Who won the Battle of the Wilderness?
Neither side won outright. Fought in a dense Virginia forest from 5 to 7 May 1864, the first clash between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee ended with Lee's outnumbered army holding its ground and inflicting heavier losses. Sources call it inconclusive or a tactical Confederate victory, but Grant did not retreat: he marched south toward Richmond.4
Lee chose the ground on purpose. The Wilderness was some seventy square miles of second-growth forest and tangled undergrowth, where a man could not see fifty feet and artillery was almost useless. A year earlier Lee had beaten Joseph Hooker in the same woods. Now he met Ulysses S. Grant there for the first time, and when the smoke and flames cleared, Grant did what no Union general in Virginia had done before him. He kept going.5
A battle of the American Civil War, part of the greatest battles of the Civil War · Related: Chancellorsville, Cold Harbor · Before: The Battle of Chickamauga · Next: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House · Key figures: Philip Sheridan
Grant comes east
After his victories in the West at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Ulysses S. Grant was brought east in March 1864 and made general-in-chief of all the Union armies. Instead of running the war from Washington, he made his headquarters in the field with the Army of the Potomac, which George Meade still formally commanded: Grant would set the strategy, Meade would handle the tactics. His orders to Meade were simple: "Lee's army will be your objective. Where he goes, there you will go also." Until then the Union's goal in Virginia had been the Confederate capital; now it was Lee's army.6
The plan was larger than one army. The Overland Campaign was meant to pin Lee in a series of battles so that he could not send troops to Georgia, where William T. Sherman was advancing on Atlanta. Lincoln, facing an election in the fall, needed results.7 › Ulysses S. Grant
The armies
Grant had about 118,000 to 120,000 men, counting Ambrose Burnside's Ninth Corps, which joined the army for the campaign: Encyclopedia Virginia gives 118,000, the National Park Service 120,000, while the American Battlefield Trust counts 101,895 Union troops actually engaged. The Army of the Potomac's three infantry corps were led by Winfield Scott Hancock, Gouverneur Warren and John Sedgwick, and Philip Sheridan took over the cavalry. Lee had some 62,000 to 65,000 (61,025 engaged, by the Trust's count), as always short of supplies. His bigger problem was leadership: since Stonewall Jackson's death, Richard Ewell and A. P. Hill had led two of his three corps, and neither had performed well. Only James Longstreet gave him experienced command at the top.8
Across the Rapidan
Before dawn on 4 May 1864 Union cavalry splashed across the Rapidan River at Germanna Ford, about 18 miles west of Fredericksburg, and engineers laid pontoon bridges; Hancock's corps crossed at Ely's Ford downstream. That night the army camped around Wilderness Tavern. Grant meant to push through the forest quickly and reach open ground, where his numbers would tell.9
Lee watched the Union crossing from his signal stations and reacted at once. He sent Ewell east along the Orange Turnpike and Hill along the parallel Orange Plank Road to strike the Union columns inside the woods, while Longstreet's corps, farther away at Gordonsville, hurried to join them. The Union cavalry failed to watch the roads properly, and on the morning of 5 May Grant's men had little idea that Lee's army was so close.10
5 May: Saunders Field and the Plank Road
Around midday Warren's corps found Ewell's men dug in on the western edge of a clearing called Saunders Field, across the Orange Turnpike. Warren had protested against attacking in such country, but at about 1 p.m. his men went forward across the field and into the woods on either side. Ewell's veterans cut them down, a brief breakthrough was sealed by John B. Gordon's brigade, and by nightfall a deadly stalemate had settled over the Turnpike. One participant called the fighting "bushwhacking on a grand scale".11
Three miles to the south, a separate battle broke out on the Orange Plank Road. Hill's divisions were pushing east toward its junction with the Brock Road, the main north-south road through the forest; if they took it, Hancock's corps would be cut off from the rest of the army. A Sixth Corps division under George Getty reached the crossroads just in time, and from about 4 p.m. Getty and then Hancock fought Hill's men at close range in the thickets until dark. By nightfall Hill's line was barely holding.12
A Union soldier, Warren Goss of Hancock's corps, later described it as "a blind and bloody hunt to the death, in bewildering thickets, rather than a battle". No one could see the fight fifty feet away; lines broke up into small groups, and the brambles tore at faces and clothing.13
6 May: Hancock's dawn attack and "Lee to the rear"
Expecting Longstreet to arrive overnight, Hill let his exhausted men rest instead of straightening their lines or digging in. Longstreet was hours late. At 5 a.m. on 6 May Hancock attacked with some 23,000 men, and Hill's divisions collapsed. Only a line of Confederate guns at the edge of the Widow Tapp farm stood between Hancock and the heart of Lee's army.14
