May 5, 1864---The Battle of The Wilderness (Day One)

MAY 5, 1864:    

The Battle of The Wilderness (Day One):    

        

All Civil War battles, no matter their scope and scale, had a horrible quality about them. With low-velocity ordnance but ever-improving weapons accuracy, men were literally blasted to pieces and torn to shreds in firefights. Shattered limbs, torn entrails, pooling blood, and the screams of the wounded, dying, maddened, and merely horrified were the punctuation marks of every battle. 

Massed infantry took brutal punishment from massed infantry and from massed artillery. Huge-scale battles like Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg were nightmarish killing grounds.

And yet, there is a dismal sameness to all major Civil War battles. In every battle, regardless of the name of the place, there is a “Stone Wall” or a “Sunken Road” or a “Wheatfield” or a “Cornfield” or a bottlenecked bridge or a flooded ford, or a “Bloody Angle” or a “Slaughter Pen” or a “Devil’s Den” or a stream stained blackly red with blood where men died by the hundreds in an afternoon.

But even among hardened Civil War veterans, there was no place worse than The Wilderness.

Precisely a year before almost to the day, Robert E. Lee had used The Wilderness --- a tangled, heavily-wooded place of scrub forest --- to entrap The Army of The Potomac and decimate it during the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lee decided to replay the same hand he had held, and crashed his 60,000-man army into Grant’s 120,000-man army. As he had done with Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, he did with James Longstreet at The Wilderness, sending a large force around Grant’s flank to close the jaws of his intended trap. Lee misjudged one element, however. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant was not “Fighting Joe” Hooker. 

Hooker had (most say intentionally) ceded the offense to Lee early in the Battle of Chancellorsville, allowing Lee to call all the shots in what became known as his “perfect” battle.  Grant refused to do the same thing. 

 

The Battle of The Wilderness began on the afternoon of May 5^th when Grant’s Fifth Corps attacked Confederate positions along the Orange Turnpike. As this attack commenced, Union troops of the Second and Sixth Corps were also grappling with Confederate forces on the Plank Road.  During the battle, a squad of Union soldiers emerged from the woods and surprised General Lee, who ran for safety. The Union men, just as taken aback at finding Lee without planning to, did not pursue him.

Beyond the change in Union Commanders, one other element was different --- the weather. Early May 1863 had been rainy, and the Wilderness had been lush, its creeks and streams running full, its verdant fecundity an ironic counterpoint to the slaughter going on amongst the Spring growth.

Not so in 1864. It had been a very dry season, and the woods were a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Friction-heated bullets and flash-lit gunpowder provided far too many sparks. As the battle wore on through the afternoon, the woods caught fire. The incapacitated wounded, isolated in the underbrush, could do nothing but scream for help and wait to be burned to death. As the fire spread, both sides withdrew their ambulatory troops, who spent the night listening to shrieking men dying in agony, and the greedy crackle and sizzle of burning fat and popping bones as the smell of burning human flesh seared its way into the men’s memories. Requests to mount rescue parties were denied by the leaders on both sides.   

Although the battling on May 5^th was fierce, it was ultimately inconclusive. Both sides stayed in place watching the conflagration as darkness fell.