May 12, 1864---The Death of Jeb Stuart; The Battle of The Bloody Angle

MAY 12, 1864:            

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House   (Day Five):   

Jeb Stuart dies of the wounds he received at Yellow Tavern.

With Stuart’s death, two thirds of the great and inspiring military triumvirate that has sustained the Confederacy is gone --- Stonewall Jackson just a year before, and now the dashing cavalier, Stuart. Robert E. Lee is left alone as the last of the Rebellion’s great military leaders. 

The Battle of The Bloody Angle:      

General Grant remains convinced that a human battering ram can take the Confederate position at Laurel Hill near Spotsylvania Court House. He orders General Winfield Scott Hancock to rush the defenses at The Muleshoe. The attack commences at dawn What develops is the worst close-quarter battle of the Civil War, remembered as The Bloody Angle. Hancock, like Upton before him, manages to breach the Confederate line, taking 3,000 prisoners, but as Confederate reinforcements pour into The Muleshoe, the dead begin to pile up five deep. 

The Bloody Angle is so clogged with the dead that Union and Confederate soldiers assist each other in moving corpses so that they have enough room to kill each other.  Gunfire becomes inefficient; instead men fix bayonets and begin to stab, slash and hack each other to death. 

By 4:00 PM, 9,000 of 15,000 Union men making the attack are wounded, missing or killed. Confederate losses are 8,000 total.  The Union takes The Muleshoe, but Lee simply pulls back his lines, erasing the salient. Laurel Hill is still a Confederate mountain.