The Battle of New Market Heights

by Jack R. Johnson 07.2024

If you drive East on Route 5 from Richmond, Virginia—past the Southern States silos and water treatment plant and the new condos rising near Rocketts landing—you’ll eventually run across one of those historical placards that identifies the battle of New Market Heights. It’s on the left near an unremarkable stretch of land about a mile before the cloverleaf at interstate 295. The area is wooded and serene, quiet enough to hear the distant caw of a crow, but 160 years ago on the morning of September 29, 1864, this was not a happy place to be.

According to historian, Jimmy Price, “The Confederates took advantage of the terrain to create a lethal killing ground.” The area was protected by Confederate artillery “which could sweep the entire field.” Additionally, the Confederates had strewn the approach to their works with what was called slashings, that is, trees felled outwards, at right angles. Beyond this was a second series of obstacles known as chevaux-de-frise which were structures made by sharpening the ends of trees and connecting them together through large logs. “If anyone made it through these two lines of obstacles, they would then have to climb up the parapet and deal with the Confederates behind the wall,” according to Price. “Not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination.”

The assault at New Market Heights was part of a larger strategy put in motion by Union General Ulysses S Grant to bring the Civil War to a quick end.  General Grant envisioned two simultaneous attacks: Major General Benjamin F. Butler’s Army of the James would move directly against Richmond at New Market Heights, while Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac would attack the Petersburg defenses. With Petersburg under direct threat, Confederate troops could not be spared to counter Butler’s operations. This left Butler with a chance of piercing the enemy defenses and sending several thousand troops into Richmond before the rest of the Union Army could pour in. Even if Butler faltered and Confederate General Robert E. Lee sent reinforcements, it would still operate as a diversion and weaken Lee’s troop strength around Petersburg, making it easier to take Petersburg in the end. 

Grant’s choice of General Benjamin Butler was interesting. Butler was a so-called ‘political’ General, and not a very popular one. Early in the war, while he was in charge of New Orleans in the spring of 1862, he famously produced General Order No. 28, which held that any woman who insulted or showed contempt for a Federal officer or soldier would be regarded as a common prostitute. The order provoked protest and outrage in the North and South as well as abroad, particularly in France and England.  Butler was subsequently nicknamed “The Beast.”

To cement his infamy in the South, Butler came up with the idea of freeing the slaves by designating them as contraband of war. Early on, slaves who escaped from Confederate owners into the Union lines were handed back to their “owners.” Butler declared that such escapees were “contraband of war” and would not be returned to captivity. His policy was soon adopted by all Union authorities. Butler also promoted the enlistment of Black troops during his time in Louisiana; an idea that the Lincoln administration endorsed and that played a role in making emancipation an official war goal. 

Eventually, Butler’s unpopularity led Lincoln to recall him from New Orleans and reappoint him to the Army of the James. His troops included an African American division commanded by Brigadier General Charles J. Paine in XVIII Corps and a Black brigade of X Corps under Brigadier General William Birney.  Butler was not sure how the Black troops would perform in combat, and one of the reasons for using them in the New Market battle Butler said was “to convince myself whether the negro troops will fight.”

Thus, when it came time to storm New Market Heights on September 29, 1864, it was Butler who decided to make his United States Colored Troops “the tip of the spear.”

As might be suspected, Southerners had no love of the Black troops. “The Confederacy viewed the use of United States Colored Troops as ‘inciting servile insurrection.’”  The phrase, “servile insurrection” was something of a trigger, recalling the nightmare of what Nat Turner and John Brown had done in their various insurrections. The Confederate Secretary of War made it clear that “slaves in flagrant rebellion are subject to death” and that they “cannot be recognized in any way as soldiers subject to the rules of war…summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken [prisoner].” 

According to Price, “it wasn’t just Southern soldiers who despised the Black troops. After The Battle of the Crater (in which some 400 Black troops were killed), one Virginia woman wrote to her husband who was a soldier in Lee’s army that he must, ‘shoot [Black soldiers], dear husband, every chance you get…It is God’s will and wish for you to destroy them. Your [sic] are his instrument and it is your Christian duty.’” 

So the Black soldiers and white officers who attacked New Market Heights suffered no illusions as to what might happen to them should they fall into enemy hands.

At four o’clock on the morning on September 29th General Butler had the troops silently cross the James River at Deep Bottom, via a pontoon bridge.  Butler personally rode up to the U.S. Colored Troop regiments as they were about to step off. He told them their war cry should be, “Remember Fort Pillow!”

Butler was referencing the massacre at Fort Pillow, Tennessee on April 12, 1864, in which some 300 African American soldiers were killed. Although most of the Union garrison surrendered, and thus should have been taken as prisoners of war, the soldiers were instead murdered. Union survivors’ accounts, later supported by a federal investigation, concluded that African-American troops were massacred by Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s men after surrendering. 

Shouting their battle cry, the six regiments of U.S. Colored Troops struggled through the slashings, and ran into the deadly sharpened chevaux-de-frise up to the parapets, fighting with exceptional bravery. In the years after the war, a regiment Colonel talked proudly of how his troops performed that day. He vividly recalled the sight of them “in the early gray of the morning, march with steady cadence down into the low grounds in front of New Market Heights, when the mists of the morning still hung heavy; saw them disappear, as they entered the fog that enwrapped them like a mantle of death….”

 Despite heavy casualties, the Black troops carried the earthworks there and succeeded in capturing New Market Heights, north of the road. Casualties were heavy. Paine’s brigade suffered more than 1,000 killed, most of them in front of the New Market Heights works. “Better men were never better led,” wrote General Butler. “The colored soldiers by coolness, steadiness, and determined courage and dash have silenced every cavil of the doubters of their soldierly capacity.” 

  After Butler rode across the corpse strewn battlefield, he wrote to his wife, somberly, “I have not been so much moved during this war as I was by that sight.”

Of the 16 Medals of Honor awarded to “Negro” soldiers during the Civil War, 14 were bestowed for this battle. Butler wrote that “the capacity of the negro race for soldiers had then and there been fully settled forever.”

As Grant anticipated, Lee shifted 10,000 troops to meet the new threat against Richmond, weakening his lines west of Petersburg, ultimately hastening the war’s end.