During the night, the II Corps pulled back along the track past Dabney's Mill, while Gregg's cavalry retraced its own route to the battlefield, slowed by the destruction of the bridge on the Quaker Road. Due to confusion in the darkness and through mismanagement on the part of some officers, not all the Union picket force was withdrawn. Most regrettably, the available ambulances could not carry all the wounded, and more than 250 were left behind in the care of volunteer surgeons.

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The Army of the Potomac lost more than 1,750 men during that attempt to turn Robert E. Lee's right flank, about 1,000 of them soldiers of the II Corps. Confederate casualties exceeded 1,300, a number more nearly equal to Union losses than had usually been the case during the Petersburg campaign. Hancock's withdrawal left the Boydton Plank Road in Confederate hands, but once again the Army of Northern Virginia had been forced to stretch its lines westward to forestall another strike against the Southside Railroad.

Hancock reported the fight at Hatcher's Run as 'my victory' and wrote to a friend, 'We had a hard fight but beat the enemy.' Grant telegraphed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that the action 'proves to be a decided success.' Yet the evidence of the battlefield–hundreds of wounded left behind in Confederate hands–pointed to something less than outright victory. The goal of cutting Lee's last supply routes remained out of reach. Still, Hancock's men had held their own, and the battle was not a repeat of the previous humiliations at the Jerusalem Plank Road and Reams' Station. Any failure was due to the errors of the commanding generals, who had planned an operation over roads too narrow and distances too great, not the soldiers who fought so hard and so well.

Certainly the men of the 36th Wisconsin, 164th New York and 8th New York Heavy Artillery had no doubts about their performance. All three regiments won special mention in the post-battle reports and, most important, the right to carry their regimental flags. Perhaps the most apt assessment of the Boydton Road affair came from Colonel Lyman, one of Meade's aides: 'As the Mine [Crater] was to be termed an ill-conducted fizzle, so this attempt may be called a well-conducted fizzle.' *

Connecticut author Bruce Trinque writes frequently on the Civil War in the East. For further reading, he suggests: Noah Andre Trudeau's The Last Citadel: Petersburg, Virginia, June 1864­April 1865; or David M. Jordan's Winfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier's Life.

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