Isaac Arnold
On October 27, 1864, Isaac Arnold died near Hatcher’s Run, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. He was in Company M of the 16th PA Cavalry and died during the Battle of Boydton Plank Road at the age of 24.
Before the war, Arnold worked on his family farm near McClure. His family was large; he had fifteen siblings. He mustered into the army in October 1862 as a three-year volunteer.
After his initial time at Camp Simmons, he was deployed with the 16th PA Cavalry to Camp Casey in Maryland. The unit joined the Army of the Potomac in January 1863, after the Battle of Fredericksburg. Arnold and his fellow cavalrymen were engaged mostly in picket and guard duty for the first half of 1863 and were lightly engaged in the fighting at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (on the far right of the Union line, on the Deardorff Farm). In the regiment’s first year, 53 soldiers died of disease and 13 were killed in action. Arnold experienced more heated engagements at Mine Run in late 1863, at the Wilderness in May 1864, and during Sheridan’s raid toward Lynchburg in June 1864. From July 1864 until his death, Arnold’s regiment supported the siege of Petersburg. Charles Miller, the regiment’s adjutant, wrote that the men were “always on duty, never resting, wearied and exhausted.”
In late October 1864, the 16th PA was part of an attempt to break the extreme right of the Confederate line south of Petersburg. General Ulysses S. Grant hoped to cut off the final two supply lines for the Confederate forces at Petersburg. This is known as the Sixth Pettersburg Offensive. On the day he was killed, Arnold took part in a movement that pushed Confederate pickets and cavalry units back behind their line of earthworks. It was ultimately an unsuccessful attempt. The Confederates had built strong earthworks on the northern side of Hatcher’s Run, a modest creek that turned into quite an obstacle after the Confederates built dams to widen it.
The 16th PA was on the extreme left of the Union line, making it one of the units that received the most fire from James Dearing’s brigade during a counterattack. In a report to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Grant estimated that his entire force had lost about 200 men (killed, wounded, and missing) that day. The total was actually much worse—there were 1,902 casualties from the battle, including 156 killed. Arnold was one of five men in his regiment killed during the battle.
Hatcher’s Run near the site of Isaac Arnold’s death