Who won the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House?
Neither side won outright. From 8 to 21 May 1864 Ulysses S. Grant hammered at Robert E. Lee's entrenched army around Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, and failed to break it. The fighting peaked on 12 May at the Bloody Angle of the "Mule Shoe" salient, where men fought hand to hand across a log wall for nearly a full day and night. With about 30,000 casualties it was the costliest battle of the Overland Campaign, and when it ended Grant, refusing to retreat, kept moving south.3
After the Wilderness, every Union general before him would have fallen back across the river. Grant went south instead, and found Lee waiting behind earthworks at a little county seat called Spotsylvania Court House. What followed was two weeks of the most savage fighting of the war, and on one rainy day in May a bend in a log wall became the Bloody Angle. "I never expect to be fully believed when I tell of the horrors of Spotsylvania," a Union soldier wrote.4
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Battle of the Wilderness · Next: The Battle of Cold Harbor · Key figures: Philip Sheridan
The race to Spotsylvania
On the night of 7 May 1864, only hours after the fighting in the Wilderness had ended, Grant set his army marching south. His target was Spotsylvania Court House, a small village about 10 miles to the southeast where the Brock Road met the road to Fredericksburg. Whoever held that crossroads had the inside track to Richmond, and Grant hoped either to get between Lee and the Confederate capital or to draw him out into the open.5 › Battle of the Wilderness, 1864
The night march was miserable. Veterans of Warren's Fifth Corps remembered columns that moved a hundred yards, halted, and started again just as the men lay down, while Fitzhugh Lee's Confederate cavalry felled trees across the Brock Road and set small ambushes in the dark. Lee had guessed where Grant was going. He gave Longstreet's corps, now under Richard Anderson, orders to march for Spotsylvania, and Anderson's men, unable to find a place to camp in the burning Wilderness, kept going through the night.6
Laurel Hill and the Mule Shoe
Early on 8 May Warren's leading troops reached an open ridge called Laurel Hill, the last defensible ground north of the courthouse. Thinking it was held only by Fitz Lee's dismounted cavalry, they charged, and the Maryland Brigade got within 50 yards before a roar of artillery and rifle fire cut it down. It was Anderson's infantry. The Confederates had won the race to Spotsylvania.7
All that day and night both armies arrived and dug in. Lee's line ran about four miles north of the courthouse, and Ewell's corps, building its earthworks in the dark to fit the high ground, created a huge bulge pointing north toward the Union army, about half a mile deep. The men called it the Mule Shoe for its shape. Engineers disliked salients, which can be attacked from the front and both sides at once, but Lee decided to hold it, trusting his artillery to protect it.8
9 and 10 May: Sedgwick and Upton
On 9 May the Union Sixth Corps commander, John Sedgwick, was shot dead near his lines. The American Battlefield Trust describes him as the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the war. The same day Hancock's corps crossed the Po River to look for Lee's left flank, only to be pushed back when Lee shifted two divisions against it.9
On the evening of 10 May a 24-year-old colonel, Emory Upton, tried something new. Instead of the usual long battle line that stopped to fire and reload, he packed 12 picked regiments into a dense column and sent them at a run against the west face of the Mule Shoe from a woods path only 200 yards away. Within a minute they were over the works among a startled brigade of Georgians, took four guns and nearly reached the McCoull house at the heart of the salient. No support came, and a counterattack drove them back, but Grant promoted Upton to brigadier general, and the American Battlefield Trust sees in his attack a forerunner of the trench tactics of World War I.10
"If it takes all summer"
Upton's brief success gave Grant an idea: if 12 regiments could break the Mule Shoe, what might two corps do? On the morning of 11 May he wrote to Henry Halleck in Washington that the army had ended its sixth day of very hard fighting, that losses on both sides had been heavy, and that he was sending back for supplies, "and purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."11 › Ulysses S. Grant
That evening the Confederates made a costly mistake. Seeing Union troops moving, Lee concluded that Grant was about to withdraw or slip around his flank, and pulled the artillery out of the Mule Shoe to be ready to follow. In fact Hancock's corps spent the rainy night creeping into position opposite the tip of the salient.12
