On the morning of April 4 the grand advance was begun. Across the narrow neck of land that divided the waters of the Chesapeake and James, the magnificent hosts of the Army of the Potomac, stretching from shore to shore, moved forward to the fortified post of the enemy at Yorktown. Battlefields, like history, repeat themselves. It is said the plains of Esdraelon have been the theater of a greater number of conflicts at arms than any other known portion of the globe, so here at Yorktown, where the Sons of Virginia, Pennsylvania and others of the thirteen colonies humbled the British under Cornwallis in 1781, and whose lines of entrenchments were yet visible, were again to meet in 1862, the sons of these sires of revolutionary fame, in martial combat, not shoulder to shoulder, as then, but in opposing phalanx. The line of advance of the 57th was by the main road leading from Hampton to Yorktown by way of Little and Big Bethel, the latter place being the scene of General B. F. Butler's unfortunate night venture of 1861.
The afternoon of the second day's march brought the advance of the army in front of the enemy's formidable works around Yorktown and along the Warwick river. For the space of nearly a mile, immediately in front of the town, the country was open, scarcely a tree or a shrub impeding the view of the fortifications, whose embrasures bristled with heavy ordnance. With drums beating and colors flying we marched boldly along the way and filing off into the open fields deliberately proceeded to pitch our tents and make our camp in the very jaws, as it were, of these frowning batteries. Whether it was a fear of bringing on a general engagement, or amazement at our audacity that kept the Confederates quiet behind their earth-works we did not then know, but subsequent events proved the former to be the cause. Not until the day following did they manifest a disposition to disturb our repose, and then only by a solitary shot that plunged into one of our company's streets, burying itself deep in the soft earth. This shot was sufficient, however, to admonish us of the fact that they had a perfect range of our camp, and could, of they chose, make it exceedingly uncomfortable for us. As a result we very deliberately withdrew, without the loss of a tent or knapsack, back to the main line in the woods, though not wholly beyond the range of their guns.