Smoke and fire filled the skies south of Petersburg in December 1864 as the Army of the Potomac’s V Corps targeted the Weldon Railroad. Dur­ing a raid along this vital supply line linking southeastern Virginia with North Carolina, liquor-fueled Federals went on a rampage in a corner of the Old Domin­ion that thus far had been largely untouched by war.

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Over an appalling two days, drunken soldiers began looting a number of houses and farms along the raid route near Hicksford, Va., and a few men even resorted to violence, destruction and rape. These shameful incidents inevitably sparked more brutality as locals bent on retribution caught and killed some Union stragglers. The Confederate victims would long remember their humiliation at the hands of “Federal troops who burned their furniture, home and crops, then left women and children in the snow with no food or animals.”

Attitudes toward the demolition of private property had changed notably since the opening years of the war. When Athens, Ala., was sacked in May 1862, for instance, Union brigade commander Colonel John Turchin—who had, as he put it, “shut my eyes” for two hours during the looting—was court-martialed for failing to prevent the destruction, and his division commander was transferred to a backwater garrison. Although President Abraham Lincoln later promoted Turchin, the incident provoked widespread controversy at the time. When Union troops looted the old colonial city of Fredericksburg, Va., on December 12, 1862—the day before the historic battle there—the moral outrage resounded on a national scale, even though no one was actually prosecuted after the fact. But by the end of 1864 the widespread destruction practiced by William T. Sherman’s and Philip Sheridan’s Federal armies gave tacit cover for the depredations committed by Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren’s soldiers during the Weldon Railroad raid.

The Weldon Railroad, known formally as the Petersburg & Weldon Railroad, was a legitimate military target, since it supplied General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which Union troops had besieged at Petersburg at the conclusion of the Overland Cam­paign in June 1864. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant was concerned that the railroad remained a crucial supply source for Lee even after the Union victory at the Battle of Globe Tavern in August, which had cut the line near Petersburg.

The Confederates had continued to run supplies along the railroad to Stony Creek Station, about 20 miles south, then hauled them the rest of the way by wagon along the Boydton Plank Road, the target of unsuccessful Federal offenses the previous September and October. Hoping to “destroy so much of the railroad that it would no longer be practical for Lee’s commissariat to run a wagon line to the end of the track,” Grant on December 5 issued orders to Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac: “You may make immediate preparations to move down the Weldon railroad for the purpose of effectually destroying it as far south as Hicksford, or farther if practicable. Send a force of not less than 20,000 infantry, sixteen or twenty guns, and all your disposable cavalry. Six days rations and twenty rounds of extra ammunition will be enough to carry along….”

Meade selected Warren’s V Corps, reinforced by a division of the II Corps and a cavalry division—altogether nearly 27,000 troops—to conduct the raid. The plan was for Warren’s force to travel light and fast, with as few wagons as possible. Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, commander of the V Corps artillery, recorded in his diary, “As speed of movement will be our main reliance for success, I am to take but four batteries of four guns each along.”

Warren was known as a conservative, professional soldier. The V Corps had been only minimally involved in the looting of Fredericksburg’s colonial city two years earlier, having spent that December day across the Rap­pahannock River at Falmouth. Of course, the soldiers had long made it a regular practice to supplement their rations on the march by foraging for livestock or firewood, but that was a far cry from what was about to happen in one little corner of Sussex County.

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