Wilderness and Spotsylvania, VA

We drove through fog, mist and rain...

as we traveled east to Wilderness, VA.  We visited the battlefield where the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, confronted the newly appointed commander of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant, for the first time in May 1864.

Two confrontations between Union and Confederate troops, one in Saunders Field...

(as it looks today)

and another along a road further south, merged into a huge conflict that engulfed this area of tangled, forested undergrowth and cost thousands of lives.

(as it looks today)

This Battle of the Wilderness lasted two days and ended in a stalemate with Lee's Confederates entrenched in a strong position.  Grant refused to attack and instead ordered a night march south to Spotsylvania Court House.  The two armies met west of town at Laurel Hill where Union soldiers repeatedly tried to take the Confederate position on the ridge, but were easy targets as they crossed the field.

(as it is today)

The Union general, John Sedgwick, was killed at Laurel Hill.  He was so beloved by his troops from Connecticut that, 20 years after his death, survivors from that regiment returned here and erected a memorial at the spot where he died.  Emotions generated during the Civil War were strong and remain so.  Even today, 150 years after Sedgwick's death, someone still places flowers at his monument.

Heavy fighting occurred at a place in the Confederate line called the Mule Shoe.  Col. Emory Upton led 5,000 Union troops along this trail through the woods to arrive undetected at the Confederate lines where they were able to break through.

The Confederates recaptured the Mule Shoe, but two days later the fiercest hand-to-hand fighting in the Battle of Spotsylvania took place on the same Confederate line at a place that became known as the Bloody Angle.  More than 20,000 Union soldiers crossed this field in what one participant described as "...a seething, bubbling, roaring hell of hate and murder."

As it is today.  Remnants of earthworks constructed along the Confederate line can still be seen on the right.

The open field today.

Neither side could claim victory at Spotsylvania, and once again Grant moved his troops south toward the Confederate capital of Richmond.  Here began Grant's war of attrition, a constant hammering of Union forces on the Confederates' dwindling resources that ten months later led to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.

This somber day ended with a visit to the town of Spotsylvania where we saw the old court house...

 and, of course, the library.