"The Alamo of the Confederacy": The Last Stand at Fort Gregg - April 2, 1865
The blue tide had broken through.
As the sun climbed higher in the Virginia sky, the weary soldiers of the Federal Sixth Corps halted amid the tangled wreckage of battle. Bloodied, exhausted, their breath misting in the cold spring air, they had driven the Confederates from the Boydton Plank Road. Now came fresh legs—Major General John Gibbon’s 24th Corps, men who hadn’t yet tasted the fire that morning.
Brigadier General Robert Foster’s Division moved into the battered ground ahead, picking their way over fallen men, smashed earthworks, and smoking wreckage. A short distance away, two squat forts loomed—Fort Gregg and Fort Whitworth, crude but sturdy earthworks bristling with muskets and cannon, held by a desperate, ragged collection of Confederate die-hards.
Inside Fort Gregg, soldiers from Harris’s Mississippi Brigade prepared for what they knew might be their final stand. They had seen the others fall—Lane’s shattered North Carolinians, Thomas’s Georgians, all retreating through the smoke and chaos. But now, the survivors gathered here with the 12th and 16th Mississippi Infantry, remnants of Lane’s brigade, and a smattering of Confederate artillerists.
Their orders were simple: Hold the fort or die.
Colonel A. K. Jones of the 12th Mississippi looked down the barrel of his rifle. He knew what was coming. The sound of Union drums, officers’ shouted orders, and the low rumble of advancing boots filled the air.
“They’re coming,” someone muttered. “Let them,” Jones said, his voice like flint.
The Assault Begins
Across 800 yards of open ground, Colonel Thomas Osborn’s Brigade emerged from the Union lines like a great, blue wave. The Mississippians opened fire. Muskets cracked, and grape and canister from the artillery tore great holes in the Union lines. Still they came.
A shallow ditch filled with muddy water surrounded Fort Gregg. When Osborn’s men reached it, they stumbled, fell, clawed their way through waist-deep muck under a hail of lead. Confederate defenders leaned over the parapets, firing down at point-blank range, hurling rocks, bricks, even chunks of cannon shells.
Behind Osborn, two regiments from Colonel George Dandy’s Brigade surged forward to reinforce. To the left, Colonel Harrison Fairchild’s men turned toward Fort Whitworth, charging with the same grim determination. But at both forts, the Federals bogged down in the water-filled ditches, men drowning, slipping, and screaming.
They began using bayonets like shovels, stabbing them into the soft earth to carve crude footholds in the dirt walls. One by one, they hauled themselves up—some shot down before they could crest the parapet, others bayoneted as they leapt over the top.
And then, inside Fort Gregg, all hell broke loose.
Hand-to-Hand Hell
Blood ran ankle-deep in the mud and dust of the cramped interior. Muskets were useless now—men swung rifle butts, drew pistols, stabbed with bayonets, and choked each other in a savage struggle for the earthwork.
“The slaughter was appalling,” wrote Captain A. K. Jones later. “I saw the field at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness… and at neither place were the dead half so thickly strewn as at Gregg.”
The fighting lasted more than two hours. The Mississippi defenders gave no quarter and asked for none. A Federal soldier who managed to survive the melee said it was like fighting inside a slaughterhouse.
Outside Fort Gregg, Fort Whitworth was under similar assault. Brigadier General Thomas Harris’s West Virginians stormed the position. The 19th and 48th Mississippi held fast, firing until their cartridges were gone, then fighting hand-to-hand with whatever they had left.
Wilcox gave the order—every man not already dead or captured must fall back. Fort Whitworth fell shortly after Gregg.
Aftermath
When the smoke cleared, the fields around Fort Gregg were strewn with bodies. Over 120 Union soldiers lay dead, and nearly 600 wounded littered the field. Inside the fort, the surviving Confederates, bloodied and stunned, laid down their arms. Fifty-five had been killed, and around 300—most of them wounded—were taken prisoner.
The ground was won, but at terrible cost.
But the defenders of Fort Gregg had done something remarkable—they had bought time. Their stand gave Lee’s remaining troops just enough breathing room to occupy the Dimmock Line, the last line of defense around Petersburg.
Though the fight was doomed, they had held just long enough to delay the inevitable.
Epilogue
To Union veterans, Fort Gregg became a byword for courage. To the South, it was “the Alamo of the Confederacy”—a place where a few hundred men, vastly outnumbered, stood their ground in the face of certain defeat.
General Gibbon stood surveying the bloodied earthworks, deeply shaken. This wasn’t just a tactical success. It was the beginning of the end.
Fort Gregg had fallen. The walls of Petersburg were crumbling. And with them, the Confederacy itself.