Then, around 7 a.m., a ragged line of soldiers came out of the woods behind the guns. "What brigade is this?" Lee asked. "The Texas brigade!" Longstreet had arrived. Lee, his blood up, rode forward to lead the charge himself, until the Texans began shouting "Lee to the rear!" and he reluctantly stayed behind. Their charge stopped Hancock at a terrible price; by the best estimates, Encyclopedia Virginia notes, only about a third of the brigade's 700 to 800 men survived. The National Park Service puts its loss at 500 of its 800 men.15
Longstreet's flank attack and wounding
Longstreet saw his chance. South of the Plank Road ran the bed of an unfinished railroad, and at about 11 a.m. four Confederate brigades used it as a hidden corridor to get around Hancock's left. They burst out of the cut and rolled up the Union line "like a wet blanket", and the Federals fell back to their earthworks along the Brock Road; Union general James Wadsworth was mortally wounded.16
Longstreet rode forward to press the attack. In the smoke and brush, Virginia troops mistook his party for the enemy and fired. Longstreet was hit in the neck and right arm, and Brigadier General Micah Jenkins beside him was killed. It happened about five miles from the spot where Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own men a year earlier. Unlike Jackson, Longstreet survived, but he was out of the war for five months, and the Confederate attack lost hours. When it finally came, about 5 p.m., it briefly broke into the Brock Road works before being thrown back.17 › Battle of Chancellorsville, 1863
Gordon's attack and the burning woods
At the other end of the line the fighting on 6 May was just as fierce and just as indecisive. Near sunset John B. Gordon struck the exposed right flank of Sedgwick's corps, broke through, and captured hundreds of prisoners, including two Union generals. But the attack came too late in the day to exploit, and Grant re-formed his line in the darkness.18
The worst horror came from the forest itself. Musket fire and bursting shells set the dry undergrowth alight, and brush fires swept between the lines, burning many wounded soldiers alive where they lay. The artist Alfred Waud drew wounded men escaping from the flames, and the drawing appeared in Harper's Weekly that June. On 7 May both armies stayed in their trenches, waiting for an attack that never came, while the woods smoldered around them.19
How many died at the Battle of the Wilderness?
Between about 26,000 and 30,000 men were killed, wounded or captured. The American Battlefield Trust estimates 17,000 Union and 13,000 Confederate casualties; Encyclopedia Virginia gives 17,666 and 11,125, and the National Park Service about 18,000 and 8,000. The Union army's own return, printed in the Official Records, counts 2,246 Union soldiers killed outright.20
Grant turns south
The National Park Service counts it as another tactical Confederate victory. Both of Grant's flanks had crumbled on 6 May, and he had lost far more men than Lee. The veterans of the Army of the Potomac knew the pattern: cross the river, get beaten, retreat, as at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. When an anxious officer warned him of what Lee might do next, Grant snapped that he was tired of hearing what Lee was going to do and told him to think instead about what they were going to do themselves.21
On the night of 7 May the army pulled out of its trenches and marched to a crossroads in the forest. A turn to the north meant retreat to the river fords. Grant turned south, toward Spotsylvania Court House and Richmond. As the men realized they were not retreating, they broke into cheers. Grant's aide Horace Porter remembered soldiers rushing to the roadside, swinging their hats and lighting pine knots so that "the night march had become a triumphal procession for the new commander".22
Why was the Battle of the Wilderness important?
It was the first battle between Grant and Lee and the opening of the Overland Campaign. Unlike every Union commander in Virginia before him, Grant did not retreat after a setback: he marched south and never let go of Lee's army. By refusing to accept defeat, Encyclopedia Virginia concludes, he turned the battle into a strategic victory for the Union.23
The Wilderness was the first of six weeks of almost continuous fighting that ended with Lee's army dug in around Richmond and Petersburg. The next day the armies collided again at Spotsylvania Court House, then at the North Anna and Cold Harbor, where Grant's losses earned him the name "butcher" in parts of the Northern press.24 › Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, 1864
The battle also exposed the strain on Lee's command. Hill had failed to prepare his lines on the night of 5 May and was ill for part of the battle; Ewell hesitated on 6 May, and Longstreet, his ablest lieutenant, was gone for months.25
Visiting the battlefield today
The Wilderness battlefield is part of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. A driving tour starts near Grant's headquarters knoll and Ellwood, the plantation house that was Warren's headquarters during the battle and is open seasonally, and continues to Saunders Field, where Confederate earthworks still survive, the Higgerson and Chewning farms, the Widow Tapp field, the site of Longstreet's wounding and the Brock Road and Plank Road intersection. Walking trails follow Gordon's flank attack, the Union line, the Widow Tapp farm and the ground held by the Vermont Brigade.26
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