Battle of Spotsylvania Court House

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House left behind an unusual object, now held by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. It is a 22-inch stump of an oak tree, its trunk cut clean through by rifle fire alone. Soldiers from the 24th Michigan Infantry Regiment and the 6th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, part of the Union's Iron Brigade, are believed to have done it. That single detail says something about what happened in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, during two weeks of fighting in May 1864. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and Major General George G. Meade had just fought Confederate General Robert E. Lee to a bloody standstill in the Wilderness. Instead of retreating, they marched toward a rural crossroads called Spotsylvania Court House. What made a crossroads worth a fight that stripped an entire forest bare with gunfire alone? And how could a battle lasting from the 8th through the 21st of May 1864 end with both sides calling it a victory?

• 2. A War of Attrition

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  In March 1864, Grant was summoned from the Western Theater and promoted to lieutenant general, taking command of every Union army in the field. He set up headquarters alongside Meade's Army of the Potomac, though Meade remained its actual commander. Grant left William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies.

  Working with President Abraham Lincoln, Grant devised a coordinated strategy striking the Confederacy from several directions at once. Union forces would press Lee near Richmond, while also pushing into the Shenandoah Valley, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama. It was the first time Union forces coordinated one offensive plan across so many theaters at once.

  Grant's target was never the city of Richmond itself, but the destruction of Lee's army. He gave Meade a blunt order: 'Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.' Lincoln had pushed this strategy for years, reasoning that Richmond would fall on its own once its defending army was gone. Grant was ready to grind through a war of attrition, since the Union could replace lost soldiers and equipment far more easily than the Confederacy.

  On the 5th of May, Grant's army crossed the Rapidan River and entered the tangled woodland known as the Wilderness, where Lee's Army of Northern Virginia attacked. Lee was outnumbered by roughly 60,000-100,000, but dense foliage gave his men a terrain advantage. Two days of fighting there produced almost 29,000 casualties without a clear winner.

  Previous Union commanders facing this same kind of stalemate had turned back north behind the Rappahannock River. Grant instead turned southeast, betting that speed could still decide the campaign.

• 3. Race to the Crossroads

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  On the night of the 7th of May, Grant ordered Meade's army to march on two routes toward Spotsylvania Court House. He wanted at least one corps there by the following morning. Warren's V Corps took the Brock Road, followed by Hancock's II Corps, while Sedgwick's VI Corps and Burnside's IX Corps swung toward Chancellorsville before turning south.

  Meade sent Sheridan's cavalry ahead to clear the Brock Road, but the troopers bogged down almost immediately. Colonel J. Irvin Gregg's brigade was stopped at Corbin's Bridge by Confederate cavalry under Wade Hampton and Rooney Lee, and dug in west of Todd's Tavern instead. Nearby, Wesley Merritt's division ran into Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry behind barricades on the Brock Road. After a sharp fight, Sheridan called a halt for the night at Todd's Tavern. When Meade reached Todd's Tavern after midnight and found Sheridan's cavalrymen asleep instead of clearing the road, his temper snapped.

  Lee, uncertain of Grant's intentions, learned that river-crossing equipment had been pulled from Germanna Ford, ruling out a Union retreat. He ordered his artillery chief, William N. Pendleton, to cut a road south through the woods. Anderson's First Corps, eager to escape the stench of the burning Wilderness, began marching by about 10 p.m.

  At dawn on the 8th of May, Union cavalry attacked Fitzhugh Lee's barricades again and were repulsed. Warren's infantry then broke through under John C. Robinson's division. Fitzhugh Lee's horse artillery made a stand near the Alsop farm, buying time for cavalrymen to form a defensive line the men called Laurel Hill. Anderson's infantry, resting at the Po River over breakfast, rushed two brigades to Laurel Hill. They arrived just as Warren's men closed to within 100 yards. Assuming only cavalry stood in his way, Warren ordered an immediate attack, and the V Corps was thrown back with heavy losses.

  Meanwhile, cavalry under James H. Wilson occupied the town of Spotsylvania Court House at 8 a.m. Confederate infantry soon forced them back up the Fredericksburg Road. The episode, on top of the uncleared Brock Road, pushed Meade's temper past its limit. Sheridan told him he could whip Stuart's cavalry if Meade would let him try. When Meade reported this to Grant, Grant simply replied, 'Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it.'

  Sheridan rode out the next day with 10,000 cavalrymen. They mortally wounded Stuart at the Battle of Yellow Tavern on the 11th of May and did not return until the 24th. Grant and Meade would spend the next two weeks without cavalry to scout Lee's lines. Meade, meanwhile, judged Sedgwick's corps 'constitutionally slow' and told Warren flatly that he had 'lost his nerve.'

