The Siege of Petersburg Continues
- Oliver Groom
- Aug 24
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Abstract: The bloody and prolonged Siege of Petersburg started on June 9, 1864, and the 236 men of the 111th were still fighting in the trenches or on picket duty at the end of September. October was deemed one of the hardest months for the 111th due to loss of soldiers. Records of POW camps.
Original written by siblings George & Deb McGraw, November 2023. Revised and edited by Erika Newcombe, Deb Hall, and Oliver Groom, August 2026.
The bloody and prolonged Siege of Petersburg started on June 9, 1864, and the 236 men of the 111th were still fighting in the trenches or on picket duty at the end of September.
October 1864 turned out to be their hardest month since Gettysburg in July 1863. The regiment lost ten men to desertion, four of whom would join the Confederate Army. Three were wounded, all of whom would recover and continue serving the Union. 87 were captured the night of July 30, 1864, while on picket duty, and one more was captured on the 31st.
Fortunately, none of the 111th were killed or died of disease during that terrible month of July in Virginia.
October 30 found the men trying to avoid the snipers and intermittent artillery shells by keeping their heads down in the trenches. An assortment of men from Companies A, D, E, F, G, H, I, and K were assigned picket duty.
24-year-old Pvt. Robert Drummond of Co. F was returning to his picket duty from camp when he saw newly-promoted 23-year-old Captain Reuben J. Myers of Co. H.
The Captain told Drummond that they should expect to be relieved soon. Drummond returned to his post and communicated this welcome news. The men on duty were soon told to pack their gear and be ready to move out when their relief arrived.
The men then heard sounds of approaching troops who, while wearing blue overcoats and gray pants, were pointing rifles at them. These were actually Rebels wearing uniforms and carrying rifles they likely had taken from Union prisoners or deserters.
The 111th men were soon disarmed and marched behind Southern lines. One of the captured men later wrote that the men were facing the enemy and did not see the Confederates approach from their rear in the “Union Uniforms.”
Several of the captured men were able to slip away and report back to camp with the devastating news. Records show that over half the men standing picket that night were made prisoners of war. As one would expect, there were several investigations and courts-martial. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed as the facts were analyzed and testimony given with no one found guilty of any misdeed. The 111th men at Pittsburg were not the only ones to have a difficult fall, as many in the regiment had been captured in other battles and then sent to the Andersonville, Libby, Belle Island, and Salisbury Confederate prison camps in the previous 26 months.
Records are scarce for the men in these camps; at least two died in October at Andersonville while others continued living in squalid conditions without adequate food, clean water, medical care, or sanitation while waiting to be exchanged for prisoners held by the Union. In one tragic example, 48-year-old Pvt. Hezekiah V. Gilbard of Co. A died of chronic diarrhea while at his home on furlough. Only three months before, he had enlisted to serve for three years.
While the men of the 111th were at Petersburg and many others from the regiment were interned at Andersonville, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman was continuing his destructive march through Georgia to the Atlantic coast. This fostered great hopes that he would reach Andersonville and free the thousands of Union POWs. However, the local Confederate military leadership didn’t want to see the ranks of the Union army increased, so they did what historians now refer to as a ‘reverse triage’ by keeping the wounded and sickest men at Andersonville and sending the healthier ones north to a new camp they built at Florence, SC.
The new camp became known as the Florence Stockade. Sgt. Daniel Hutchins of Co. D wrote from Andersonville on September 12, “We got orders to pack up & get ready to leave the Bull Pen. We got ready & laid on the southside of camp all night. I did not sleep much.”
After departing from Andersonville on the 13th, he wrote, “We left camp Sumpter [sic] at an early hour at about 8 and We arrived at Macon [Georgia] in the afternoon about 3am and had a difficult time obtaining water as the guards would not let us get off the cars.”
The men spent the 14th in Augusta, GA, sleeping in the rail cars with no food, water, or sanitary facilities. When they changed cars, they continued to Charleston, SC, and arrived on the 15th. They were treated well by the locals before proceeding to the POW camp at the Washington Race Course, twelve miles from the city.
They stayed in squalid conditions for some days with no food and only water from hand-dug wells. Hutchins was able to sell his watch for $100 in Confederate currency [$20 US] to help supplement his meager food rations. Two men of the 111th did not survive this leg of their journey to Florence, SC.
Hutchins wrote on September 21, “We learned this morning that poor Web [Pvt. Daniel Webster Lamson] is dead he has left this field of trouble & gone home to rest for he was a good Christian May God help us.” The following day, he wrote, “We did not get our rations till after dark I tried to get out to the hospital to see John Almakiners who’s very low & not expected to live I did not succeed We don’t have to dig more than 4 feet to get water.”
Lamson and Almakinders were both privates in Co. D who had been wounded on July 2 at Gettysburg. They recovered and continued to fight at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, where they were respectively captured.
The Wayne County Historical Society encourages anyone with family members who served and lived in Wayne or Cayuga Counties during the 1860s to contact the Wayne County Historical Society at info@waynehistory.org or (315) 946-4943. If you are not sure about your Civil War ancestry, you can follow up with the link below:
Photos:
“The Federal Army Entrenched Before Petersburg - A Night Scene in the Trenches.” By Edwin Forbes
“R.J. Myers Capt. Co H 111th Regiment.” Photo by permission of Mary Transue Mercatoris
“Sharpshooters on the line of the Eighteenth Corps.” By Alfred Robert Waud
Section of an 1864 map of Charleston, South Carolina, by Robert Knox Sneden of POW Camp.
Sources:
New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, One Hundred and Eleventh Infantry, in Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York for the Year 1900: Registers of the One Hundred and Eleventh Infantry, accessed July 2, 2026, “111th Infantry Civil War Roster.”
Wayne Historians Organization. Wayne County Civil War Soldiers. Accessed July 2, 2026. “Wayne County Civil War Soldiers.”
Comments