Battle of the Wilderness

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of the Wilderness began with Robert E. Lee standing on Clark Mountain on the 2nd of May 1864. He looked down at a panorama of Union campfires spread across the valley below. Lee could see enough to know Ulysses S. Grant's army was stirring, but not enough to know which roads it would use. Grant was new to this theater of the war. Six Union commanders before him had already tried and failed against Lee in Virginia. None of them had managed to keep pushing south after a bloody opening battle instead of retreating. Over three days in a tangle of scrub oak and pine northwest of Fredericksburg, Grant and Lee would test whether that pattern could finally break. The ground was so thick that soldiers on both sides ended up firing at sounds instead of men they could see.

• 2. Ground That Swallowed Armies

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  Locust Grove, Virginia, sat about 20 miles west of Fredericksburg, in a stretch of country locals simply called the Wilderness. Historians disagreed on its size. Estimates ran from 132 to 156 square miles at the largest. Most writers on the battle settled on a smaller figure, about 70 square miles. The land itself was a patchwork of open clearings and dense second growth forest, thick with small trees, bushes, shrubs, and pines. Roads were narrow and few, and clearings were scarce, so mounted cavalry fighting was nearly impossible. Smoke hung in the dense woods and made it hard to see an enemy soldier at all. Men often fired at sounds rather than at anything they could see. Infantry units lost their alignment easily, got lost, and stumbled into friendly fire. The Confederates knew this terrain better than the Union did, which narrowed the advantage the Union's larger numbers should have given it. Artillery, too, lost much of its power once it entered the trees. Grant understood how badly the Wilderness blunted his edge in troops and guns, and he preferred to fight Lee somewhere more open.

  A year earlier, in these same woods, Lee had beaten the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Chancellorsville. His army there had been less than half the size of the Union force he faced. Most of that earlier fighting had happened slightly east of the route the Union army was now taking. Having already won once on this ground, Lee hoped to draw Grant into fighting him in the Wilderness again. Lee's own plan for exploiting this ground required one more piece to be in place. Longstreet's First Corps was still a march away, and its arrival would decide how far Lee could press his advantage.

• 3. A New Kind of Campaign

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  In March 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was summoned east from the Western Theater and promoted to lieutenant general, given command of every Union army. He had already won at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Chattanooga, and Vicksburg, where nearly 30,000 Confederate soldiers surrendered. President Abraham Lincoln wanted a general who would fight, and the Union's successes so far had come almost entirely in the Western Theater. Grant set up his headquarters alongside Major General George Meade's Army of the Potomac, though Meade kept formal command of that army. William Tecumseh Sherman took over most of Grant's former commands in the West.

  Grant judged that the Union's eastern and western armies had worked too separately, and that occupying captured territory drained resources without weakening the Confederacy. His new strategy called for attacking on every front at once, so Confederate forces could not simply shift from one crisis to another. The goal was to destroy Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Tennessee, not to seize ground. Lincoln approved of the approach. Grant called Lee's army "the strongest, best appointed and most confident Army in the South." Lee had spent most of the war fighting on ground he knew well, in his home state of Virginia.

  Grant's instruction to Meade was blunt: "Lee's army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." Benjamin Butler's Army of the James was to approach Richmond and Petersburg from the southeast. Franz Sigel would move through the Shenandoah Valley to destroy the rail lines and granaries feeding Lee's army. Sherman, meanwhile, would push into Georgia with the same goal, tearing up rail lines and supplies. Grant hoped for a quick, decisive battle, but he was prepared to fight a war of attrition if he had to. Both sides could expect heavy casualties, though the Union had far greater resources to replace lost soldiers and equipment than the Confederacy did. When the campaign began in May, Grant commanded 118,700 men and 316 artillery pieces to Lee's 66,140. By the 2nd of May, Grant had four corps positioned along the Rapidan River, ready to begin what would become the Overland Campaign. A few days later, those four corps would cross the river, and the Wilderness would be waiting for them.