• 4. Upton's Gamble

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  Overnight after the 8th of May, Confederate soldiers dug more than 4 miles of earthworks, reinforced with timber and positioned for enfilade fire. The line bulged outward in a horseshoe shape more than a mile long, a salient the soldiers called the Mule Shoe. Lee's engineers knew it was a weakness even as they built it.

  At about 9 a.m. on the 9th of May, Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick was inspecting his VI Corps line. A Confederate sharpshooter shot him through the head, killing him instantly. He had just told his men, 'they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.' Sedgwick was one of the most beloved generals in the Union Army, and Meade replaced him with Horatio G. Wright, his senior division commander.

  That same day, Grant noticed Confederates shifting from west to east and ordered Hancock's II Corps across the Po River to strike Lee's left flank. Hancock grew nervous about the defended Block House Bridge and delayed his attack until morning, a pause that let Lee reposition two divisions against him overnight.

  On the 10th of May, Jubal Early attacked the division Hancock had left behind under Francis C. Barlow. Confederate shelling set the surrounding woods on fire as Barlow's men retreated across the Po, burning the bridges behind them. At 4 p.m., elements of the II and V Corps assaulted Laurel Hill again, advancing through a grove of shattered dead pine trees. They were repulsed with severe losses yet again.

  Around 6 p.m., Col. Emory Upton led 12 hand-picked regiments, about 5,000 men in four battle lines, against a weak point called Doles's Salient. The position was named for Brig. Gen. George P. Doles's Georgia troops, who held that stretch of line. Upton's men were ordered to rush the open field without stopping to fire, reaching the earthworks before defenders could get off more than a couple of shots.

  Gershom Mott's division was meant to widen the breach, but it was the weakest unit in the army. Worn down since the Wilderness and close to the end of its enlistments, the men panicked under artillery fire and fled. Upton's men still broke into the Confederate trenches after fierce hand-to-hand fighting, but with no support arriving, Lee and Ewell's counterattack forced them back out. British historian Charles Francis Atkinson later called the charge 'one of the classic infantry attacks of military history.' Grant promoted Upton to brigadier general for it.

  That same evening, Burnside's men advanced to within a few hundred yards of the courthouse, completely turning Lee's right flank, but were ordered back before anyone realized the opportunity. Grant later wrote in his memoirs that he blamed himself, not Burnside, for not having had a staff officer there to report the position in time.

• 5. The Bloody Angle

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  On the morning of the 11th of May, Grant sent Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton a now-famous message. 'I propose to fight it out on this line,' he wrote, 'if it takes all summer.'

  Lee believed Grant was preparing to retreat toward Fredericksburg, and ordered artillery pulled out of Allegheny Johnson's division inside the Mule Shoe. He had no idea it was exactly the spot Grant intended to attack. That evening, Hancock's men gathered near the Brown farm, about 1,200 yards north of the Mule Shoe, in a torrential rainstorm. Johnson grew suspicious and asked Ewell for his artillery back. The order did not reach the guns until 3:30 a.m., just 30 minutes before Hancock's attack was due to begin.

  Hancock's assault was planned for 4 a.m. on the 12th of May, but darkness delayed it until 4:35, into a thick mist. The attack shattered Jones's Brigade and, on the eastern tip of the Mule Shoe, captured both Brig. Gen. George Steuart and his division commander, Allegheny Johnson.

  Fifteen thousand men from Hancock's corps poured into a front barely half a mile wide. They quickly lost all unit cohesion, becoming little more than an armed mob. John B. Gordon rushed Robert D. Johnston's North Carolina brigade toward the gap, and though Johnston was wounded, his men halted the collapse. Robert E. Lee himself moved forward with the counterattacking troops until his own men stopped him, shouting 'Lee to the rear!' On the western leg, Robert E. Rodes and Stephen D. Ramseur's brigade fought to reclaim the trenches lost by the Stonewall Brigade.

  The fighting concentrated at the point where the western leg of the Mule Shoe turned south, a spot that became known as the Bloody Angle. William Mahone rushed two brigades back from the far left flank to help, and one of their commanders, Abner M. Perrin, was killed there. By 8 a.m., heavy rain turned the earthworks slick with water and blood, and South Carolinians under Samuel McGowan joined the defense.

  At Laurel Hill, Warren's renewed attack petered out within thirty minutes. Meade ordered him to attack 'at once at all hazards with your whole force, if necessary,' but the assault failed again. Grant authorized Meade to relieve Warren, though his replacement, Andrew A. Humphreys, chose to withdraw the corps without formally removing him.

