Civil War Today

The Mule Shoe

May 11- 13, 1864

May 11^th started out with both sides probing each other trying to figure out what their plans were. Typically, the Union misread Lee’s intentions giving him an opportunity to pull off some kind of a surprise that would send the Army of the Potomac reeling back to Washington in disarray, but not this time. Lee misread the Union intentions this time and thought they were getting ready to retreat. Grant has no such intentions.

A heavy rain storm prevented any serious action for the remained of the eleventh. The Union used the day to reposition for an all out attack on the Mule Shoe, scheduled for 4am on the twelfth. Interpreting the Union moves as preparations to leave, Lee used the day to pull the artillery out of the Mule Shoe.

Grant hit the Mule Shoe at 4:35am on the twelfth with everything he had. Remember, the Mule Shoe position had been constructed at night by very tired solders. They had followed the contours of the land which was way they were in such an exposed position to begin with, but to make matters worse they had made a very big mistake when they situated their trenches.

The trench followed along the top of a ridge, but it was situated to the physical top of the ridge not the military crest. Confederate engineers seemed to make this mistake a lot; it would play a major role later at Missionary Ridge in Tennessee. The physical top of the ridge is the high point; the military crest is the highest point where the defenders fire covers the whole approach. Because the Confederate trenches were on the physical top much of the Union approach was in defilade. Compounding the mistake, the Confederate forgot that old maxim: Keep your powder dry.

Using the assault tactics pioneered days earlier by Upton the Union forces sweep over the field and into the Confederate trenches. The Confederates didn’t have any where to retreat to so they stood and fought a desperate hand to hand battle with the Union attackers. The fight carried on for 24 hours before it was finally settled.

The initial Union assault drove through and over the position and threatened to cut the Army of Virginia in half. Lee mounted a series of counter attacks to give his engineers time to construct a new line across base of the Mule Shoe. The fighting ground down into a brutal slug fest as both sides continued to feed more and more troops into battle. Bodies began to pile up, a tree was cut down by the continuous fire, and both sides brought up artillery and blasted away at each other from close range.

The fight continued on throughout the night unabated. Men now fought on a layers deep carpet of bodies. The ground was muddy from the heavy rain on the eleventh and the trampling of the struggling solders drove the fallen dead and wounded down into the mud. Caissons bringing up ammunition mutilated the bodies further and still the fighting drug on. Finally on the thirteenth the Confederates fell back to the new trench line and fighting sputtered to a close.

Nobody had ever seen any kind of fighting like what had happened at the Mule Shoe. The Union suffered about 9,000 casualties in the fight while the Confederates suffered around 8,000, all in a very small space. The Union prevailed in that they had captured to Mule Shoe but the Confederates had held on long enough to construct a new, shorter and stronger line. So when the fighting finally stopped, nothing much had changed.