On the afternoon of May 6, 1864, Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet was shot by his own men in the Wilderness of Virginia, a moment of friendly fire that historians have debated for over 150 years. The bullet struck him in the right shoulder, passed through his chest, and missed his spine by less than an inch. He survived, but he was removed from command at the exact moment his army needed him most. The wound came on the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness, the opening fight of Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S.
Grant’s Overland Campaign. Grant had moved the Army of the Potomac, roughly 120,000 men, into the dense, smoke-choked woods of northern Virginia. Confederate General Robert E. Lee opposed him with about 64,000 troops.
Grant’s objective was direct: destroy Lee’s army and march on Richmond. The first day of fighting, May 5, was chaotic. Visibility was limited to a few feet in the tangled undergrowth, and entire brigades became lost. The woods caught fire, and wounded soldiers from both sides who could not crawl away burned where they lay.
By nightfall, neither army had gained a decisive advantage, but the Confederate Third Corps under Lieutenant General A. P. Hill had been badly mauled along the Orange Plank Road. Just after 5:00 a.
m. on May 6, Union Major General Winfield Scott Hancock launched a mass assault down that road with roughly 20,000 men. Hill’s line, down to about 6,000 exhausted troops, collapsed. Confederate soldiers threw away their muskets and fled west toward a crossroads at the Widow Tapp farm.
By mid-morning, the Confederate right flank had been shattered and Lee’s army was in danger of being split in two. Lee rode forward to the Tapp farm, where remnants of Hill’s corps were trying to rally. The 67-year-old general dismounted and drew his sword, preparing to lead a personal counterattack. At that moment, cheering was heard from the west.
James Longstreet had arrived. Longstreet had marched his First Corps nearly 20 miles from camps near Gordonsville, leaving at 3:00 a. m. without stopping to eat or rest.
He reached the Tapp farm around 9:30 a. m. and walked directly to Lee. Seeing the older general about to lead the advance himself, Longstreet reportedly put a hand on Lee’s bridle and said, “General, if you go in, I will have to go in, and you know I am heavier than you.
” Lee laughed and handed his sword to an aide. Longstreet then executed a classic flanking maneuver. He sent one division to anchor the line south of the Plank Road while another swung wide through unbroken woods to strike the exposed Union left flank. The attack shattered Hancock’s line, and by mid-afternoon the Confederates had pushed the Union troops back to the Brock Road intersection they had held at dawn.
Longstreet had stopped the Union advance, but he wanted more. At around 3:00 p. m. , Longstreet gathered his staff and outlined a plan for a dawn attack the next morning.
Then he said four words: “Let me see the ground. ” He mounted his bay horse and rode east along the Orange Plank Road with a small party of staff officers and couriers. On the left side of the road, the 3rd South Carolina Infantry was deployed in a skirmish line, waiting for Union cavalry that never appeared. The men on the extreme left flank had either not heard orders to hold fire or had forgotten them in the smoke and exhaustion of the day.
When they saw mounted shapes coming out of the east, the direction of the enemy, a lieutenant shouted a challenge. A staff officer responded, “Friends, hold your fire. It’s General Longstreet. ” The rifles were already rising.
The volley was ragged and rolling. One bullet struck Longstreet in the right shoulder, entered his chest, and exited below his left armpit. A second bullet shattered his right hand. He did not fall from his horse.
Witnesses agreed he spoke quietly: “I’m badly hurt. Somebody help me off my horse. ”
The officer riding behind him, Brigadier General Micah Jenkins, was hit in the forehead and died instantly. Two other staff officers were wounded, and one orderly, W.
H. Mitchell, was shot in the chest and died within minutes. When the men of the 3rd South Carolina realized what they had done, some dropped their rifles, some wept, and one soldier ran into the road and fell to his knees begging forgiveness from a general who could not hear him. Longstreet was carried to a field hospital at the Widow Tapp farm.
The chief surgeon, Major John Cullen, found that the bullet had passed cleanly through his chest without hitting bone, heart, or lungs. The right hand, however, was a ruin, with three fingers nearly severed and bone fragments protruding through the palm. Longstreet refused chloroform, wanting to remain conscious while the army was in the field. He watched as Cullen picked bone fragments from his hand without making a sound.
The wound ended Longstreet’s command that spring. His dawn attack never happened. Richard H. Anderson, who inherited command of the First Corps, lacked Longstreet’s tactical instincts and spent the night preparing for a Union counterattack instead of striking Hancock’s line.
By the morning of May 7, the opportunity was gone. Grant was not retreating; he was marching south toward Spotsylvania Courthouse and eleven more months of war. Longstreet was evacuated by wagon and then by railroad to Lynchburg, Virginia. He spent six months recovering, learned to write with his left hand, and returned to duty in the fall of 1864, but the spring of his command was lost.
Micah Jenkins was buried in a shallow grave near the battlefield, wrapped in a blanket with no coffin or marker. He was 30 years old. The men who fired the fatal shots were never identified and faced no punishment. In the smoke and confusion of battle, they had fired at shadows, and one of those shadows had a name.
Robert E. Lee, upon hearing the news, said, “He is the best fighter I ever had. The Lord’s will be done. ” He did not ask who fired the shot.
Historians have argued for generations whether Longstreet’s wound cost the Confederacy the war. Had he led the dawn attack on May 7, he might have shattered Hancock’s corps and forced Grant to retreat. But Grant was determined never to retreat, and the war went on. What actually happened was a road, a thicket, a nervous finger on a trigger, and a bullet that flew true but chose the wrong target.
A general fell quietly, asked for water, and told his staff to carry on without him. The war continued.