The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House (8 to 21 May 1864) was a pivotal engagement in the Overland Campaign, a major Union offensive during the final year of the American Civil War (1861 to 1865). The battle saw some of the most intense fighting of the war, particularly at a point called the 'Bloody Angle,' where thousands of soldiers were killed or wounded in a bitter hand-to-hand struggle that lasted over 20 hours. The two-week battle was inconclusive, ending when the Union army disengaged from the Confederates to continue their push toward Richmond.

On 7 May 1864, the first rays of morning sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees to reveal a carpet of charred and mangled dead. For two long, nightmarish days, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had slugged it out in a section of dense Virginian woodlands eerily known as the Wilderness. With few roads, low visibility, and little room for units to maneuver, it had been a chaotic, panic-filled battle. Men had fired blindly into the trees ahead, forced to crouch or lie down, the air was so thick with bullets. Regiments had groped forward through the gloom in clumsy, uncoordinated assaults, with some entire companies taken prisoner after blundering straight into enemy lines. The dry underbrush had caught fire, leading to large forest fires that devoured the dead and wounded alike – groups of wounded men, in both blue and gray, had huddled together as the fires drew nearer, gripping loaded weapons so they could take their own lives rather than be burned alive.

The Battle of the Wilderness had been one of the hardest fights of the entire war so far, producing upwards of 25,000 casualties (roughly 17,600 Union and 7,500 Confederate). But even after all this carnage, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies, was not finished. In previous campaigns, when a Union army had been similarly thrashed, it most often retreated beyond the nearest river to lick its wounds, a course of action that many expected Grant to take now. Grant, however, was a fighter and was loath to give up the offensive with the Confederate capital of Richmond so close. On the afternoon of 7 May, he ordered his dejected army to begin moving down the Orange Plank Road. But when it came to the crossroads, the army did not turn north – as most expected it would – but instead marched south, continuing its incursion into Virginia. This instantly raised the morale of the veteran soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, who had become so used to beating northerly retreats and were relieved to be continuing their offensive. "Our spirits rose," one man recalled, "We marched free. The men began to sing…That night we were happy" (quoted in Foote, 191).

Grant's destination was Spotsylvania Court House, a sleepy, insignificant village that offered little more than a few stores and houses clustered around a small park. But this little town had great strategic significance – if Grant could entrench his army here, he would be interposing himself between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond. The rebel army, tasked with defending its capital, would have no choice but to attack and would break upon Grant's fortifications like waves upon rock. Unfortunately for Grant, his movements did not go unnoticed by his opponent, General Robert E. Lee. Gray-bearded and wily as a fox, Lee quickly guessed Grant's intentions and rushed to get his own troops to Spotsylvania first. He dispatched his cavalry corps under Major General J. E. B. Stuart to race down Brock Road and begin setting up fortifications in front of the town. Meanwhile, the Confederate First Corps under Major General Richard Anderson would beat a forced march to hopefully get to Spotsylvania by the next morning (Anderson was only temporarily in command of the First Corps after its usual commander, James Longstreet, had been seriously wounded at the Wilderness). And so, as Stuart's cavalrymen sped down Brock Road, the race to Spotsylvania had begun.

All throughout the day, Yankee and rebel cavalry skirmished with one another along Brock Road. Early on the morning of 8 May, Fitzhugh Lee – the 28-year-old nephew of the Southern general – led a division of Stuart's cavalry to Laurel Hill, a few miles north of Spotsylvania, and began fortifying it. He was joined a few hours later by Anderson, who, perhaps eager to prove his merit as a new corps commander, had marched his First Corps tirelessly through the night to get there in time. And so, by the time the first elements of the Army of the Potomac approached Spotsylvania midmorning, they found a good chunk of Lee's army already strongly entrenched. Major General George G. Meade – the formal commander of the Army of the Potomac, despite Grant's presence within the army – decided to order an immediate assault, hoping to push the rebels off the hill before the rest of Lee's army had a chance to come up.

Throughout the morning, the Union V Corps under Major General Gouverneur K. Warren made several assaults up Laurel Hill but were driven back each time with heavy losses. Meade called a halt to the attacks at around noon to wait for the rest of his army to arrive. Then, at 6 p.m., he sent the V Corps back up the hill, this time supported by troops from the VI Corps. By then, Fitz Lee and Anderson had been reinforced by the Confederate Second Corps under Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell; the rebels once again poured lead into the faces of the Yankees, who were sent sprawling back down the hill, leaving their dead and wounded to litter the ground behind them.

