The Wilderness

Grant's Overland Campaign: The Wilderness

May 5-6, 1864

Grant vs. Lee

For some reason I have always had the hardest time getting my mind around the Wilderness. I’ve read about everything there is to read on the subject and visited the battlefield; yet, somehow I can’t see to get the events straight. Usually, I go to a battlefield and everything I’ve ever read starts coming back to me as I walk around and it all starts falling into place. On Lookout Mtn. in Chattanooga, Tennessee as I followed the route of Hookers attack and looked up toward the summit it was obvious that the Confederate positions were in the wrong place and their artillery would have be useless. No problem. At Pea Ridge, the Confederates had backed themselves into a corner and given the Union the perfect spot to setup their artillery, simple. At Spotsylvania the Confederates had the forest at their backs, a line of good trenches with wide open fields of fire, and they were dug in like a tick: But the Wilderness, what happened there?

I suppose the Confederates had a built in advantage, they were Southerners, many Virginians, and this was Virginia after all, so the dense brushy forest punctuated by cleared fields would have been like the countryside they had grown up hunting in. Union shop keepers and bank tellers would just be lost in the sticks. The Southern soldiers had been fighting for three years by this point and knew how to act independently in battle, where the less experienced Union troops needed formations to function at all and formations broke down in the heavy brush.

Maybe that is my understanding of the Wilderness; it was a big jumbled chaotic mess. Those who would do the best there were those who were most at home in the woods and could adapt, innovate, and overcome. (Thanks Clint.) Maybe there really isn’t any more to it than that. I have included the various park informational signs for the three tour stops that make up the Wilderness Battlefield Park. Maybe you can make some more sense of it than I could.

On this page I take my best shot at explaining the Wilderness, it is more of a description of why they fought there than what happened; I know, but it is my best shot.

Note: there is no visitors center for the Wilderness, just the wayside shown bellow. Information about the battlefield can be obtained at the Chancellorsville Visitors Center. There isn't even a separate tour map, the Wilderness is covered by stops 10, 11, and 12 on the Fredericksbug and Spotsylvnia Tour Map.

Saunders Field Tour Stop 10

The Battle of the Wilderness was the first major battle of Grant's Overland Campaign and the first battle between Grant and Lee.

The dominant military theory of the mid 1800’s dictated that the successful military commander must concentrate his forces and strike his enemy at the weakest spot of his similarly concentrated forces. Inherent in this strategy was the idea that a commander must fight one battle at a time to allow for the greatest concentration of forces. By defeating the concentrated force of his enemy, the successful commander would inflict a crushing defeat on his foe, compelling him to surrender and end the war. All of the generals, with the exception of Nathan Bedford Forrest, had been laboring under this dictum from the beginning of the war and it explains why they did the things they did.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Wizard of the Saddle, not having had the benefit of formal military training, was not bound by any dictum and was therefore free to develop a whole new theory of warfare. Given his lack of supplies, manpower and infantry support Forrest developed a fighting style we now call guerilla warfare, employing lightening fast strikes at targets of opportunity to keep his militarily superior opponents off balance and confused.

Saunders Field, where the battle opened. The Visitor's Wayside is in the copse of trees center right.

March 9, 1864 Ulysses S Grant was made a lieutenant general and supreme commander of the Union army. Grant had another idea: Forrest’s activities were fine for making a small force effective against a large one; but, while it would prolong a war indefinitely, it wouldn’t win it. Grant realized that the weakness of the Confederate army was its limited pool of manpower and the lack of an industrial base for producing supplies. Concentrating forces and attacking one place at a time allowed the Confederates to maximize their smaller force by moving it around to wherever they saw the Union concentrating.

Grant had decided that the best way to fight the Confederacy was to attack on a broad front; he realized that the South couldn’t fight everywhere at once. Accordingly, when Grant was given supreme command he ordered all of his field commanders to attack immediately. Grant himself took up residence with Meade’s Army of the Potomac to insure that it would not only go on the attack but stay on the attack as well. So it was that Meade broke camp at Brandy Station and led his men across the Rapidan River into a place called The Wilderness.

Ewell came down the turnpike toward you. There are some works at this end of the field right under the camera.

What Grant wanted a swift movement that would threaten Richmond and force Lee to attack, what Grant got was an over burdened army with a massive supply train that got fouled up by the river and the dense second growth of the Wilderness. One thing Grant couldn’t afford to do was leave his supply train exposed giving Lee a chance to re-supply at Grant’s own expense. So Grant stopped, in the one place in the whole world he didn’t want to stop, and sorted out the supply wagons. This gave Lee the opportunity he needed to move up and engage the Army of the Potomac in a place where numbers didn’t much matter.

A shot of the works on the East edge of Saunders Field.

Robert E. Lee was still operating under the principle that a massive defeat of the enemy results in a total victory, he should have see by this point that it wasn’t true. Lee had massively defeated the Union army many times, once in the wilderness already at Chancellorsville the year before, and still the North had not surrendered. Lee carried on the fight believing that the next big victory would force Lincoln to sue for peace. Looking for that next great and last battle, Lee moved into the wilderness and attacked Grant’s forces on May 5, 1864.

The fighting opened when the Confederate Ewell’s Corps collided with Warren’s V Corps on Orange-Fredericksburg Turnpike. Initially, Warren’s men drove Ewell’s corps back, but the thick underbrush hampered the union assault. The battle seesawed back and forth and by the end of the second day both armies has succeeded in surviving but not much else. What is remembered of the fight in the Wilderness is not the brilliant military maneuvers, there were none, but rather the horror of the conditions endured by the solders. Fires set by the battle raged while the men fought and the wounded that could not flee were burned alive.

By the second night Grant saw that nothing was going too be accomplished in that mess of trees and brush, and quietly as possible he limbered up his army and setout for the crossroads at Spotsylvania Courthouse. The Union solders of the Army of the Potomac had seen this play before: a new commander, limber up, cross the Rapidan, fight a big battle, flee back across the Rapidan and wait for the next new commander; but, this time they didn’t flee, they headed south. Old soldiers exclaimed with pride, “That Grant don’t scare worth a damn.” They were right.

While the South saw the Wilderness as a victory, in the end the only real significant development to come out of the Wilderness was the wounding of Confederate General James Longstreet. General Stonewall Jackson had been wounded not far away at Chansellorsville, and like Jackson, Longstreet was shot by his own men, only three miles away from the location where Jackson was shot; but, unlike Jackson Longstreet recovered.

Interestingly enough, Grant saw the Wilderness as a Union victory. I tend to see it as a stalemate, neither side could gain any sort of advantage over the other because the soldiers would get lost whenever they tried to advance. I suppose from Grants point of view he was satisfied that the Army of the Potomac had stood its ground and Lee’s Army of Virginia had not been able to move it. I have a harder time seeing the South's claim to victory, true Lee had caught the Union army in the Wilderness, he wanted to avoid a fight in the open, but he didn’t stop its advance. When Grant flanked left it was of his own volition, not something Lee forced upon him. I don't see where the 1927 sign above can claim the Union was defeated, they didn't go home.