  Fighting at the Bloody Angle ran almost 24 hours without pause, an intensity of gunfire that flattened the landscape and stripped away all foliage. Some soldiers reported firing as many as 400 rounds that day. Corpses piled four and five high, and men had to throw bodies over the parapet just to keep fighting. One survivor later wrote, 'Nothing can describe the confusion, the savage, blood-curdling yells, the murderous faces, and the grisly horror of the melee.'

  The fighting finally stopped around midnight, and by 4 a.m. Confederate troops withdrew to a new line built 500 yards to the south. Union casualties that day reached about 9,000, and Confederate losses about 8,000, including some 3,000 men taken prisoner in the collapse of the Mule Shoe. Grant, watching those numbers climb, was already planning where to hit Lee's line next.

• 6. Attacks That Failed

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  Grant told his chief of staff, Henry W. Halleck, that 'the enemy are obstinate and seemed to have found the last ditch.' He set about shifting his lines east of Spotsylvania to renew the fight.

  On the night of the 13th and the 14th of May, the V and VI Corps marched through heavy rain over roads turned to deep mud. Elements of the VI Corps occupied Myers Hill, overlooking most of the Confederate position, and Emory Upton's brigade skirmished most of the day to hold it.

  Grant's army was too scattered and worn out to attack Spotsylvania Court House on the 14th. Lee had left it almost undefended for most of that day, until he realized what Grant was doing and shifted troops to cover it. Five straight days of rain forced Grant to tell Washington his army could not resume offensive operations until it had 24 hours of dry weather.

  The weather finally cleared on the 17th of May, and Grant guessed that Lee had pulled his forces away from the old Mule Shoe positions. He ordered the II and VI Corps back to the Landrum house to attack there at sunrise on the 18th, with Hancock leading. Ewell's Second Corps, however, had never left, and had spent the intervening days strengthening the earthworks in front of them. Hancock's men were caught in abatis and cut down by artillery fire so heavy that Confederate infantry barely needed to fire a shot.

  Grant then decided to abandon the area, ordering Hancock's corps toward the railroad between Fredericksburg and Richmond. He hoped Lee would give chase and expose his army to a counterattack. Before Hancock could move, Lee sent Richard S. Ewell to locate the Union army's northern flank. Near the Harris farm, Ewell's men ran into Union heavy artillery soldiers who had recently been converted to infantry duty.

  Reinforced by the 1st Maryland Regiment and David Birney's division, the fighting stretched on until about 9 p.m. Lee, worried about Ewell fighting alone and cut off, called the corps back. Some of Ewell's men lost their way retreating in the dark and were captured, part of more than 900 Confederate losses in what turned out to be a pointless skirmish. Hancock's delayed march south would not begin until two nights later, on the 20th of May.

• 7. Counting the Cost

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  Lee never took Grant's bait at Harris Farm, instead marching on a parallel path toward the North Anna River as the campaign rolled on. Grant would fight him again at the Battle of North Anna and the Battle of Cold Harbor. He then crossed the James River to attack Petersburg, where the armies faced each other for nine months.

  Spotsylvania Court House produced almost 32,000 total casualties, the costliest battle of the entire Overland Campaign. It ranks among the five costliest battles of the whole Civil War. Grant's army absorbed over 18,000 of those losses, with close to 3,000 men killed outright. Counting the two weeks since the Wilderness began, Grant had lost about 36,000 men, and another 20,000 went home as their enlistments expired. By the 19th of May he had only 56,124 effective soldiers left in the field.

  Lee's army lost another 10,000-13,000 men at Spotsylvania, close to 23 percent of his total force, compared with about 18 percent of Grant's. Grant's side could replace its losses easily; the Confederacy had to strip other fronts of men just to reinforce Lee.

  Five general officers died of wounds from the battle. They included Union Brig. Gens. James C. Rice and Thomas G. Stevenson, and Confederate Brig. Gens. Junius Daniel and Abner M. Perrin, alongside Sedgwick. Of the five, Sedgwick held the distinction of being the highest-ranking officer by seniority to die in the entire war. The list of wounded or captured Confederate officers also included John R. Cooke, Harry T. Hays, Cullen A. Battle, James A. Walker, and Henry H. Walker.

  Historians still disagree on the exact numbers. One tally, drawn from Union regimental records, puts Federal losses at 2,725 killed, 13,416 wounded, and 2,258 captured or missing, for a total of 18,399.

• 8. What the Ground Remembers

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  Forty-three men received the Medal of Honor for actions during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. Among them were Frederick Alber, George W. Harris, John C. Robinson, Archibald Freeman, and Charles H. Tracy.

  Parts of the battlefield are preserved today within the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The American Battlefield Trust and its partners have added more than 151 acres to that preserved ground, across five separate purchases made between 1989 and 2023. The most recent acquisition closed in 2023, meaning the work of protecting this ground is still ongoing, five purchases in and counting.