• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 186 0

meandering creeks, and primitive cart tracks that had been fought over several times before. The gloominess of the place was made more intense by the unburied skeletons of soldiers on both sides who had died in previous battles on this unpromising ground. It was Grant’s hope to cross the river, get through the Wilderness as fast as possible, and fight Lee in more open country where he could make full use of his cavalry and artillery, but Lee was too quick for him. He did not attempt to hinder Grant’s crossing of the Rapidan, but the moment Grant’s columns were in the Wilderness, Lee attacked, with Ewell on the left and A. P. Hill on the right, bringing Longstreet up as fast as possible to attack between them, in the center. Grant’s long columns had to be reformed into three corps, under (from right to left) John Sedgwick, Gouveurneur Warren, and Hancock. It took time on both sides to form a coherent line of battle in such broken, thickly wooded country, and Grant’s army was quickly pushed back off its main north-south road into the woods, while Lee’s army retained control over the roads running through the Wilderness from west to east. A day of bitter fighting took place, during which the dry undergrowth caught fire, burning the wounded to death where they lay—an additional horror in a day of horrors. Despite Lee’s reputation for the daring strategic move, it was, as Wellington described Waterloo, “a pounding match,” in which both sides simply closed with each other, fired at point-blank range, and charged with the bayonet.

Grant was expecting the unlucky Burnside to march northwest from the James River to support him, but Burnside became lost in the thick woods and did not appear until late in the day. Almost everybody in the Union army expected that Grant would retreat back across the Rapidan after receiving such a severe mauling—certainly McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade, when they had been in command, would have done so—but Grant ordered another attack at dawn, and the second day turned out to be as bloody as the first. At the end of it the army was ordered to move during the night, not back to the Rapidan as they expected, but instead to swing around Lee’s right, moving south toward Spotsylvania Court House.

Lee was momentarily taken by surprise, but he moved his army fast, getting a step ahead of Grant, and was already in front of Spotsylvania while Grant was trying unsuccessfully to move around his right. From May 8 through May 20, Grant pummeled Lee’s positions around Spotsylvania in a series of brutal, head-on attacks, always searching for a way to get around Lee’s right, with mounting casualties. On May 11 he wrote to Halleck, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer” (another Grant line that was to become famous), and he clearly meant it. As the casualties rose the old rumors and criticism that had surfaced after Shiloh were raised again—that Grant was drunk, incompetent, “a butcher.” Union casualties may have been as high as eighteen thousand—the fighting was so intense that there was no time to count them—and Confederate casualties reached almost twelve thousand, a crippling loss for the Army of Northern Virginia; still the fighting went on with no letup. Grant truly had “a bulldog grip” on Lee.

At last Grant turned Lee’s flank, but Lee once more managed to get ahead of him, and the two armies fought day by day, foot by foot, Grant advancing, Lee retreating toward Richmond, until, on June 2, Grant was within six miles of Richmond, with nothing but Lee’s dwindling but still considerable army between him and the city. Still, that was enough. Lee was an engineer—his positions were carefully chosen, and protected with formidable breastworks and deep trenches. Grant ordered a full attack for the next day—the day that would see him lose his temper at the Union teamster beating a horse around the head—and by noon, in less than half an hour’s fighting, he had lost some seven thousand men without shifting the Confederates an inch from their positions.2 It was, even in his own eyes, the