On the morning of May 6, 1864, Robert E. Lee had Ulysses S. Grant trapped. The Union Army of the Potomac, numbering well over one hundred thousand men, was disoriented in a seventy-square-mile tangle of Virginia forest called the Wilderness, where artillery could not maneuver and cavalry could not scout.
Lee had five of his best generals positioned to crush the Union advance. Richard Ewell commanded the Second Corps on the Orange Turnpike to the north. Ambrose P. Hill held the Orange Plank Road to the south with the Third Corps.
James Longstreet, Lee’s most reliable commander, was rushing from Gordonsville with the First Corps. John B. Gordon, Ewell’s most aggressive division commander, was maneuvering for a flank attack. Above them all, Lee himself was orchestrating what should have been the perfect tactical blow.
By dawn, the Union Second Corps under Winfield Scott Hancock, the most powerful fighting unit in the Army of the Potomac, was being pushed back in confusion. Confederate attacks were working exactly as Lee had planned. But then something went catastrophically wrong, and the failure would echo through the rest of the war. Lee’s plan had been built on the same ground where he had beaten Hooker the year before at Chancellorsville.
When word came on May 2 that Grant had crossed the Rapidan River, Lee knew he was heavily outnumbered. Grant had roughly 120,000 men; Lee had 61,000. But Lee understood the terrain. If he could pin Grant in the Wilderness, where the dense forest made artillery useless and maneuvering nearly impossible, he might break the Union army apart piece by piece.
He would let Grant cross the river uncontested, then strike on two parallel roads with Ewell and Hill while Longstreet raced forward to deliver the final blow. On May 4, Union cavalry splashed across the Rapidan at Germanna Ford. Engineers laid pontoon bridges, and the Army of the Potomac began crossing. Grant ordered his men to move fast, but Lee was already reacting.
On the morning of May 5, Ewell’s Corps marched east on the Orange Turnpike, and Hill’s Corps moved on the parallel Plank Road. The two Confederate corps were separated by miles of impenetrable forest, a risky division of force, but Lee bet the Wilderness itself would prevent Grant from exploiting the gap. At midday, the Union V Corps under Gouverneur Warren emerged from the forest onto Saunders Field and ran directly into Ewell’s men. Ewell had prepared his position perfectly.
His men were dug in, his artillery had clear fields of fire, and Warren’s attack was repulsed with heavy losses. Three miles south on the Plank Road, Hill’s Third Corps collided with Union troops racing to seize the Brock Road, a crucial north-south avenue. Hancock recognized the danger and brought his entire corps forward. By nightfall, the Union line on the Plank Road was stabilizing.
Lee faced a critical decision. Ewell had stopped Warren. Hill was fighting hard but being pushed back. Longstreet had not yet arrived.
Hill’s men were exhausted after marching all night. Lee passed along orders for the night: do not entrench, do not strengthen positions. Longstreet would be there by dawn, and they could attack with fresh troops in the morning. The decision would prove disastrous.
At dawn on May 6, Hancock attacked with twenty thousand men of the Union Second Corps, advancing along the Plank Road toward Hill’s exhausted, unprepared troops. Hill’s men fought hard but could not hold. Within an hour, the Third Corps was in full route. Men were running.
Officers could not stop them. For a moment, Grant had the breakthrough he had dreamed of: the Confederate center had collapsed, and a hard push could split Lee’s army in two. But then a column of fresh troops appeared. Longstreet’s First Corps had arrived.
The Texas Brigade, eight hundred tough soldiers under General John Gregg, charged into the gap in Hill’s line. They were not enough to stop Hancock, but they were enough to buy time. Lee, recognizing the critical moment, rode forward on his horse Traveler, intent on leading the countercharge himself. His own soldiers shouted, “Go back, General Lee,” and grabbed the reins of his horse, physically preventing him from riding into the fight.
Lee relented, and the Texas Brigade, joined by other units of Longstreet’s corps, crashed into Hancock’s advance. Longstreet took command with characteristic decisiveness. He spotted an unfinished railroad grade running through the forest, cleared land that was a hidden road not on most maps. He sent four brigades through this corridor, paralleling the Plank Road, to strike the Union left flank.
At 11:00 a. m. , as Hancock pressed forward believing he had broken the Confederate line, Longstreet’s flank attack emerged from the forest. The impact was devastating.
Union soldiers described it as a wet blanket being rolled up by Confederate fire. In minutes, Hancock’s breakthrough evaporated. The Confederate attack seemed unstoppable. Then the unthinkable happened.