Meade was angry that he had been unable to get to Spotsylvania first – now it was the Union who might break attacking the Confederate fortifications rather than the other way around. He vented his frustration by yelling at his cavalry commander, Major General Philip H. Sheridan, for failing to win the race to Spotsylvania. The argument was settled by Grant, who agreed to let Sheridan redeem his reputation by chasing after Stuart. That night, 10,000 Yankee horsemen left the army camp to wreak havoc in the Virginian countryside and, hopefully, lure Stuart out to his doom.

Throughout the night, the Confederates were hard at work digging a series of earthworks. Lacking enough spades, they used bayonets, cups, and even their hands to dig into the ground. By the morning of 9 May, they had constructed around four miles (6.4 km) of trenches, breastworks, and artillery emplacements, covered by timber barricades called abatis. It was a strong network of entrenchments; indeed, its only weak spot was a U-shaped salient jutting out from the center of the line, which was appropriately nicknamed the ‘Muleshoe'. The Union troops, too, began to dig their own entrenchments, but, since they had gotten off to a later start, they became the targets for Confederate sharpshooters. Every now and then, a shot would ring out, and the Yankees would stop digging to duck and hide.

All this cringing and ducking annoyed Major General John Sedgwick, commander of the Union IV Corps. Believing that the rebel marksmen were too far away to inflict any real damage, he rode forward to harangue his men. "What? Men dodging this way for single bullets?" he said. "What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance!" (quoted in Foote, 203). No sooner had he spoken these fateful words than Sedgwick lurched forward, blood spurting from a hole just below his left eye. Within minutes he was dead, felled by a sharpshooter's bullet.

Sedgewick had been one of the most beloved generals in the army, his loss a great blow to morale. Even Grant was shaken by his loss, repeatedly asking, "Is he really dead?" But there was no time to mourn. Hoping to position his troops for an attack the following morning, Grant ordered the II Corps under Major General Winfield Scott Hancock to cross the Po River to prepare to attack Lee's vulnerable left flank.

On the third day of battle, Hancock awoke to find a large concentration of Confederate forces to his front – during the night, Lee had shifted his troops over to the left to check the threat posed by Hancock's II Corps. Under the false assumption that Lee had weakened his center in order to reinforce his left, Grant hurriedly ordered Hancock back across the Po in preparation for an assault on the Confederate center at Laurel Hill.

At 5 p.m., elements of the V and II Corps charged up the hill, only to find it still strongly defended; once again, the Yankee attack was repulsed with heavy losses. During the lull in the fighting that followed, an idea was proposed by Colonel Emory Upton, a wiry young West Point graduate from New York. Relying on his knowledge of military theory, Upton laid out a plan whereby twelve regiments would be arrayed in four battle lines. The first line would breach the enemy trenches and then fan out to the left and the right, widening the breach for the rest of the lines to penetrate. The other regiments would then pour through, overwhelming the rebel defenders with their numbers.

Upton's superiors approved his plan and gave him the necessary twelve regiments that he required. Shortly after 6 p.m., Upton's attack got underway. His men crossed the 200 yards of no man's land, under strict orders not to fire until they reached the enemy trenches. When they arrived, they found that the Confederates "absolutely refused to yield ground" and the first Union soldiers to climb atop the trenches were quickly shot down or skewered with bayonets (quoted in Catton, 114). But Upton's men kept coming and soon poured into the trench, clubbing and stabbing anyone within their reach, pushing the rebel defenders back. Soon enough, they had succeeded in creating a breach and widening it enough for the other three battle lines to rush through.

While Upton's attack was successful, the Yankees failed to exploit it – the Union division that was supposed to move in to support Upton was driven back by heavy artillery fire. Upton, therefore, was forced to withdraw. Nevertheless, he had proved the virtue of his plan and earned a battlefield promotion from Grant, who decided to repeat the plan the next day, except on a larger scale. "A brigade today," he said, "We'll try a corps tomorrow" (quoted in Catton, 116).

There was no attack the following day, 11 May – shifting his entire army for concentrated attacks along the enemy line took time, leading Grant to postpone the attack for the morning of 12 May. Still, he dispatched orders to his corps commanders. Hancock's II Corps would assault the Muleshoe, while the IX Corps, under Major General Ambrose Burnside, assaulted the eastern end of the salient. Warren's V Corps and the VI Corps – now under Major General Horatio Wright, after Sedgwick's death – would attack up Laurel Hill.

Grant believed that the rebels were close to breaking, but not wanting to be too optimistic, he wrote to Washington that he was prepared to "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer" (quoted in McPherson, 731). Lee, meanwhile, noticed the large-scale movement of Union forces and mistook this as a sign that Grant was preparing to disengage and march toward Fredericksburg. Wanting to be as mobile as possible so he could strike the enemy as they retreated, Lee ordered Major General Edward ‘Alleghany' Johnson to withdraw the cannons he had placed in the Muleshoe, unaware that Grant planned to strike that very spot tomorrow.

