by Mark Nesbitt
Finally, six hours after being ordered, Maj. Gen. G. K. Warren began his advance west on the Orange Turnpike against Ewell’s dug-in Confederates. Almost immediately, unit cohesion was lost because of the tangled thickets, scrub brush, and thorn bushes. A few minutes before 1:00 P.M., the Union assault reached the open country of Saunders Field. Instead of the large force Meade wanted attacking the Confederates, a much smaller force—one quarter the size—was all that could be organized for the assault. As soon as the diminished Federal attack entered the clearing, they came under fire from Confederates some 400 yards away.
Farther south, the Union attack bogged down, literally, in a swamp near the Higgerson Farm. The units slogged waist deep in water until they veered off to several points of the compass. More than one of the soldiers believed their officers must be drunk.
Because of the repulse of those Union forces, the Federal advance units had to withdraw. This left both avenues—the Orange Turnpike and the Orange Plank Road—available for the Confederates to advance along.
The butcher’s bill was growing. Saunders Field was filled with the dead and dying; those who were ambulatory, Union and Confederate alike, made it to a gully and lay down with faces to the earth to avoid the crossfire from both sides. One unit, the 146th New York, took forty-six percent casualties; Zouaves of the 140th New York suffered a debilitating fifty-one percent killed, wounded, and missing. Then, as bad as things had been, they got worse.
Discharges from Confederate muskets set the dry tinder in Saunders Field on fire. The wounded who could crawl attempted to escape from the licking flames. Those who couldn’t crawl roasted. One man with two broken legs was seen watching the flames creep closer and closer, his musket loaded and capped beside him. Cartridge boxes of the crawling wounded caught fire; the black powder inside burned and popped. After the fire died out, the living noticed strange, charred, smoking lumps throughout the field—the cremated remains of those trapped in the holocaust. By 2:30 P.M., the Union attacks, like the fires in Saunders Field, had died out. They were failures because of the piecemeal, premature fashion in which they were made.
Yet another Federal attack was made north of the Orange Turnpike by fresh troops who had marched past partially burned corpses. Confederates there purposefully set the woods on fire to stall the Yankee attack. Soldiers were wounded not only by flying lead and iron, but by flying body parts of their comrades. Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick’s aide was adjusting a piece of horse equipment when he was knocked almost unconscious by a human head, hitting him at nearly the velocity of the shell that separated it from its former owner and covering the aide with blood and gray matter.
By 4:00 P.M., this second round of fighting on the Orange Turnpike ended, leaving the smoky, choking, flaming maelstrom of the Wilderness the only victor.
In the meantime, Meade ordered Getty to advance along the Orange Plank Road from his position along the Brock Road. Meade assured Getty that he would be backed up by more Union troops under Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock. By 4:15, without Hancock’s men yet on the field of battle, Getty began his assault.
A contemporary view of the Wilderness battlefield.
To the south of the Orange Plank Road, a Vermont brigade tried its luck against the Confederates. One regimental commander, Col. Newton Stone, was shot in the thigh, got bandaged and returned, like someone drawn inexorably to his own demise, to be shot in the head and killed. Four more commanders in the brigade were shot down. Although the Vermonters tried to attack again, it was useless, and the men lay down under fire to await support.
On the other side of the Orange Plank Road, Union units were not faring any better. Mounted upon his horse, Brig. Gen. Alexander Hays began to address one of his regiments for inspiration. The ringing speech was cut short by the eerie, hollow sound of a soft, lead bullet smashing into his skull.
By 4:45 P.M., after the collapse of a Union division, Confederates were closing in on the Brock Road and Orange Plank Road intersection. Confederates were within minutes, if not seconds, of taking the Brock Road when Hancock’s lead elements entered the battlefield and, with barely enough time to align their ranks, pitched into the fiery woods and drove the rebels backward.
