Darkness made it difficult for Colonel Henry L. Abbot of the 1st Connecticut Artillery to determine the precise makeup of the Confederate naval force moving past his position above Virginia’s James River at 8 p.m. on the evening of January 23, 1865. It was vital, however, that he do so. Abbot was the commander of Fort Brady, the large, earthenwork fortification that was the key to the Union defenses on the James. His ability to identify the force passing below could be crucial to the ultimate outcome of the war.

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At the moment, that stretch of the James River was one of the most significant places in the war-ravaged nation. Upriver a few miles from Fort Brady stood the besieged Confederate capital, Richmond. Downstream, Northerners relied upon the river as well. The food, ammunition and supplies necessary to support the Federal armies in Virginia moved through the large supply base at City Point, only a few miles downstream from the fort at the confluence with the Appomattox River.

The Southern flotilla passing Fort Brady was clearly an imposing force. Northern lookouts identified three of the vessels as large, ironclad rams and also made out the wooden gunboat Drewry, and a small steam-driven torpedo boat. Possibly even more vessels were passing in the darkness, Abbot later reported. It was hard for the observers to tell.

Despite their formidable armaments, the batteries at Fort Brady fired only a few fleeting rounds at the passing Southern force. Their targets obscured by the darkness, Northern gunners did little real damage. Nonetheless, by running the fort the Confederates put the Federal forces along the river on alert. Something big was underway. Without knowing it, Abbot and his men were witnessing the beginning of the Confederate Navy’s last, desperate effort to break the Union’s ever-growing stranglehold on the Confederate capital. It would become one of the last important naval engagements of the Civil War — the battle at Trent’s Reach.

The importance of the James River to the Richmond defense cannot be overstated. In April 1861, the mere rumor of the approach of the Federal warship Pawnee provoked near panic in the city. As if playing a scene from a comic opera, the population turned out en masse to defend the city from the imaged threat of the Union warship. From that time forward, the Southerners worked diligently to secure the city from any attack by way of the river.

The powerful batteries at Drewry’s Bluff were one formidable deterrent to Northern naval operations on the James. In May 1862, for instance, its guns pounded a powerful Northern naval squadron so decisively that afterward the Federals were reluctant to approach the Confederate capital by river.

The Southerners, however, did not rely solely upon shore batteries to defend Richmond. In fact, their crowning defensive achievement was undoubtedly the formidable naval squadron built to guard the river approaches to the capital. The backbone of the fleet consisted of three powerful ironclads. The flagship of the James River Squadron was CSS Virginia II, namesake of the most famous Confederate warship of all time, the same ironclad that took part in the famed battle with the Union warship Monitor at Hampton Roads in 1862. Like her predecessor, Virginia II was a formidable warship. Built at Richmond in 1864, the warship drew 13 feet of water and carried a battery of four heavy guns.

The flagship’s consort, CSS Richmond, was equally powerful. Also patterned on the original Virginia, Richmond was, like the flagship, 180 feet long, drew 16 feet of water, and carried four guns. The third Confederate ironclad, the ram Fredericksburg, drew 11 feet of water and carried four guns. These three formidable ironclads did not go into battle alone. To supplement the trio of large fighting ships, the Confederates had gathered a variety of lesser warships, including gunboats, torpedo boats and tugs. Altogether, the Confederated had assembled a powerful squadron for the defense of their capital.

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