At 4:30 a.m., the Union assault began. Hancock's II Corps swept over the Muleshoe, quickly overwhelming the rebels. Most of Alleghany Johnson's Confederate division was quickly beaten back – Johnson himself was captured – though some of the defenders put up a stiff fight. Indeed, the storied Stonewall Brigade, posted on the left of the Muleshoe, fought so hard that it lost all but 200 of its men and had to be dissolved after the battle. But once Hancock's troops gained possession of the Muleshoe, the attack stalled; no one had considered how to capitalize on such a breakthrough.

This pause allowed the Confederates time to rush over reinforcements, mostly from Brigadier General John B. Gordon's division. As he had done a week ago at the Wilderness, Lee rushed forward, wanting to personally lead these men into battle. But the soldiers, unwilling to risk losing their beloved commander, refused to go forward until he went to the rear, which he reluctantly did.

At 6:30 a.m., Grant sent in Warren and Wright, just as the Confederates were rushing over their own reinforcements. A horrific hand-to-hand struggle ensued around the Muleshoe, with the heaviest fighting taking place at the western edge of the saliant, soon to be immortalized as the ‘Bloody Angle'. In most instances, close-quarters combat was a fierce but brief affair; both sides would come together, fight for a few minutes, and then one would break. This time was different – the hand-to-hand fighting at the Muleshoe lasted for over 20 continuous hours. In the course of the fighting, a torrential rainstorm broke out, soaking the men who, down below, were literally struggling for their lives. As historian Shelby Foote describes the hellish scene:

These were the red hours of the conflict, hours no man who survived them would forget, even in his sleep, forever after. Fighting thus at arm's length across the parapet, they were caught up in a waking nightmare…men simply fought to keep on fighting, and not so much on instinct as pure adrenaline. Slaughter became an end in itself…troops were killed by thrusts and stabs, through clinks in the log barricade, while others were harpooned by bayonetted rifles flung javelin-style across it…rain fell, slacked, fell again in sheets, drenching the fighters and turning the floor of their slaughter pen to slime. Down in the trenches, dead and wounded men were trampled out of sight in the blood-splotched mud by those who staggered up to take their posts along the works, until they too were dropped or forced to retire because their weapons became so powder-fouled from rapid firing that they could not be loaded to fire again.

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It was not until after midnight that the fighting at the Bloody Angle came to an end. So many bullets had been fired that an oak had been completely felled by minié balls, and the bodies filled the trenches nearly to the brim. Lee pulled his survivors back to a second line, half a mile to the rear, while the Union troops pulled back to their initial position. The next morning, the Muleshoe was held by no one but the corpses.

Each army spent the next several days consolidating its lines. Like tired boxers in the ring, they maneuvered and countermaneuvered, each side trying to get the better of the other. In the meantime, the casualty lists kept climbing; although there were few major assaults after the Bloody Angle, skirmishes and sharpshooters kept the bodies piling up all across the line. For the Confederates, the most significant casualty was their dashing cavalry commander. On 11 May, Sheridan had caught up with Stuart at Yellow Tavern, a few miles outside of Richmond. After an hours-long cavalry battle, Stuart had been mortally wounded; he was subsequently taken to Richmond where he died on 12 May, as thousands of other men were giving their lives at the Bloody Angle. His loss devastated Lee, who said that he could not even mention Stuart's name without weeping.

On 19 May, the last major assault took place when Ewell's Second Corps clashed with Hancock's men at Harris Farm. It was an accidental and pointless skirmish that resulted in hundreds of additional losses on each side.

By the end of the second week, Grant realized that he would have to change course. The frontal assaults on the Confederate trenches had proved fruitless; Lee's position was too strong. Rather than waste more time at Spotsylvania, Grant decided to move on. As he had done after the Wilderness, he would slip around Lee's army and push south, threatening Richmond. Lee would have no choice but to follow. So, during the night of 20 May, Grant pulled his army out of its defenses and drove south, circumventing Spotsylvania and the gray army that still sat in front of it. The next day, Lee also got moving. But instead of following Grant's army directly, he marched on a parallel road down to the North Anna River. The meatgrinder of the Overland Campaign would, therefore, continue – first in the Battle of North Anna (23 to 26 May) and then at the Battle of Cold Harbor (31 May to 12 June), both bloody additions to what was already the deadliest month of the war.

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House had lasted for 14 days. During that time, 30,000 men had become casualties – the Union had lost 18,399 killed, wounded, or captured, while the Confederates lost 12,687 killed, wounded, or captured. When combined with the losses suffered at the Wilderness, the butcher's bill approached 50,000, a horrifying number that exceeded anything else in this horrifying war. But the suffering and dying was not yet over. Grant was pushing south. Unwilling to give up the initiative, he was determined to defeat Lee and take Richmond - no matter the cost.