better ideas, approved it. The attack would go in before first light on March 25.