• 4. Collision on Two Roads

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  Meade's original plan sent Alfred Torbert's cavalry division to screen the army's flank alongside James Wilson's. An erroneous report of Confederate cavalry near Fredericksburg changed that, and Torbert's men were sent east instead. That left only Wilson's inexperienced 3rd Cavalry Division, the smallest of the three, to screen three infantry corps. At 5:00 a.m. on the 5th of May, Wilson detached about 500 men of the 5th New York Cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel John Hammond. They were meant to patrol west of Parker's Store until relieved. Instead, they ran into most of A. P. Hill's Third Corps advancing on the Orange Plank Road. Judging the dense woods unsuitable for fighting on horseback, Hammond's men dismounted and fought as a skirmish line, using their seven-shot Spencer repeating rifles. They slowly gave ground toward Parker's Store, buying time for the rest of the Union army. The advancing Confederates eventually cut them off from the rest of Wilson's division.

  At 6:00 a.m., Gouverneur Warren's V Corps moved south, and Confederate infantry appeared near the Orange Turnpike. Meade assumed it was a single division and ordered Warren to attack. It was actually all of Richard Ewell's Second Corps, dug into earthworks at the western edge of a clearing called Saunders Field. The advance fell apart almost immediately. Gaps opened in the Union line, and some regiments ended up facing the wrong direction entirely. The Iron Brigade broke through part of the Confederate line and captured battle flags, only to have its exposed flank crushed by John B. Gordon's brigade. The 6th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment alone lost nearly 50 men in a few minutes. Union artillery pushed into Saunders Field was overrun, and as soldiers fought hand to hand over the guns, the dry field caught fire. Wounded men from both sides burned to death where they lay.

  Farther south on the Orange Plank Road, George Getty's division held a key crossroads for hours, waiting for Winfield Hancock's II Corps to arrive. When Getty finally attacked, at 4:15 in the afternoon, the fighting turned especially fierce around Brigadier General Alexander Hays's brigade. Hays was killed while addressing the 63rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment. He and Grant had been friends since West Point and had served together in the Mexican War. When Grant heard the news, he said only that he was not surprised Hays had died in battle: "It was just like him." Night fell with neither road fully won, and Lee still had one more corps, Longstreet's, yet to reach the field.

• 5. Longstreet's Flank and a Volley of Friendly Fire

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  Longstreet rode ahead of his marching men and reached the battlefield around 6:00 a.m. on the 6th of May. Hill's battered Third Corps was already falling back in retreat. The vanguard of Longstreet's column was John Gregg's Texas Brigade, and Lee, not recognizing its commander, asked what unit this was. Gregg answered that it was the Texas Brigade, and Lee waved his hat over his head and shouted, "Texans always move them!" Caught up in the moment, Lee began riding forward with the advancing brigade. The Texans grabbed the reins of his horse, Traveller, and refused to advance unless Lee pulled back to safety. Longstreet convinced him to relent.

  At 10:00 a.m., Lee's chief engineer, Martin L. Smith, found an unfinished railroad bed south of the Plank Road. It offered a clear path to the Union's left flank, which had been left unguarded by a mix-up in orders. Longstreet sent Moxley Sorrel and Brigadier General William Mahone with three fresh brigades to strike the exposed flank at 11:00 a.m. The Union line broke and fell back; Hancock later wrote that the attack rolled up his line "like a wet blanket." James Wadsworth was mortally wounded in the collapse.

  Around midday, as Longstreet rode forward on the Plank Road with his officers, fire broke out from his own 12th Virginia Infantry Regiment. The regiment had gotten separated from its brigade, and in the smoke and confusion, the two Confederate units began firing on each other. Longstreet's mounted party was caught in the crossfire, and Longstreet was severely wounded in the neck. Brigadier General Micah Jenkins and two of Longstreet's aides were killed in the same volley. It happened in the same stretch of Wilderness where Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own men almost exactly a year before. Longstreet handed command to Charles Field with a final order: "Press the enemy."

  That evening, John B. Gordon convinced Jubal Early to let him attack the Union right. That flank was held by troops nicknamed "Milroy's weary boys," after an earlier defeat under that name. Gordon's attack, launched around 5:30 p.m., sent part of the Union line running and captured two brigade commanders, Alexander Shaler and Truman Seymour. John Sedgwick himself was nearly captured; his horse was hit, and the man standing beside him was shot. Word of the collapse caused alarm at Grant's headquarters, and one officer warned him that Lee would "cut us off completely from our communications." Grant snapped back that he was tired of hearing what Lee might do. He told the officer to think instead about what the Union army itself would do. On the 7th of May, Grant would disengage from the Wilderness entirely and put his army on the road toward Spotsylvania Court House.

