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The casualties from the battle were certainly enough to make most commanders unwilling to risk another clash with Lee; but Grant was different from his predecessors. The wagons were moving because Grant was continuing the advance to Richmond. He informed General Meade that the entire army must be on the march by midnight. Once the long lines began moving, Grant took his place at the front so that the men would know he was leading them toward, rather than away from, battle.

Lee was prepared for the news. He knew he was facing a far tougher opponent than his previous adversaries. He assumed Grant was heading for the crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House—the road south from there being the swiftest route to Richmond—and raced to get there ahead of him. Over the next couple of days, the two armies converged on Spotsylvania, skirmishing all the way.54 Lee managed to stay in front, but barely: using bayonets and tin cups, his army hastily dug itself in along the intersection at the court house in a thin line that extended for about three miles. The Confederates braced for Grant’s attack on the tenth. During the afternoon, Union regiments clambered through the woods and out into the open in an attempt to punch a hole in Lee’s defenses. The Confederate line bulged in the middle, where the ground was higher than the rest of the undulating landscape. Here, at a point dubbed “the Mule Shoe” because of its U shape, a Federal attack succeeded in capturing twelve hundred prisoners, temporarily threatening the integrity of Lee’s line. A simultaneous attack on the Confederate position around Spotsylvania Court House was led in part by the 79th New York Volunteers. Though Ebenezer Wells was furious at being in the front lines when his release was less than three days away, he feared being called a coward even more than he feared dying.55 But here the Confederates held their position, and the attack ended at darkness with once again nothing achieved. The Highlanders were kept at the front lines until the final minute of their enlistment, when the regiment was ordered to march to Fredericksburg with two hundred prisoners in tow.

Grant tried to shake Lee from Spotsylvania by sending Major General Philip Sheridan and 10,000 cavalrymen to attack the Confederate defenses in front of Richmond. The raid forced Lee to dispatch Jeb Stuart and 4,500 troopers to pursue the Federals, and the two cavalry forces clashed on May 11 at Yellow Tavern, only six miles from Richmond. Stuart received a fatal shot in his stomach as he attempted to rally his outnumbered corps. Sheridan could have destroyed Stuart’s cavalry, but Lee’s nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, known as Fitz, immediately took charge and was able to effect a skillful retreat.

When first checked by Lee, Grant had sent a telegram to General Halleck in Washington, which read in part: “I propose to fight it out on this line [of attack] if it takes all summer.” He showed his determination by launching a second attack against the Mule Shoe on May 12. The nature of the ground invited the attackers in, but getting out—especially once the earth had been churned to mud—was almost impossible. The Highlanders had escaped by a hair’s breadth on a day that cost the two armies more than ten thousand men. The brutal hand-to-hand fighting between the Federals and Confederates led to the area’s being christened “the Bloody Angle.” “Rank after rank was riddled by shot and shell and bayonet-thrusts, and finally sank, a mass of torn and mutilated corpses,” recalled a horror-struck member of Grant’s staff who witnessed the assault. “Then fresh troops rushed madly forward to replace the dead, and so the murderous work went on.”56

The Army of the Potomac had suffered twice as many casualties as the Army of Northern Virginia since May 5. A rough estimate showed that on May 13, 83,000 Federals remained of the 119,000 who had crossed the Rapidan River on the fourth. But Lee had not only lost a quarter of his army: a third of his commanders were also gone, and more responsibilities were devolving onto his shoulders. Grant, on