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The Overland Campaign was a major campaign which occurred in the Eastern theater of the American Civil War from May to June 1864 as Union general Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac advanced overland across the Rapidan River towards the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, facing fierce resistance from Confederate general Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. After being fought to a draw at the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, the Battle of North Anna, and the Battle of Totopotomoy Creek and losing the Battle of Cold Harbor, Grant was able to outmaneuver Lee's army and threaten Richmond from the south, besieging the railroad hub of Petersburg and initiating the Richmond-Petersburg campaign.

Background[]

In March 1864, Lincoln put Ulysses S. Grant in charge of all Union armies in the field. Grant's plan called for simultaneous Union advances against Atlanta in the West and against Lee in the East. Grant changed the Union objective from the capture of Richmond to the destruction of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and established his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, which, in early 1864, was encamped on the Rapidan River. Grant decided to outflank the Confederate positions across the river by slipping through the Wilderness on the Confederate right, where a year earlier, at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Lee had nearly destroyed the Army of the Potomac.

History[]

Before dawn on 4 May 1864, Ulysses S. Grant opened his advance against Robert E. Lee. The first of nearly 120,000 men, 4,300 supply wagons, and 850 ambulances making up the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River well downstream of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, nestling behind formidable defenses on the other side.

If Grant could get through the Wilderness, on the Confederate right, before Lee could react, he might lure the Southern general into the open and destroy him. So all day long the blue-clad divisions tramped down the road between walls of somber pines and oak thickets, dense with thorny, foot-entangling vines. It was a "region of gloom and the shadow of death," as one officer put it, and many veterans felt an ominous dread as they went into bivouac that night. Dismayed scouts had reported that Lee, who had been watching the Union army, was on the move, heading swiftly up the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road, parallel tracks that led east into the Wilderness.

The Battle of the Wilderness[]

Until James Longstreet's First Corps, marching from a different direction, could join him, Lee would be attacking Grant with only one-third of his opponent's strength. Nevertheless, on the morning of 5 May he slammed into a Federal army that was still deploying to meet him. Union troops in Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps tried to stem Richard S. Ewell's Second Corps' onslaught on the Turnpike; 3 miles away, a single Union division held the Brock Road, running across Orange Plank Road, as A.P. Hill's Third Corps bore down on them. Thousands of men on both sides were soon clawing their way through briars and stumbling across ravines, trying to form orderly battle lines. Formations and directions of advance rapidly went astray in the tangled maze of undergrowth.

The confused fighting continued all day. At Grant's headquarters, the general ceaselessly whittled sticks and chain-smoked cigars as he waited for reports. In the woods, the volume of musketry was rapidly becoming a deafening cacophony as yelling men, groping blindly, shot point-blank at muzzle flashes in the gloom - "firing by earsight." Storms of bullets tore through the woods and cut men down in droves. Brush fires became runaway infernos, burning to death many of the helpless wounded, whose hideous screams could be heard above the din. Smoke had turned the sun a lurid bloodred long before twilight finally descended and the battle subsided. Weary survivors literally fell to sleep, rifles in hand.

Early on 6 May, the fighting resumed as Grant went on the attack. The Union right wing kept up the pressure, then Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps, at the Brock Road, smashed through the underbrush into A.P. Hill's ragged lines, which broke and fled. Lee himself rode into the bedlam, trying desperately to rally his troops before all was lost. With only his staff and a single artillery battery standing between his army and disaster, Lee saw that Longstreet's divisions were finally arriving down the Plank Road. "Who are you, my boys?" Lee cried above the uproar. "Texas boys," came the reply. "Texans always move them!" the general shouted, waving his hat, and with a strange light in his eyes began to lead them into battle. Grimy hands tugged at his bridle, as men yelled, "Go back, General Lee! Lee to the rear!" Brigadier-General John Gregg's 800 Texans surged forward and stopped the onslaught, although at a fearful price. Fewer than 250 of the men who charged emerged unscathed.

Confederate riposte[]

By mid-morning, some of Longstreet's men had discovered an unfinished railroad cut to the south and, concealed from view, turned Hancock's flank, rolling it up brigade by brigade until the Union troops were in mass retreat. In the din and confusion, some Confederates saw horses galloping toward them through the smoke and leveled a volley. Among the men and animals left sprawled on the ground were South Carolina's general Micah Jenkins, shot in the head, and Lee's "Old War Horse," Longstreet himself, severely wounded in the neck.

With that the Southern attack faltered; when it was renewed in late afternoon it was decisively repulsed by Federal troops deployed behind breastworks along Brock Road. A roar of musketry to the north was that of John B. Gordon's Georgians trying to outflank the Union right, but the shooting slackened with darkness, with neither side able to break through. A second horrid night descended on the burning, bullet-shredded Wilderness. Grant called off his attacks; Lee dug in.