Around 6:00 P.M., Union assaults on the Orange Plank Road against A. P. Hill’s frazzled corps were renewed. Grant had determined correctly that there must be a gap between Ewell’s and Hill’s corps. As Union troops drove toward the gap, only 150 men from the 5th Alabama had remained unbloodied. The unit was so small that it was being used to guard prisoners. The tiny group charged, screaming the rebel yell at the top of their lungs. In the dusky, smoky, confusing forest of the Wilderness, they apparently sounded like a massive assault. The attacking Federals stopped and fired blindly, their forward impetus blunted. The fighting along the Orange Plank Road died with the light. The two opposing lines were a few dozen yards apart, close enough to hear each other digging in, their talking echoing eerily in the hazy woods.
While the fighting along the Orange Plank Road progressed into the waning daylight, the battle to the north, along the Orange Turnpike, flared again.
Grant had received some information that Confederates were leaving the vicinity of the turnpike and heading south, toward the Plank Road. Deducing that Ewell’s line must be weakened, he ordered renewed assaults. The intelligence, however, was faulty. The Union attack upon that flank failed and the woods again caught on fire.
Grant’s proposed massive push against Ewell never materialized, and by 10:00 P.M., the firing along the lines died. All night the men could hear the cries of the helpless wounded and the ominous crackling of the fires creeping closer and closer to them. The groans became piercing shrieks as the flames burned the wounded to death.
Overnight Grant issued orders to round up every available soldier and put them in the ranks for a final, death-dealing blow to the Confederates. His plan was simple and massive: attack Ewell on the turnpike and Hill on the Orange Plank Road; Maj. Gen Ambrose Burnside’s fresh troops would drive between the two attacking wings toward the center and divide Lee’s army. On Lee’s part, there was nothing to do but wait for Longstreet to come up with his corps. The fate of his army, particularly in the face of the overwhelming Federal superiority in numbers, depended upon it.
The Union attack began at about 5:00 A.M., May 6. The Confederates, expecting to be relieved by Longstreet during the night, had not entrenched. The immediate result was predictable: Confederates were driven back to the Widow Tapp Farm, where Lee had his headquarters. To blunt the Union fire, Confederates propped wounded Federals up against trees ahead of their position, reasoning the advancing troops would not fire toward their own. The unorthodox tactic worked.
By 5:15, while Hancock’s Union troops were driving the Confederates back along the Orange Plank Road, there was still no sign of Burnside’s force, which was to exploit the Confederate center. A Union attack from the north by Brig. Gen. James S. Wadsworth’s troops upon the Orange Plank Road did materialize, however; in fact it only added to the confusion as the troops intermingled with Federals attacking from the east and jammed the battlefield with superfluous troops.
As Union units reached the eastern edge of the Widow Tapp’s fields, they were greeted by the pounding of a dozen Confederate cannon—William Poague’s guns—firing at a slow cadence, their shells angling across the Orange Plank Road. Overwhelming numbers, however, were with the Yankees. Poague’s gunners were only buying time, and everyone knew it. Slowly the Federals began to lap around the edges of Poague’s position. Each minute brought doom nearer to Lee’s army.
Then, from behind the Widow Tapp Farm, came Longstreet’s First Corps, having marched an unbelievable thirty-two miles in twenty-four hours. Whatever fatigue the men felt upon approaching the battlefield must have been allayed by their realization that they were saving Lee’s army from destruction. Swept up by the charge that was to save his army, Lee himself started to lead it. But Longstreet’s Texans would have none of it. Several grabbe
d his reins and tried to turn horse and rider. It wasn’t until Longstreet himself rode up to assure Lee that he could stem the Yankee tide that Lee went to the rear.
The Texas Brigade paid dearly for the honor of fighting under the eyes of Lee. With no other units flanking them, they marched into a stand-up, eyeball-to-eyeball fight with a superior number of Yankees, a mere twenty yards away. It went on for twenty-five minutes. When it was over, the brigade fell back, leaving nearly 550 casualties, or almost seventy percent of their number, marking the area where they stood and fought. But they stopped the Federal advance.
