May 18, 1864---"Bloody Spotsylvania"; The Battle of Harris' Farm; The Gold Hoax

MAY 18, 1864: 

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House enters its eleventh day. With the weather cleared and the ground dry enough to traverse, again Ulysses S. Grant throws thousands of troops against Laurel Hill. Although Lee has withdrawn from the salient known as The Muleshoe, and although Grant has driven the Confederates from The Bloody Angle and the other outlying defensive lines, this time Grant tries to break through Lee’s inner defenses on Laurel Hill, only to face massed cannons. 

A contemporary Confederate report stated dryly: “Very little musketry was used in this engagement, for the reason that the enemy did not come near enough our lines.” 

1,250 Union men are killed in the assault, most torn to pieces by heavy ordnance. This day of slaughter, amazingly, has no name of its own in history, but gave a name to the field of battle: “Bloody Spotsylvania.” 

The Battle of Harris' Farm: 

Even as the frontal assault at Laurel Hill rages, General Grant begins to move troops around the Confederate right flank, hoping to interpose Union forces between Lee and Richmond. A line of New York infantry crosses the Ni River, only to find a Confederate battery on the far bank. A roaring battle commences. The Rebel battery is immobilized on wet ground, and the New Yorkers, despite facing down cannons, are surprisingly fierce. 

Union troops and cannons keep arriving en masse, and soon the banks of the Ni are a bare-blasted no-man’s land. Lee begins to fear that the battle may turn against him, leaving the road to Richmond in Union hands. He orders his troops to disengage from battling the Federals. Again he moves into a blocking position between Grant and Richmond. 

Even as Grant and Lee and Sherman and Johnston are locked in vicious combat at opposite ends of the Eastern Theatre, a financial panic grips the nation when two New York City newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce, each publish the story that President Abraham Lincoln has issued a proclamation conscripting 400,000 more men into the Union army. Given the reports from wholesale carnage coming from the battlefields the Northern public immediately assumes that this means that the war is not going well for the Union, and Wall Street reacts as might be expected: Stocks go into free fall, and investors begin buying gold, which balloons in value more than 10% within a few hours. 

 

It turns out that the story is a hoax, cooked up by Joseph Howard Jr., the City Editor of the anti-Lincoln Brooklyn Eagle, who has invented a fake Associated Press dispatch about the President’s call for more troops. Not unsurprisingly, Howard has also just recently invested heavily in specie, and makes a killing in just a few hours. 

Howard is arrested on May 22nd, and spends three months in prison. He is released on August 22, 1864. With perfect irony, the very day Howard is released, President Lincoln issues a call for 500,000 more soldiers.