The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, fought from 8 to 21 May 1864 in Virginia1, was a costly and inconclusive clash in Grant's Overland Campaign. Grant tried to get between Lee and Richmond; Lee's men dug in first. The fighting peaked on 12 May at the Bloody Angle of the Mule Shoe salient, a day and night of hand-to-hand horror. Neither side broke, and Grant, refusing to retreat, kept moving south2.
After the Wilderness, most Union generals would have fallen back. Grant went south instead, and met Lee dug in at Spotsylvania, where the fighting at the Bloody Angle became a byword for the sheer horror of close combat.
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of the Wilderness · Next: The Battle of Cold Harbor · Key figures: Philip Sheridan
Grant moves south
Unlike his predecessors, Ulysses S. Grant did not retreat after the bloody draw in the Wilderness. He slid his army around Lee's flank toward the crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House, trying to get between the Confederates and Richmond and force Lee into the open.
The race to Spotsylvania
Lee's men won the race, reaching Spotsylvania first3 and throwing up strong earthworks. The Confederate line bulged forward in a great salient the soldiers nicknamed the Mule Shoe, a tempting but dangerous target.
The Mule Shoe
Grant hammered at the line for days. A massed assault on the tip of the Mule Shoe broke through3 at first, but Confederate counterattacks sealed the gap, and the fighting concentrated on the western face of the salient.
The Bloody Angle
On 12 May the struggle at that corner, the Bloody Angle, became some of the most terrible close-quarter fighting of the war, men shooting, stabbing and clubbing each other across the parapet for nearly a full day and night in the rain1, the dead piled in the trenches. Lee pulled his line back to a new position behind the carnage.1
Why Spotsylvania mattered
Spotsylvania ended without a decisive result and at enormous cost4, but it confirmed the new character of the war in the East. Grant would not let go; around this time he wrote that he proposed to fight it out on this line if it took all summer5. The grinding campaign ground on toward Grant's long siege of Petersburg.