12 May: Hancock's dawn assault
At first light on 12 May, in fog and rain, some 20,000 men of Hancock's corps surged forward against the tip of the Mule Shoe. With the guns gone, the defenders were overwhelmed. The attackers captured most of the salient and many of its defenders. But the very size of the victory slowed them down: the Union troops crowded into the captured works lost their order collecting prisoners and trophies, and Lee had the time he needed.13
Lee hurried reinforcements into the salient and once more rode forward to lead a counterattack himself, until John B. Gordon sent him to the rear and led it instead. By 9:30 a.m. the Confederates had won back almost all of their original line except a few hundred yards. Grant fed the Sixth Corps into the fight, and the struggle settled on a slight bend in the works on the west side of the salient.14
The Bloody Angle
For the next 18 to 22 hours, in pouring rain, the fighting at that bend, ever after called the Bloody Angle, became the most terrible close combat ever seen on the continent. The Confederate defenders, a Mississippi and a South Carolina brigade, fought behind log barricades six feet high, with cross walls every 20 feet that turned the trench into a chain of roofless log pens filling with rainwater and bodies. Union troops sheltered in a hollow just in front, kept up a constant fire and rushed the works again and again. Men shot each other through gaps in the logs, stabbed with bayonets and clubbed with muskets across the parapet.15
At one point a section of Union artillery was run up by hand to almost point-blank range and fired canister into the works until nearly all its horses and gunners had fallen. A Union soldier of the 95th Pennsylvania remembered that the fire was so heavy that the head logs of the breastworks "were cut and torn until they resembled hickory brooms". Another wrote that the salient was "a boiling, bubbling and hissing cauldron of death". The American Battlefield Trust estimates that the fighting of 12 May alone cost some 17,000 casualties.16
Lee's last line and the end of the battle
The defenders at the Angle were buying time. Behind them Lee's men were digging a new line across the base of the salient, and at about 2 a.m. on 13 May whispered orders told the survivors to fall back to it. When the Union troops crept forward at dawn they found the Angle held only by those who could not leave. "They were lying literally in heaps," one wrote.17
Grant shifted his army east and south through days of heavy rain, looking for a weak point. On 18 May he sent Hancock back against the old salient, but massed Confederate artillery stopped the attack within hours. On 19 May Ewell's corps probed around the Union right and ran into a brigade of heavy artillery regiments, newly converted to infantry, at the Harris farm. On 20 and 21 May Grant pulled out and marched southeast toward the North Anna River, and Lee followed to stay between him and Richmond.18
Aftermath and significance
Spotsylvania cost the Union about 18,000 men and the Confederacy between 10,000 and 12,700, some 30,000 in all, making it the costliest battle of the Overland Campaign. Both sides claimed success: the Confederates because they had held, the Union because it had inflicted losses Lee could not afford. The National Park Service historian points out that Lee lost a disproportionate share of his senior officers, and that the Army of Northern Virginia never regained its old efficiency.19
The campaign went on to the North Anna, to Cold Harbor and to the long siege of Petersburg. Britannica counts more than 60,000 Union casualties in the campaign of May and June 1864, the heaviest losses of any single campaign in American history; Lee's smaller army never fully recovered from its own. Spotsylvania showed the new shape of the war in the East: not a single decisive battle, but continuous fighting that would wear the Confederacy down.20 › Siege of Petersburg, 1864 to 1865
Visiting the battlefield today
The Spotsylvania battlefield is part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. From the exhibit shelter, across the Brock Road from Laurel Hill, a driving tour leads to Upton's Road, the Bloody Angle, the Harrison house site behind Lee's last line, the McCoull house site in the middle of the salient, the east face of the Mule Shoe, Heth's Salient and the Fredericksburg Road. A 1.1-mile trail walks the ground of the Bloody Angle, and the 5.7-mile Spotsylvania History Trail passes much of the 14 miles of earthworks that survive on the battlefield.21
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