On the morning of 8 May 1864 Union troops marching south from the Wilderness charged a low ridge called Laurel Hill, just north of Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia, expecting to brush aside a screen of Confederate cavalry. They ran into infantry. Robert E. Lee's army had won the race to the crossroads, and the two armies dug in for nearly two weeks of fighting that included some of the worst close-quarters combat of the Civil War.
The race to the crossroads
The Battle of the Wilderness ended with neither army able to break the other. On the night of 7 May Ulysses S. Grant, instead of retreating, ordered the Army of the Potomac south toward Spotsylvania Court House, a village where the Brock Road met the road to Fredericksburg. If he could hold the crossroads, he would stand between Lee and Richmond, or at least force Lee to fight in the open. How the Wilderness ended is told on our page for 5 May.1 › Battle of the Wilderness, 1864
Lee guessed where Grant was going. Confederate cavalry under Fitzhugh Lee slowed the Union column on the Brock Road around Todd's Tavern. The National Park Service says veterans of the Union Fifth Corps remembered the stop-and-start night march as one of their worst experiences of the war. Meanwhile Richard Anderson, who had taken over the wounded James Longstreet's corps, marched for Spotsylvania on a parallel road. The two main accounts explain his early arrival differently. The National Park Service says the burning Wilderness offered no place to camp, so Anderson kept going without sleep. The American Battlefield Trust says his men were going into camp near the Po River when a courier from J. E. B. Stuart warned them that the Federals were coming, and Anderson put them back on the road at once.2
Laurel Hill
Early on 8 May Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps reached the open ground below Laurel Hill, the last defensible position north of the courthouse. Warren believed only cavalry held it and ordered an attack. The National Park Service describes the Maryland Brigade charging to within 50 yards of the ridge before a blast of artillery and rifle fire cut it down. The defenders were the leading units of Anderson's corps. Warren's attacks failed with heavy losses, and both sides began to entrench. Britannica describes how Lee then had a line of field fortifications some four miles long dug north of Spotsylvania.3
Through the night Richard Ewell's corps came in on Anderson's right and built its trenches along high ground in the dark. At first light they found they had made a great bulge in the line, pointing north toward the enemy, which the soldiers called the Mule Shoe. A salient could be attacked from the front and both sides, but Lee chose to keep it and rely on his artillery to protect it.4
The Mule Shoe and the Bloody Angle
On 9 May the commander of the Union Sixth Corps, John Sedgwick, was shot dead, and the American Battlefield Trust calls him the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the war. On 10 May Colonel Emory Upton led twelve picked regiments in a fast, tightly packed column that broke into the west face of the Mule Shoe before being driven back. Grant decided to try the same idea on a far larger scale.5
On the evening of 11 May Lee, wrongly believing Grant was pulling out, removed the guns from the salient. At dawn on 12 May about 20,000 men of Winfield S. Hancock's corps overran the tip of the Mule Shoe and took many of its defenders prisoner. Lee's counterattacks sealed the breach, and the fight settled on a bend in the works that became known as the Bloody Angle, where men fought hand to hand over log barricades in pouring rain. The sources differ on how long it lasted. The National Park Service and Britannica say eighteen hours, and the American Battlefield Trust twenty-two. In the early hours of 13 May the Confederates fell back to a new line across the base of the salient.6
Two weeks of attrition
A Union attack on Lee's new line on 18 May got nowhere. On 20 and 21 May Grant broke away and marched south again, and Lee followed to keep his army between Grant and Richmond. The losses are counted differently. The National Park Service gives about 18,000 Union and 10,000 Confederate casualties, while the American Battlefield Trust and Britannica give 18,000 and 12,000. The American Battlefield Trust calls the battle inconclusive and the costliest of the Overland Campaign. The National Park Service stresses the loss among Lee's senior officers, which it says his army never made good.7
The full story is in our article on the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. The campaign went on to the North Anna River and to Cold Harbor.8
Also on this day
- 1648: Battle of St Fagans. Near St Fagans in south Wales, a Parliamentarian detachment under Colonel Horton met a much larger rebel force under Rowland Laugharne, largely unpaid former Parliament soldiers.
