Started at the usual time and marched eighteen miles today.
We bivouacked in some old camps which our men had built during the siege of
Petersburg, within two miles of town. I rode all the way today with the wagon
train. A part of the Fifteenth Corps came in ahead of the Seventeenth Corps,
but our corps beat the Fifteenth into Petersburg after all their running to
beat us. The two generals in command of the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Army
Corps started out, after crossing the Roanoke river, to see which corps could
reach Petersburg first. So while one brigade of the Fifteenth Corps came into
Petersburg first, the entire Seventeenth Corps arrived in town ahead of the
Fifteenth.
Source: Alexander G. Downing, Edited by Olynthus B.,
Clark, Downing’s Civil War Diary, p. 274
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