DK - The American Civil War

Confederate bodies were churned many

layers deep and in the mud writhed the

wounded. Soon the West Angle would

understandably be nicknamed the

“Bloody Angle.”

Exhausted stalemate

After the horrific events of May 12,

the rain continued to fall while both

exhausted armies marked time in the

mud. Attempts at maneuver were

completely bogged down until a fitful

sun at last reappeared. Grant then

launched another attack. At daybreak

on May 18, after a thundering barrage,

12 Union brigades swept over the

wrecked and abandoned salient,

still littered with corpses,

toward Lee’s final

capturing thousands of Rebels. At this
desperate hour, it was Lee himself who
once more rode into the maelstrom.
His hat swept from his head, his silver
hair shining, he again tried rallying his
broken soldiers. Again the cry rose,
“Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!” but
their commander, his blood up, would
have none of it until a sergeant firmly
took his bridle, leaving General John
B. Gordon to coordinate a series of
ferocious counterattacks.
Yard by costly yard, the Confederates
reclaimed every part of the salient, but
the bluecoats only regrouped along the
outside face of the breastworks, ready
to renew their assault. Lee needed his
weary veterans to hold the Northerners
while a new defensive line was
hastily constructed.

The “Bloody Angle”
The Confederates held their line, as the
musketry roared for most of the day.
Nowhere did the fighting rage as
violently as it did along the 600-ft
(183-m) stretch of works known as the
West Angle. There the deafening roar
reached a level of sustained frenzy
seldom equaled in any conflict. The air,

heavy with rain, exploded with shot and

shell. Thousands of soldiers wallowed in

the mud and blood, screaming and firing

point-blank. A battle mania took hold.

Fierce hand-to-hand struggles surged

back and forth across the parapet.

The incessant shooting continued for

20 hours and more, each sputtering lull

followed by a renewed brutal crescendo.

Darkness brought no respite from the

slaughter, the muzzle flashes becoming

just a continuous sheet of flame. By

midnight, nearby trees were crashing to

the ground, chipped and sheared in half

by the volume of flying lead.

By 4 a.m., the firing had eased. It

soon ceased altogether, as the surviving

Southerners escaped to Lee’s newly

completed defensive line, abandoning

the salient. Dawn revealed a hideous

scene. Before the splintered works the

Union dead lay in heaps, so chewed

and lacerated by bullets as to be

unrecognizable. Among the traverses,

THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN

While Grant struggled ferociously with

Lee at Spotsylvania, subsidiary operations

were unfolding elsewhere in Virginia.

DEATH OF STUART

On the evening of May 12, 1864, Lee’s cavalry

chief, Jeb Stuart, died in Richmond of a wound

received fighting Sheridan’s troopers at

Yellow Tavern 248–49 ❯❯.

DEFEAT IN THE VALLEY

Four days later, on May 15, Franz Sigel’s Union

army was defeated by John C. Breckinridge’s

Confederates at the Battle of New Market

254–55 ❯❯, delaying Grant’s hopes for a

successful Shenandoah Valley offensive.

BUTLER BOTTLED UP

On May 5, 1864, General Benjamin Butler landed

his Army of the James at Bermuda Hundred,

but P. G. T. Beauregard’s forces were soon

able to confine him there 254–55 ❯❯.

AFTER

Battle trophies

Hancock’s May 12 assault on the Mule Shoe Salient

was lauded in this 1864 portrayal as the “greatest

victory of the war.” The fighting was brutal, but

Hancock’s Second Corps succeeded in capturing

thousands of prisoners, including two generals.

defensive line, which was bristling with

cannon. But the Confederate artillery

alone was enough to shatter the

onslaught, their infantry never even

raising a rifle.

Failing to pry Lee out of his works,

Grant began shifting his forces

eastward, sidling them past Lee’s

entrenched right flank. On May 19,

a large Rebel force did emerge to

investigate what the Union Army was

doing. The bloody but inconclusive

fight at the Alsop and Harris farms was

the final clash in the battles around

Spotsylvania Court House. By May 21,

Grant had his men hurrying south for

the North Anna River, still aiming

to get between Lee

and Richmond.

“Nothing in history equals this contest. Desperate,

long, and deadly it still goes on ...”

CORPORAL WELLES TAYLOR, 110 PENNSYLVANIA REGIMENT, TO HIS WIFE, MAY 17, 1864

Coehorn mortars

Some weighing only 296lb (134kg) apiece, these

portable artillery pieces were ideally suited for

trench warfare. Some Confederates called their

arcing, unpredictably falling shells “demoralizers.”