Robert Stiles, Four years under Marse Robert

I have little or no recollection of our search for Grant, except that there was nothing about it calculated to make an impression — that it seemed rather a slow, stupid affair. Of course we crossed the Chickahominy, and then we worked down toward Malvern Hill. I am not even sure, however, whether we left the vicinity of Cold Harbor on the 13th or waited a day or two in that neighborhood. We did not cross the James River, I think, until the night of the 17th; but from that time everything seemed to have waked up, and though we saw no enemy, yet we knew where he was, and that Petersburg was his immediate objective and not Richmond, nor any point on James River.

We made a rapid all-night march, which was a very trying one, on account of the heat and the heavy dust which covered everything and everybody and rendered breathing all but impossible. We stopped an hour or so to rest the horses-we did not so much regard the men-and arrived in Petersburg in the early morning, our division and our battalion being among the first of Lee's troops to arrive. We were just in time to prevent Burnside from making an assault, which would probably have given him the city. General Beauregard had made admirable use of the scant force at his command and had successfully repulsed all previous attacks, but he did not have a garrison at all adequate to resist the countless thousands of Grant's main army, which had now begun to arrive, and which seems to have been deterred from the assault by the knowledge of our arrival.

The whole population of the city appeared to be in the streets and thoroughly alive to the narrow escape they had made. Though we had done nothing save to come right along, after we found out where to come, they seemed to be overflowing with gratitude to us. Ladies, old and young, met us at their front gates with hearty welcome, cool water, and delicious viands, and did not at all shrink from grasping our rough and dirty hands. There is nothing more inspiring to a soldier than to pass through the streets of a city he is helping to defend, and to be greeted as a deliverer by its women and children. He would be a spiritless wretch