In the meantime, Grant’s planned 5:00 A.M. attack along the Orange Turnpike to the north was beaten to the punch by Ewell’s men, who leapt from their earthworks at 4:45 and began an assault. The two sides fought to a standstill. The Wilderness again affected battle tactics: Unable to see one another, combatants merely took aim at the sound of the others’ firing. By 8:00 A.M. the musketry died down
Burnside’s men began their march toward the Chewning Farm between the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road at about 6:30 A.M. Although already nearly two hours late, Burnside inexplicably called a halt so his men could cook breakfast and coffee. As they ate, the men could hear fighting on either side: Sedgwick battling Ewell to the north and Hancock tangling with Longstreet to the south. At 7:30, Burnside was under way to connect with Hancock.
By the time Burnside’s men marched onto the battlefield, Confederate artillery began peppering them and rebel infantry loomed before their route. Burnside realized that the Confederates had taken the high ground at the Chewning Farm and called a halt to the advance.
While Burnside remained stymied, Union attacks from the north on Longstreet fizzled out. It seemed that a coordinated attack was impossible to achieve. By 10:00 A.M., Longstreet and Hancock had done nothing more than to stalemate.
Earlier, a report came to Longstreet about an unfinished railroad bed that paralleled the Orange Plank Road and then angled away from it. Longstreet devised a plan to use the bed as an avenue for an attack upon Hancock’s left flank. At about 11:00 A.M., Confederates swarmed over one of the several swales between the railbed and the Union flank. The attack made it to the Orange Plank Road and beyond.
Officers on both sides continued to be shot down. Wadsworth was attempting to reorganize his troops when Federal refugees from Longstreet’s railbed attack came rushing by. A rebel bullet slammed into the back of his head, showering a nearby staff officer with his blood and brains. Wadsworth’s quivering, still-breathing form lay insensible near the road.
Longstreet rode in front of his column of infantry with his staff and officers. Confusion, par for the course in the Wilderness, now dealt its cruelest blow. The Confederate flanking column was just crossing the road as Longstreet and his entourage approached. Mistaking them, through the smoky air, for Yankees, they fired. Longstreet himself was hit. A large, powerful man, the bullet hit him in the neck and lifted him visibly from his saddle.
With the commander of the Confederate wing wounded and out of the action, the attacks in the sector ground to a halt. Lee’s line straddled the Orange Plank Road, parallel to Hancock’s Union line, both in a generally north-south orientation.
Burnside, meanwhile, had reorganized his troops to continue his assault southward. But before the attack could begin, Burnside had to have lunch! A veritable champagne picnic was presented to him and his staff, which they paused to consume. Finally, some eight hours after he began his march, he launched his attack upon Longstreet’s flank. Had Hancock pushed his men out from the trenches toward Longstreet, who knows what could have been gained. As it turned out, Hancock was frozen, intimidated some said, by the disorganization wrought by his previous few hours fighting in the Wilderness.
Hancock, no doubt, felt secure behind the chest-high log earthworks his men had thrown up all along the west side of the Brock Road. They had cleared a field of fire and had artillery backup. But at 4:15 P.M., their attention was focused by the sound of Confederates, screaming their rebel yell, charging across the clearing, only to be stopped by Federal musketry. Instead of falling back, they hit their knees and slugged it out with Union infantry at thirty yards.
As the two sides blazed away at each other, the intervening brush caught fire. The wind just happened to be blowing toward the Federal line. Soon, the log breastworks flared, and the flames and choking pine smoke did what the rebels could not—-drive the Yankees from their position. Confederate battle flags were soon waving above the breastworks on the Brock Road, but not for long.
Unfortunately for the Confederates, the part of the Union line they had captured was directly in front of the Union artillery. As the rebels placed their flags upon the breastworks, the cannoneers blew them off. Using double canister, their artillery provided time for Federal infantry to reorganize and attack. The fighting was handto-hand. For fifteen long minutes it raged until the Yankees held their breastworks again.
