The Battle of Fort Stedman, also known as the Battle of Hare's Hill, was fought on March 25, 1865, during the final weeks of the American Civil War. The Union Army fortification in the siege lines around Petersburg, Virginia, was attacked in a pre-dawn Confederate assault by troops led by Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon. The attack was the last serious attempt by Confederate troops to break the Siege of Petersburg. After an initial success, Gordon's men were driven back by Union troops of the IX Corps commanded by Maj. Gen. John G. Parke.
1865 photograph at Fort Stedman by Timothy H. O'Sullivan
View of the interior of Fort Stedman
Maj. Gen. John G. Parke
Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon
John Brown Gordon was an attorney, a slaveholding planter, general in the Confederate States Army, and a politician in the postwar years. By the end of the Civil War, he had become "one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted generals."
Gordon in uniform, c. 1862
Gordon portrait by Mathew Brady, c. 1855-1865
John C. Gordon, a man who had been enslaved by John B. Gordon, joined the Union's 12th United States Colored Infantry Regiment in 1863 (The Salina Daily Union, May 5, 1910)
Postbellum engraving by Campbell Brothers, New York