May 6, 1864---The Battle of The Wilderness (Day Two)

MAY 6, 1864:     

The Battle of The Wilderness (Day Two):    

After the hideous end of the first day’s fighting, the Battle of The Wilderness resumed in darkness at 4:45 AM, when the Union Second Corps renewed its assault on the Confederate positions along the Plank Road.  Longstreet counterattacked just after dawn, and again, Robert E. Lee came close to being captured as the battle swirled around him.  A Texas Brigade led him to the rear, as Longstreet redoubled his offense. Around noon, however, Longstreet was struck in the neck by a Confederate bullet. Badly wounded, he turned over field command, first to General Charles Field and then to General Richard Anderson. Longstreet was hors de combat until October 13^th. He was wounded only a few hundred yards from the spot where Stonewall Jackson had been fatally wounded on May 2^nd the previous year. 

  

The rest of the day was marked by inconclusive, but nevertheless horrible fighting. At the same time that individual men fought feverishly, Grant’s subordinates seemed chary of engaging Lee. This led to one of the most famous exchanges of the Civil War:

“General Grant [said a subordinate], this is a crisis that cannot be looked upon too seriously. I know Lee's methods well by past experience; he will throw his whole army between us and the Rapidan, and cut us off completely from our communications."

Grant snapped, "Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."    

Grant had every good reason to snap at the man. He was on edge. The men of both armies were still haunted by the fire the evening before, and the fighting in the charred stretches of The Wilderness was macabre in the extreme:  Not only were the remains of the burned dead underfoot, but the men of both armies found themselves tripping over and among the scattered skulls, ribcages, and limb bones of the men who had fallen in the Battle of Chancellorsville the year before. Bracken had grown up and through the empty eye sockets of skeletonized men. Rusted rifles and bayonets littered the ground; finger bones snapped underfoot as living men passed by. Unexploded ordnance, undisturbed for a year, would detonate when inadvertently stepped on or kicked out of the way.  Occasionally, a man might find rags and scraps of uniforms, a canteen marked with the name of a fallen comrade or opponent. For some of the men (of both armies) who had fought at Chancellorsville, this visit to the killing fields proved too much, and they lost their minds in the midst of combat.    

 

After beating back a desperate Confederate charge that nearly took the crossroads of the Orange Pike and the Brock Road (the only real roads in The Wilderness), the Battle of The Wilderness collapsed into a piecemeal series of isolated small-unit and individual actions. Hampered by the underbrush neither side could advance effectively. Both sides tried to dig in and defend the land they held. In many parts of the field, a stalemate not unlike that of the trench warfare of World War I, still fifty years in the future, developed.