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.

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.

May 4, 1864---The Overland Campaign begins

MAY 4, 1864:    

The last great military campaign of the Civil War begins, the Overland Campaign, designed by Ulysses S. Grant and The Army of The Potomac to box in General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and destroy it through attrition. Although battle had been a daily occurrence during the Civil War, most of the 10,000 battles were small- to medium-scale engagements. The larger engagements, like Antietam and Gettysburg had been marked by long and slow buildups, massive violence and destruction, and disengagement after which both sides retired to lick their wounds and prepare for the next epic contest. This gave both sides time to recuperate, re-equip, and re-deploy.

Grant throws this strategy out the window. From now on, The Army of Northern Virginia will be under constant and unrelenting pressure as battle follows battle in quick succession, and from any direction of the compass. Although Union losses will be heavy, Grant is counting on the fact that the Union can afford to lose a host quicker than Lee can lose a brigade. For the next terrible, storied forty days he will do just that.

An epic showdown ensues that eventually decides the war. On this day, The Army of the Potomac moves out of its winter quarters and crosses the Rapidan River, advancing to the tangled woods of The Wilderness. Grant plans to move Federal troops quickly around Lee's left flank and advance beyond the Wilderness before engaging with the Confederates. But logistics plays a part; troops and supplies are slow in moving. As the dusk of May 4^th falls, the he Union is not advancing fast enough. Seeing an opportunity, Lee rushes in with his full force, drawing the Federals into an unwanted battle in The Wilderness.