The bloody month of May

May of 1864 marked a huge change in the prosecution of the war against the Confederacy. Two months before, Abraham Lincoln had given Ulysses S. Grant command of all Federal armies, and Grant’s strategy was to go on the offensive in every theatre of the war.

(Many years ago, on one of my cross-country trips, I was driving through Tennessee on I-40 and noticed the highway signs for Shiloh. It seemed weird to me that I was east of the Mississippi, and yet still passing a battlefield that was in the Western Theatre. But the country was still young, then, and the Mississippi was sort of the jumping-off point for nowhere.)

So in the first week of May, the Army of the Potomac (still commanded by our pal, George G. Meade, who’d faced Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg) moved out of its winter camp and pushed across the Rapidan River in Virginia.

They encountered the Army of Northern Virginia at the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, on 5 May. That’s not very far from Fredericksburg, where the Army of the Potomac had lost a catastrophic fight in December 1862, positioned between the Confederates on the high ground and the Rappahannock River behind them in bitterly cold weather.

And it’s also not far from Chancellorsville, where the year before Lee’s best lieutenant, Thomas J. Jackson—known as “Stonewall”—had been mortally wounded by his own men in the confusion of battle. (He actually died of pneumonia after having his shattered left arm amputated; but the precipitating cause was the gunshot wound.)

That part of Virginia is beautiful—lush, green pastures, farms, woods. It kind of reminds me of Northern France in both appearance and feel. Coming as I do from the semi-arid climate of Southern California, when I see miles and miles of natural green, I want to jump in it and roll around.

But, you know—they didn’t call it “the Wilderness” for nothing. That area is rather like the Ardennes in France—densely wooded, with a lot of brush among the trees. Not ideal terrain for massed infantry to take on one another; there’s no maneuvering room, and no one—not infantry, not cavalry, not artillery—has any clear perspective on what’s going on. (Well, even less that you ordinarily do on battlefields.) But that’s where the two armies met, so that’s where they fought.

The trees and underbrush caught fire in several places from the artillery fire. Men unable to see anything through the black smoke burned to death, or they shot themselves before the flames engulfed them.

Two days of fighting left Lee with a technical victory, although it had cost him a lot. In all that chaos—and spookily close to the place where Jackson had been shot by friendly fire—James Longstreet, one of Lee’s finest corps commanders, was (accidentally) wounded in the right arm by his own men. Lee could not really afford to take the 11,000 casualties, or to lose Longstreet, even temporarily.

And in the end, it didn’t matter to Grant. Unlike any other Union commander before him, he never viewed a tactical defeat as anything other than a setback. He was intent on getting to the Confederate capital at Richmond, basically regardless of the cost.

So throughout May, he pushed the Army of the Potomac to engage the Army of Northern Virginia—at Spotsylvania from the 8^th to the 21^st, and then at Cold Harbor at the end of the month. Every time Lee blocked him, he moved laterally and then pushed forward again. The cost was high, but he had the materiel, the conscripts and the backing of Lincoln; he ignored everything else.