Qualla: Battle of Cumberland Church

Battle of Cumberland Church: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Grant wrote the letter at five o'clock in the afternoon on April 7, 1865, from the Randolph House hotel in Farmville. He was forty-two years old and three days from the end of a four-year war. Three miles up the road, beyond the Appomattox River, his Second Corps was being repulsed in front of a Methodist meeting house called Cumberland Church. Confederate fire had broken the Union assaults. The Army of Northern Virginia, somehow, was still fighting. Grant set down his pen, addressed the letter to General Robert E. Lee, and asked him to surrender. Brigadier General Seth Williams delivered it through the lines around eight-thirty that night. Lee showed it to James Longstreet, who read it and said, "Not yet."

Battle of Cumberland Church: The Bridges at Farmville

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cumberland Church was not the only thing burning that afternoon. After the catastrophe at Sailor's Creek the day before, Confederate troops under Richard Anderson and John B. Gordon had fled to High Bridge over the Appomattox, the railroad bridge with a wagon road underneath, and...

Battle of Cumberland Church: Mahone's High Ground

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

William Mahone, the Petersburg railroad president who had become one of Lee's most reliable division commanders, fortified the high ground around Cumberland Church about four miles west of High Bridge and three miles north of Farmville. Longstreet brought up the rest of the survi...

Battle of Cumberland Church: A False Sound of Reinforcements

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Humphreys realized he was facing not one Confederate division but the entire remaining Army of Northern Virginia. He sent word back to Meade asking for reinforcements. The Union VI Corps was supposed to come up from the south, but no one north of the river yet knew that the Confe...

Battle of Cumberland Church: Grant's Letter

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

While the fight at Cumberland Church was breaking off in the late afternoon, Grant was at the Randolph House in Farmville writing the letter that would begin the surrender correspondence. He had been a quartermaster in the Mexican War twenty years before, had failed at farming an...

Battle of Cumberland Church: Night March West

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Around eleven that night Lee pulled his army out of Cumberland Church and started west again. Roads turned into quagmires under the rain and the constant traffic. Mules died in their traces. Wagons that could not be moved were burned. Longstreet, with Lee in his column, moved by ...