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

But my staff officer had seen Smith and Hancock talking together. Smith got Hancock at nine o'clock at night to relieve his own men from their position in the fortifications on the ground that they were tired and hadn't ammunition. That they were tired in one sense is most true, not because they had marched some seven or eight miles in the morning, but only because they had stood around doing nothing all the rest of the day. As to his being out of ammunition there was no excuse for that because his men hadn't fired five shots apiece all day and why was not Smith's ammunition there? If he had sent to me, there was time enough in three hours for me to have supplied them with ammunition from Bermuda Hundred, or with anything else they needed. And yet, if they were out of ammunition, he never asked me for a cartridge.

I can imagine the reason why Smith withdrew his troops from the line and got them in a movable column, and had Hancock hold the lines with his men. If Smith had moved at daylight on the 16th, as I rather think he meant to do, then Smith's troops would lead the column and he would get the glory of having captured Petersburg.

Here it is opportune to state a fact that is hardly conceivable save that the evidence of it is overwhelming. Lee was caught napping.¹ Although a large portion of Grant's army had crossed the James River on the 15th, and substantially all of it by noon of the 16th, Lee had no knowledge of that fact. Indeed, he had lost Grant's army entirely, and did not know where it was. This fact Beauregard learned at Petersburg on the 16th by a despatch from Lee in which he asks whether he has heard of Grant crossing the James River.²

Lee himself did not reach Petersburg until the 18th of June, at 11.20, not until then being convinced that Grant's army had passed the James. This explains fully why none of his troops passed our lines on the 14th, 15th, or 16th, and not until late in the afternoon or evening of the 17th of June.

If General D. H. Hill, of the Confederate Army, is correct, Lee had been caught napping many times.³

It is established by incontestable evidence that when Smith made his attack upon Petersburg with more than sixteen thousand men, the negroes under his command captured the redoubts on the line Nos. 5 to 9 inclusive, and broke throught the line from Nos. 3 to