As Longstreet rode forward with his staff to pursue the broken Union lines, shots rang out from the south side of the Plank Road. Confederate troops, confused in the dense forest, mistook Longstreet’s column for Union cavalry and opened fire. A minie bullet passed through his neck and right shoulder. He reeled in the saddle, blood pouring from the wound.
He survived, but he would not return to command until October 1864. The damage was catastrophic. Longstreet’s corps, suddenly leaderless, lost momentum. The pursuit bogged down.
The breakthrough was no longer a breakthrough. Richard H. Anderson, a competent but uninspired officer, took command of the First Corps. He lacked Longstreet’s presence, his decisiveness, his ability to sense an opportunity and exploit it ruthlessly.
The Confederate attack faltered. Lee shifted his focus to the Union right, north of the Orange Turnpike. There, John B. Gordon had spent the day watching the Union flank and reporting that it was vulnerable.
He pressed Ewell to let him attack, but Ewell hesitated, waiting for explicit authorization from Lee. At 4:00 p. m. , as dusk fell, Lee finally gave the order.
Gordon’s division charged forward and caught the Union VI Corps by surprise. For twenty minutes, everything hung in the balance. The 6th Alabama, already decimated in earlier fighting, lost eighty percent of its remaining strength but seized Union guns and captured nearly 2,500 prisoners. Two Union generals were killed or mortally wounded.
It was another Confederate breakthrough, but Gordon had no support. The other divisions in Ewell’s corps did not coordinate with his attack. Sedgwick brought up reserves, Union batteries opened fire, and Gordon’s attack sputtered out as darkness fell. After two days of fighting, the Battle of the Wilderness had reached a stalemate.
But the real horror was the terrain itself. Fires from the first day still smoldered. Dry brush ignited from cannon fire and musket flashes. Wounded soldiers, unable to move, burned to death where they fell.
Nearly two hundred men from both armies perished in the flames, their bodies later unidentifiable. The official casualty count was staggering: approximately 17,666 Union and 11,033 Confederate casualties, nearly thirty thousand in total. But the numbers do not tell the full story. Lee’s plan had been nearly perfect, but he lacked the subordinates to carry it out.
Ewell, still recovering from the loss of his leg and from the psychological effects of battle, was hesitant where Stonewall Jackson had been aggressive. Hill, sick and overwhelmed by corps command, made the decision not to entrench on the night of May 5, a decision that proved catastrophic when Hancock attacked at dawn. Longstreet, brilliant upon his arrival, was cut down by his own men. And Gordon, for all his courage, made a one-division attack against an entire corps without support.
Lee reportedly mourned the loss of his best commander, saying, “I have lost my old warhorse,” a phrase that echoed his grief for Stonewall Jackson, killed at Chancellorsville the year before. The Confederate Army of May 1864 was not the army of 1862. The best officers were dead, wounded, aging, sick, and traumatized by years of brutal warfare. Lee was trying to fight as if he still had the perfect subordinates, but he did not.
On the morning of May 7, Grant did something that shocked the Confederates. Instead of retreating, he simply sidestepped Lee’s army and continued south toward Richmond, as if the brutal two-day battle had been nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Grant sat calmly on his horse chewing a cigar as his bloodied army streamed past him. Soldiers cheered and waved their hats.
Every Union general before Grant had retreated after a tactical defeat — McClellan, Burnside, even Hooker after Chancellorsville. But Grant did not retreat. He reportedly told a reporter, “If you see the president, tell him from me that whatever happens, there will be no turning back. ”
That phrase would define the rest of the war.
In the following weeks, the campaign continued through Spotsylvania, the North Anna River, and into the grinding siege at Petersburg. By the end of the Overland Campaign in June 1864, the Union had suffered approximately 55,000 casualties, the Confederacy approximately 33,000. Grant bled Lee white, trading Union lives for Confederate ones, knowing the North had more men to spare. It was brutal and costly, but it was working.
The Wilderness was the moment where five Confederate generals came closest to stopping Grant’s offensive. If Longstreet had not been wounded, if Hill’s center had held longer, if Ewell had attacked earlier, if Gordon had been supported — any of these might have changed the outcome. But none of them happened. They failed by the narrowest of margins, and the momentum of the war shifted forever.
Grant learned that Lee’s army, for all its skill and aggression, could be pushed. And if pushed hard enough, long enough, without flinching, it would eventually break.