damaging attack. This was expected to permit Lee to shorten his lines and send a large force to help Johnston, or if necessary give the Confederates a head start in evacuating Richmond and Petersburg and combining Lee's entire force with Johnston's dwindling army. Gordon's surprise attack on Fort Stedman in the pre-dawn hours of March 25, 1865 ultimately failed with the Confederates suffering about 4,000 casualties, including about 1,000 captured, which the Confederates could ill afford. The Union Army lost no ground due to the attack and their casualties were too few to deter them from further, immediate action. In response to the Confederate attack on Fort Stedman in the afternoon of March 25, at the Battle of Jones's Farm, Union forces of the II Corps and the VI Corps (Sixth Corps) captured Confederate picket lines near Armstrong's Mill and extended the left end of the Union line about closer to the Confederate fortifications. This put the VI Corps within easy striking distance, about , of the Confederate line. After the Confederate defeats at Fort Stedman and Jones's Farm, Lee knew that Grant would soon move against the only remaining Confederate supply lines to Petersburg, the South Side Railroad and the Boydton Plank Road, which also might cut off all routes of retreat from Richmond and Petersburg. March 29 orders and movements Grant's orders On March 24, 1865, the day before the Confederate attack on Fort Stedman, Grant already had planned an offensive for March 29, 1865. The objective was to draw the Confederates out into an open battle where they might be defeated and their military effectiveness destroyed. In the alternative, if the Confederates held their lines, the Union force could cut the remaining road and railroad supply and communication routes, the South Side Railroad and the Boydton Plank Road, which connected with the previously severed Weldon Railroad to Petersburg, and the Richmond and Danville Railroad to Richmond, and to stretch Lee's line to the breaking point. Grant ordered Major General Edward Ord's to move part of the Army of the James from the lines near Richmond to fill in the lines to be vacated by the II Corps commanded by Major General Andrew A. Humphreys at the southwest end of the Petersburg line before II Corps moved to the west. Ord moved two divisions of Major General John Gibbon's XXIV Corps under Brigadier Generals Charles Devens and William