• 6. The Toll

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  The Union's official report counted 2,246 officers and men killed, 12,037 wounded, and 3,383 captured or missing, a total of 17,666 casualties. Historian Gordon C. Rhea believes the real number was likely higher; a lieutenant reportedly saw Warren reducing the casualty figures reported up the chain. Other estimates of Union losses run between 17,500 and 18,000. At least six Union brigadier generals were among the casualties, according to Grant's own correspondence. Wadsworth and Hays were killed; Truman Seymour and Alexander Shaler were captured; George Getty and Joseph Bartlett were wounded.

  A study by historian Young puts Confederate losses at 1,477 killed, 7,866 wounded, and 1,690 missing, for a total of 11,033. Of the wounded, 233 men were also captured and are counted only once, in the wounded total. Lee's own report from the end of the 5th of May noted the death of Brigadier General John M. Jones. It also recorded the wounding of Brigadier General Leroy Stafford, shot through the shoulder blade in a way that severed his spine. He died four days later. Lee's report for the following day added the wounding of Longstreet and Brigadier General John Pegram, and the death of Micah Jenkins. Combined, the two armies suffered over 28,000 casualties, placing the Battle of the Wilderness among the five costliest battles of the entire Civil War. Burnside's IX Corps, fighting to break the Confederate center along the Plank Road, lost no fewer than ten regimental commanders killed, wounded, or captured in a single afternoon.

• 7. No Winner, Only Momentum

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  Historians trace much of the Union's trouble to what one source calls "woefully inadequate" cavalry positioning. Wilson, Sheridan's least experienced cavalry commander, had been given the smallest of the three cavalry divisions to screen the army's right flank alone. His inexperience meant Union infantry marched into the Wilderness without pickets on the Orange Turnpike, so Ewell's approach came as a surprise. Pulling the cavalry back from Todd's Tavern on the 6th of May further delayed the Union march toward Spotsylvania Court House. A few officers, among them Hammond and a lieutenant colonel named John W. Kester of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry Regiment, fought well despite the confusion. All four Union corps commanders, historians note, accomplished comparatively little in the battle overall.

  On the Confederate side, discussion centers on Lee, Longstreet, and Gordon. Lee positioned Ewell's and Hill's corps well, but he let Longstreet's First Corps drift too far from the field. Historian Peter S. Carmichael judged Lee's choice to let Hill's exhausted men rest on the night of the 5th of May, rather than reform their lines. He called it "a horrendous decision, maybe the worst of his career." Gordon later criticized Ewell and Early for delaying his flanking attack, but historians judge that criticism unfair. Early had received incorrect intelligence that Union troops were moving against his own flank, which made him cautious with his outnumbered men.

  The National Park Service calls the outcome simply "indecisive." One historian credits Lee with a kind of victory, since he fought Grant to a standstill. That same historian adds that the battle still cost the Confederacy its ability to keep the initiative. What set this battle apart was what Grant did next. Rather than retreat north across the river, as every prior Union commander in Virginia had done after a bloody defeat, he pushed his army south. Union soldiers, realizing they were advancing rather than retreating, began singing as they marched. Sherman called the move "the grandest act of Grant's life," and said it left him feeling "that the rebellion will be crushed." The battle also confirmed something Longstreet had once warned Lee about Grant. Grant, Longstreet said, would fight "every day and every hour till the end of the war." Eleven months later, on the 9th of April 1865, a starving and trapped Confederate army surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. One of the strongest points on that battlefield, Ellwood Manor, had served as Major General Warren's headquarters during the fighting, and its family cemetery held a secret from the previous year's battle at Chancellorsville.

• 8. What Remains

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  Ellwood Manor, also called the Lacy House, still stands within Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. That park was established in 1927 to protect the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania Court House, and the Wilderness. In the family cemetery there lies a smaller, stranger grave. It holds the arm of Confederate Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson. His own men had shot him in these same woods a year before Grant and Lee ever fought there.

  Two volunteer organizations have carried on preservation work alongside the National Park Service. The Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield have focused on preserving and enhancing Ellwood Manor itself. The American Battlefield Trust, working across the wider battlefield, had saved more than 294 acres by mid-2023.