Battle of Sailor's Creek Battle of Sailor's Creek The Battle of Sailor's Creek was fought on April 6, 1865, near Farmville, Virginia, as part of the Appomattox Campaign, near the end of the American Civil War. It was the last major engagement between the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee and the Union Army under the overall direction of Union General-in-Chief Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. After abandoning Petersburg, the exhausted and starving Confederates headed west, hoping to re-supply at Danville or Lynchburg, before joining General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. But the stronger Union army kept pace
Joseph E. Johnston Johnston, emigrated to Virginia from Scotland in 1726. Joseph was the seventh son of Judge Peter Johnston (1763–1831) and Mary Valentine Wood (1769–1825), a niece of Patrick Henry. He was named for Major Joseph Eggleston, under whom his father served in the American Revolutionary War, in the command of Light-Horse Harry Lee. His brother Charles Clement Johnston served as a congressman, and his nephew John Warfield Johnston was a senator; both represented Virginia. In 1811, the Johnston family moved to Abingdon, Virginia, a town near the Tennessee border, where his father Peter built a home he named Panecillo. Johnston attended