By dawn on 7 May, with both armies well entrenched and the fighting ended for the moment, Grant had made the decision not to retreat, as his predecessors had too often done when faced with a setback. Rather, he planned to slide left and south, ordering the Army of the Potomac's high command to strike that evening for Spotsylvania Court House, a hamlet located some 10 miles to the southeast of the Wilderness battlefield. It stood at a crossroads that controlled the routes to Richmond.

Grant was determined to position his forces between Lee and the Confederate capital. He knew this was the only way he could compel the enemy to fight in the open, and he did not want to see Lee's outnumbered veterans get behind breastworks. The task of prying them out would lead to further grueling and costly fighting. Grant hoped to begin his maneuver around Lee's right flank without being detected by his adversary. He slipped most of the army behind Hancock's Second Corps, still manning the Brock Road and thus masking the movement. The press of wagons and exhausted men made for slow going. As Grant and his staff rode through the logjams, thousands of begrimed soldiers, seeing his horse was trotting south, raised cheer after lusty cheer. Finally, they were not retreating before the Army of Northern Virginia.

Lee had not failed to spot the clouds of dust from Grant's wagons and felt certain they were heading toward the key point of Spotsylvania. He ordered Richard H. Anderson, who had replaced Longstreet, to move the First Corps out at dawn. The fires that night, however, still lit up the Wilderness in a terrifying display few of the veterans ever forgot; so Anderson, unable to bivouac his soldiers there, got an early and, in the event, lucky start.

Lee's response[]

Throughout the day on 8 May, Confederate cavalrymen fought fierce delaying actions, slowed the Union advance, and allowed Anderson's soldiers, hastening down a parallel route, to choose their ground. They arrived at the village minutes ahead of the Union vanguard, and General J.E.B. Stuart deployed them across the high ground to the west, where they were soon repulsing one piecemeal attack after another. As darkness fell, more and more units were fed into the ensuing fight, each stumbling into position along a lengthening front. As Grant had feared, Lee had his troops dig in.

By morning, a forbidding arc of Confederate earthworks, fronted by abatis (felled treetops) and sharpened stakes, was snaking through the woods and fields. At a 1-mile bulge in the line, known as the Mule Shoe salient by the Confederates, these works were dauntingly impressive - packed-earth breastworks framed by log revetments (retaining walls), rifle ports topped by shielding head logs, and stout traverses (intercepting embankments) jutting rearward to protect the defenders against flanking fire or crossfire. However, because the position had been hastily sited in the dark, for all its defenses it had a weakness: a breach by Grant could divide Lee's army.

Attempted breakthroughs[]

Having failed to outmaneuver his opponent, Grant hammered away at Lee's defenses. Numerous attacks against the Rebels entrenched on Laurel Hill and the Spindle Farm were ill-coordinated and bloodily repulsed. Then, on the evening of 10 May, in the woods across from the Mule Shoe salient, Colonel Emory Upton quietly packed 12 Union regiments into one dense wedge. Bursting out of the woods, the column charged with such momentum that it actually breached the salient. Despite its eventual repulse (although the attackers carried with them a number of prisoners), this fleeting success convinced Grant, as a steady rain began falling, to plan a similar, only much bigger, assault, spearheaded by Hancock's Second Corps. The target would be the apex of the salient.

The Union assault[]

Dawn on 12 May brought more rain, along with a mist so thick that the Confederates manning the apex defenses barely heard the tramp and splash of innumerable feet until some 20,000 Union soldiers were upon them. If faulty intelligence had not persuaded Lee to remove 22 cannon from the salient, and if many of its defenders had not led their powder get dampened by the rain, the onslaught might have been repulsed.

The Northern attackers easily surmounted the works and were seemingly everywhere, killing or capturing thousands of Rebels. At this desperate hour, it was Lee himself who once more rode into the maelstrom. His hat swept from his head, his silver hair shining, he again tried rallying his broken soldiers. Again the cry rose, "Lee to the rear! Lee to the rear!" but their commander, his blood up, would have none of it until a sergeant firmly took his bridle, leaving General John B. Gordon to coordinate a series of ferocious counterattacks.

Yard by costly yard, the Confederates reclaimed every part of the salient, but the bluecoats only regrouped along the outside face of the breastworks, ready to renew their assault. Lee needed his weary veterans to hold the Northerners while a new defensive line was hastily constructed.

The "Bloody Angle"[]

The Confederates held their line, as the musketry roared for most of the day. Nowhere did the fighting rage as violently as it did along the 600-foot stretch of works known as the "West Angle". There the deafening roar reached a level of sustained frenzy seldom equaled in any conflict. The air, heavy with rain, exploded with shot and shell. Thousands of soldiers wallowed in the mud and blood, screaming and firing point-blank. A battle mania took hold. Fierce hand-to-hand struggles surged back and forth across the parapet.

