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| Pontoon bridge at Deep Bottom.2 |
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to fight their way to Reams's Station, on the Weldon road, which they expected to find in the possession of the Nationals.
On the contrary, the cavalry of Hampton, and infantry under Mahone and Finnegan were there in great strength.
In attempting to force their lines, Wilson and Kautz were defeated with heavy loss, and with difficulty they made their way back to the Army before Petersburg, with the men and horses of their terribly shattered columns nearly exhausted.1 no other raid in the rear of the Confederates was undertaken for several months after the return of this one.
It was too dangerous and expensive a service, under the circumstances, to be made profitable.
and now, after a sanguinary struggle for two months, both armies were willing to have a little repose, and there was a lull in the active operations of the campaign, excepting what pertained to intrenching.
The Union Army thus investing Petersburg, at which Point Richmond, Twenty miles distant, was best defended, had lost, within eight or nine weeks, nearly seventy thousand men. Re-enforcements had kept up its numbers, but not the
quality of its materials.
Many veterans remained; but a vast portion of the Army was composed, if not of entirely raw troops, of those who had been little disciplined, and in a great degree lacked the buoyant spirit of the early
1 in the fight at Reams's Station, they lost their guns, a small train, and many men and horses. The Confederates claimed to have captured 1,000 effective men, besides the wounded, 13 guns, and 80 wagons. Wilson estimated his entire loss during the raid at between 750 and 1,000 men. Grant said, in his Report, that the damage done to the enemy “more than compensated for the losses we sustained.” the raiders destroyed about sixty miles of railway, with mills, factories, and blacksmith shops. At Reams's Station, about 1,000 negroes, most of them mounted on horses “borrowed for the occasion,” and following the Union cavalry, were captured by the Confederates. Many of these, Wilson reported, were slaughtered without mercy, and the remainder were remanded to slavery.
2 this shows the appearance of the pontoon bridge at Deep Bottom, with Butler's little dispatch-steamer Grey Hound, lying just above it.
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