Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[687] Danville road thoroughly and the canal, Lee would be immediately forced South and Richmond would be ours. After consultation I directed General Smith to make his attack upon the upper batteries of the line around Petersburg, although I had learned that the fortifications were stronger there,--that is, they were more pronounced works than those lower works over which Kautz had trotted on the 9th of June. This Smith did.

Smith had with him some eighteen thousand effective men. There were in Petersburg, as I have said, but twenty-two hundred, or one man to every four and one half feet of intrenchments around that city.¹ Of all that Smith had been so thoroughly informed that he knew it. He knew the situation of that part of the fortifications of Petersburg, because up to the time of his attack there had been no substantial change in them for months. My proposition to him was, as to Gillmore, to go in by an attack and “rush,” and I represented to him strongly that Gillmore on his expedition had only rushed at his dinner.

Now I think Smith was an efficient soldier in many respects,--although it would seem that I have every cause to dislike the man in every relation of life. But he had one inevitable regular army failing — the vice Assistant Secretary Dana wrote to the War Department² Wright and Warren were accused of: “interminable reconnoissances” --waiting and waiting, not going at a thing when he was told, but looking all around to see if he could not do something else than what he was told to do, or do it in a different way from what he was told.

Fearing lest he might believe, as an excuse for reconnoitring, that Lee's troops had gone into Petersburg or could get there before him, I telegraphed him that since he marched, not a body of troops had passed through Richmond on the Petersburg road, the only way they could get to Petersburg.³ This information I also gave to Grant.

It was impossible for any considerable body of troops to pass into Petersburg through Swift Creek or across the Mattoax Bridge without its being known at my signal stations. In the clear, warm, dry weather that we had, the cloud of dust itself would announce the passage of a squadron of cavalry, and if they came by rail, such passage would be detected at night by the noise of the train, and in the daytime by seeing the cars.