The incessant shooting continued for 20 hours and more, each sputtering lull followed by a renewed brutal crescendo. Darkness brought no respite from the slaughter, the muzzle flashes becoming just a continuous sheet of flame. By midnight, nearby trees were crashing to the ground, chipped and sheared in half by the volume of flying lead. By 4 AM, the firing had eased. It soon ceased altogether, as the surviving Southerners scaped to Lee's newly completed defensive line, abandoning the salient. Dawn revealed a hideous scene. Before the splintered works the Union dead lay in heaps, so chewed and lacerated by bullets as to be unrecognizable. Among the traverses, Confederate bodies were churned many layers deep and in the mud writhed the wounded. Soon the West Angle would understandably be nicknamed the "Bloody Angle."

Exhausted stalemate[]

After the horrific events of 12 May, the rain continued to fall while both exhausted armies marked time in the mud. Attempts at maneuver were completely bogged down until a fitful sun at last reappeared. Grant then launched another attack. At daybreak on 18 May, after a thundering barrage, 12 Union brigades swept over the wrecked and abandoned salient, still littered with corpses, toward Lee's final defensive line, which was bristling with cannon. But the Confederate artillery alone was enough to shatter the onslaught, their infantry never even raisin ga rifle.

Failing to pry Lee out of his works, Grant began shifting his forces eastward, sidling them past Lee's entrenched right flank. On 19 May, a large Rebel force did emerge to investigate what the Union Army was doing. The bloody but inconclusive fight at the Alsop and Harris farms was the final clash in the battles around Spotsylvania Court House. By 21 May, Grant had his men hurrying south for the North Anna River, still aiming to get between Lee and Richmond.

Maneuvering toward Richmond[]

On 8 May 1864, as the opening battles at Spotsylvania were beginning, the 10,000 troopers of General Philip Sheridan's cavalry corps swung into their saddles and set off on a massive raid on Richmond, 50 miles to the south. Three days later they were nearly at the city's outer defenses when they learned that Confederate cavalry blocked their way.

General J.E.B. Stuart, with a third of Sheridan's numbers, had hastily deployed across a ridge just north of a tumbledown inn called Yellow Tavern. Stuart's men and mounts were exhausted, but they put up a spirited resistance for three hours. Then, just as a late afternoon thunderstorm broke, Sheridan's troopers charged up the ridge. Galloping along his lines, Stuart shouted encouragement. He had just reached the 1st Virginia Cavalry when he was shot and seriously wounded. "Go back! Go back!" he yelled to his men, who were about to break under the force of the assault, "I had rather die than be whipped!" Still they could not hold their line, and were driven off the ridge a few minutes later.

The road to Richmond was open, but Sheridan shied away from the city's defenses and headed east. Rebel cavalry harried his flanks and rear, but eventually he made his way to the Army of the James at Bermuda Hundred. He had fulfilled his vow to "whip Jeb Stuart out of his boots." The seriously wounded Stuart was taken to Richmond, where he died of his wound on the evening of 12 May, as fighting raged at Spotsylvania's "Bloody Angle."

Meeting at the North Anna River[]

Ten days later, Grant left Spotsylvania and sent his advance units once more on the roads toward Richmond. The cat-and-mouse game began again, with Lee matching Grant's progress mile for mile, as rain lashed the slogging troops. Before darkness descended on 22 May, Lee had concentrated his army behind the south bank of the North Anna River, 21 miles from the Confederate capital. Grant arrived on the opposite bank the next day. General Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps splashed across a shallow ford at Jericho Mill and was attacked that evening by a division from General A.P. Hill's corps. Warren drove Hill's troops off after a sharp and bloody fight.

Union failure[]

The following morning, General Winfield Scott Hancock's Second Corps crossed the North Anna 5 miles downstream, meeting little resistance. Hopeful rumors began to circulate that Lee had retreated again. In mid-afternoon, however, one Union division encountered Confederates near Hanover Junction, dug in behind entrenchments. An hour later, General Ambrose Burnside's Ninth Corps tried crossing at Ox Ford, only to be stopped by the strong rebel defenses.

By evening it was apparent that the Army of Northern Virginia had been lurking in the midst of Union forces and was shielded behind a formidable inverted "V." The apex was on Ox Ford and the rear was protected by steep-banked streams. In a masterstroke, Lee had divided the Union army, but was himself too ill to organize an attack. Grant could not unite the two wings of his army, which therefore retreated from this most ingenious of defensive arrangements, withdrawing across the river. A day passed. Then, on the evening of 26 May, Grant feinted to the west, and again pivoted his army to the southeast.

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