The Wilderness Campaign
The duel between generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant commenced with a battle in a tangled
woodland called the Wilderness. Fighting resumed in the fields around Spotsylvania Court House, where
deadly assaults reached a pitch of sustained ferocity seldom equaled in the war.
of somber pines and oak thickets, dense
with thorny, foot-entangling vines. It was
a “region of gloom and the shadow of
death,” as one officer put it, and many
veterans felt an ominous dread as they
went into bivouac that night. Dismayed
scouts had reported that Lee, who had
been watching the Union army, was on
the move, heading swiftly up the Orange
Turnpike and Orange Plank Road, parallel
tracks that led east into the Wilderness.The Battle of the Wilderness
Until James Longstreet’s First Corps,
marching from a different direction, could
join him, Lee would be attacking GrantB
efore dawn on May 4, 1864, Ulysses
S. Grant opened his advance against
Robert E. Lee. The first of nearly
120,000 men, 4,300 supply wagons, and
850 ambulances making up the Army of
the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River
well downstream of Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia, nestling behind
formidable defenses on the other side.
If Grant could get through the
Wilderness, on the Confederate right,
before Lee could react, he might lure the
Southern general into the open and
destroy him. So all day long the
blue-clad divisions tramped
down the road between wallsBEFORE
In March 1864, Lincoln put Ulysses S. Grant
in charge of all Union armies in the field.
Grant’s plan called for simultaneous Union
advances against Atlanta in the West and
against Lee in the East.
LEE VERSUS GRANT
Grant changed the Union objective from the
capture of Richmond to the destruction of Lee’s
Army of Northern Virginia, and established his
headquarters with the Army of the Potomac,
which, in early 1864, was encamped on the
Rapidan River. Grant decided to outflank the
Confederate positions across the river by
slipping through the Wilderness on the
Confederate right, where a year earlier, at the
Battle of Chancellorsville ❮❮ 174–75, Lee
had nearly destroyed the
Army of the Potomac.
with only one-third of his opponent’s
strength. Nevertheless, on the morning of
May 5 he slammed into a Federal army
that was still deploying to meet him.
Union troops in Gouverneur Warren’s
Fifth Corps tried to stem Richard Ewell’s
Second Corps’ onslaught on the Turnpike;
3 miles (4.8km) away, a single Union
division held the Brock Road, running
across Orange Plank Road, as A. P. Hill’sMicah Jenkins’s sword
In the din and confusion of Longstreet’s May 6 flank
attack, South Carolina’s General Micah Jenkins
was mistakenly but mortally wounded by
fellow Confederates.Fighting in the Wilderness
Winslow Homer’s Skirmish in the Wilderness (1864)
shows scattered fighting among the trees—what one
soldier called “bushwhacking on a grand scale.”