The Federal high command had seen that for a breakthrough all Burnside needed was for Hancock to attack with him. They had scheduled an attack for 6 P.M., but Longstreet’s assault on Hancock at 4:15 had wrecked any chance for that happening. Hancock and Burnside’s coordinated assault was canceled. The only problem was that nobody told Burnside. Again the Wilderness, with its dead-end trails and impenetrable lines of sight, became a player. By nightfall, Burnside’s attack had been repulsed.
Most of the day, Confederate Brig. Gen. John B. Gordon had been scouting the Union far right flank, above the Orange Turnpike. From the position, he realized that the Union right and rear were exposed to him. It was ripe for a flank attack à la Stonewall Jackson. When Gordon’s proposal for an attack started up the chain of command, however, it was met with undue caution. The assault was delayed until nearly twelve hours after the exposed Union flank was discovered.
Around 6:00 P.M., Union soldiers had stacked rifles, hung cartridge belts and boxes, and began cooking dinner. Suddenly, out of the dusky woods to their right rear came Confederates, howling their ungodly rebel yell. The surprised Yankees ran. Gordon’s attack rolled up a good bit of Sedgwick’s line, captured two Union generals, and nearly captured Sedgwick himself before running out of steam. Darkness and Sedgwick’s reinforcements halted Gordon for good. For the rest of his life, Gordon would regret the mishandling of his proposal to attack earlier.
Casualty reports vary widely. The National Park Service places the figures at 8,000 killed, wounded, missing or captured for the Confederates and 18,000 total for the Federals, while other sources raise the number of Confederate casualties to as high as 11,400 and lower Union casualties to 13,948.
Historians for the most part agree, however, that the battle was a tactical victory for the Confederates, but a strategic one for the Federals. Confederates may have won the battle, but as Grant slipped southward, his men cheered. For many of his troops, the crossing of the Rapidan was the crossing of the River Styx; for others who survived, even if for a few more hours until Spotsylvania, it was the Rubicon. Either way, there would be no return.
Wilderness Ghosts
If there is any Civil War battlefield in the country where ghosts must linger, it would be the Wilderness. During the fighting, the woods caught fire from muzzle blasts. Many of the wounded, already in pain and unable to move, roasted alive. Their comrades, watching from only a few yards away, were unable to help them for fear of dying in the fires themselves. Some of the wounded were seen, as the flames licked closer, to load their weapons and place them under their chins.
There may be many soldiers who died on the Wilderness Battlefield who are still there. Early burial parties claimed they had recovered all the bodies; subsequent burial details complained about what a poor job their predecessors had done. There may still be many remains—men denied burial in consecrated ground or sepulture with a soldier’s honors—scattered about the field.
Ellwood Manor
Ellwood Manor was built around 1790. During its pre–Civil War
years, the large, two-story brick house was visited by James Madison, James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, Robert E. Lee’s father.
During the Civil War, it was owned by the Lacy family. It was first occupied by Confederates after the battle of Chancellorsville and became a recovery hospital. Stonewall Jackson’s left arm was amputated nearby and brought to the Lacy Family Cemetery to be buried, where it rests today.
In 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness, the parlor of Ellwood became the headquarters of Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, who commanded the Army of the Potomac’s Fifth Corps during the battle. Grant’s headquarters were nearby, and he visited Ellwood to strategize with Warren.
Ellwood is now a part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park and is open to the public on certain days. It has been restored to its May 1864 appearance by generous donations from the Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield.
Tom Van Winkle, who belongs to the friends group, was volunteering at Ellwood one afternoon and had a strange experience, which he was willing to share:
I was volunteering as a tour guide at Ellwood, better known as the Lacy House, during the Civil War in Virginia event. Ellwood was the second home of J. Horace Lacy and family, the larger being in Stafford and known as Chatham, now the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park headquarters.
Now consisting of over a hundred plus acres sitting nearly in the center of the Wilderness Battlefield . . . the Ellwood site also contains the Lacy family cemetery. It is a small clearing with a couple of dead trees and surrounded by an old split rail fence in the middle of a cornfield. No headstones are evident in the graveyard, save one.