A Season of Slaughter
The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864
By Chris Mackowski
Savas Beatie LLC
Copyright © 2013 Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61121-148-1
Contents
Touring the Battlefield/List of Maps,
Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
CHAPTER ONE: The Campaign — May 1864,
CHAPTER TWO: Out of the Wilderness — May 7, 1864,
CHAPTER THREE: Todd's Tavern — May 7-8, 1864,
CHAPTER FOUR: Laurel Hill — May 8, 1864,
CHAPTER FIVE: THE DEATH OF "UNCLE JOHN" Sedgwick — May 9, 1864,
CHAPTER SIX: Upton's Attack — May 10, 1864,
CHAPTER SEVEN: The First Day of Rain — May 11, 1864,
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Mule Shoe, Part I: The Union Attack — May 12, 1864,
CHAPTER NINE: The Mule Shoe, Part II: The Confederate Counterattacks — May 12, 1864,
CHAPTER TEN: The Mule Shoe, PART III: The Bloody Angle — May 12-13, 1864,
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Heth's Salient — May 12, 1864,
CHAPTER TWELVE: Myer's Hill — May 13, 1864,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Mud and Maneuver — May 14-17, 1864,
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Engineering Over Infantry — May 18, 1864,
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Harris Farm — May 19, 1864,
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Campaign Moves South — May 20-21, 1864,
APPENDIX A: The Battle of Yellow Tavern by Daniel T. Davis,
APPENDIX B: Civilians on the Battlefield by Kathleen Logothetis,
APPENDIX C: A History of the Battlefield by John F. Cummings III,
APPENDIX D: Spotsylvania in Memory by Chris Mackowski,
Order of Battle: Spotsylvania Court House,
Suggested Reading,
About The Authors,
CHAPTER 1
The Campaign
MAY 1864
"It has been nothing but one scene of horror and blood shed since we crossed the Rapidan," wrote Pvt. Ransom F. Sargent in a letter. It was May 19, 1864 — the first day in nearly three weeks that the musician from the 11th New Hampshire had the chance to sit down and write a letter. Sargent and his regiment — like the rest of the Army of the Potomac — had been relentlessly marching, fighting, and maneuvering through oppressive heat, pouring rain, pitch- black night, impenetrable wilderness, and apocalyptic forest fires — all in hostile territory.
The movement started on May 3, 1864, when Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Union armies, ordered the Army of the Potomac to march south from its winter quarters around Culpepper and Brandy Station Virginia. The army's mission: "to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him." This represented a significant shift in strategy. Previous Union efforts had been aimed at the Confederate capital, not the Confederate armies: "On to Richmond!" Northerners cried.
Grant had other ideas. "Lee's army will be your objective," he told Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac. "Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." Grant knew that if the vaunted defenders of Richmond were vanquished, nothing would stop the Union juggernaut from then just marching through the capital's front door.
Grant intended Meade's army to move in concert with several other Union armies: Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler'sArmy of the James was to move up the Virginia Peninsula and threaten Richmond from the southeast while Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel moved southward up the Shenandoah Valley, securing the breadbasket of the Confederacy; Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's army group, consisting of the Armies of the Tennessee, Ohio, and Cumberland, were to push into Georgia toward Atlanta; and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks' Army of the Gulf was to push from New Orleans toward Mobile, Alabama. The coordinated effort would prevent Confederates from using their interior lines to shift reinforcements from one theater of battle to another, "preventing him from using the same force at different sections against first one and then another of our armies," Grant wrote.
Under this strategy, Grant intended to apply pressure on all points of the Confederacy while letting each army commander call his own shots, even as he kept a big-picture eye on everything. However, he felt the Army of the Potomac deserved special attention because of its high-profile position so close to the capital and the population and media centers of the east — not to mention the difficulties that army traditionally had with its Confederate counterpart, the Army of Northern Virginia. As a result, Grant chose to make his headquarters in the field with Meade's army, although he still intended to let Meade execute the actual day-to-day operation of the army. Grant would also shield Meade from the politics of Washington.
Meade, so irascible that his men called him a "godammed google[eyed snapping turtle," had actually expected Grant to sack him in favor of a hand-picked successor, and so Meade had even offered Grant his resignation. The gesture so impressed Grant that he kept Meade in command of the army.
"[Grant] is so much more active than his predecessor, and agrees so well with me in his views, I cannot but be rejoiced at his arrival, because I believe my success to be the more probable," Meade wrote in a letter to his wife. "My duty is plain, to continue quietly to discharge my duties, heartily co-operating with him and under him."
Under Grant's orders, Meade moved the Army of the Potomac southward on May 3 with an eye toward the open country around Spotsylvania Court House. There, the army would have several possible avenues of approach toward Richmond. Although the Confederate capital was not the army's true objective, the Federal commanders reasoned that, by threatening the city, they could draw the Army of Northern Virginia out into the open for a decisive battle. With just over 123,000 men, the Federal army would hold a significant numerical advantage in any such contest.
First, the Federal army had to move through an area known as the Wilderness — 70 square miles of nearly impenetrable second-growth forest. "[A] most appropriate term," said Theodore Lyman, a member of Meade's staff, "a land of an exhausted, sandy soil, supporting more or less dense growth of pine or of oak. There are some cleared spaces, especially near the Germanna plank ... The very worst of it is parallel with the Orange Plank and upper part of the Brock Road."
"This Wilderness is a generally level barren, covered with a matted growth of scrub oak, stunted pine, sweet gum brush and dogwood," recounted Col. S. D. Thurston of the 3rd North Carolina. "The surface of the earth is indented occasionally with low basins, through which the rainfall, washing from the higher margins, cuts long gullies and often deep and wide washouts."
It was here in the Wilderness, on the morning of May 5, where things started to go wrong for Ulysses S. Grant.
"Lee's army will be your objective. Wherever leegoes, there you will go also."
* * *
After an autumn of cat-and-mouse with the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia had settled into winter camps along a defensive line that paralleled the Rapidan River, from an area along the edge of the Wilderness westward toward Orange Court House. The army's First Corps, under Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, had been away on detached service in Tennessee for much of that time but returned in April, bringing Confederate strength up to 66,000 men fit for duty....
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