The Union's Bloody Miscue at Spotsylvania's Muleshoe

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The Union's Bloody Miscue at Spotsylvania's Muleshoe

 

From America's Civil War Magazine (historynet.com)

 

 

BY CURTIS D. CROCKETT

 

Just after 6 o’clock, early in the evening of May 10, 1864, near Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, a Union officer waved a handkerchief; the Northern guns fell silent, and Colonel Emory Upton, the only officer on horseback, rode to the front of his troops. Twelve Union regiments, some 5,000 men whom Upton declared the best in the army, stood in four ranks, three regiments to a line, with bayonets fixed atop their muskets. Only the muskets of the front three regiments—men from Upton’s own 2nd Brigade —were primed for firing. Upton had given strict instructions that the men not stop for anything—not to fire, not to reload, not to help their wounded —until they breached the Muleshoe, a bulge in the arc of Rebel works around Laurel Hill.

An aloof –some said arrogant —24-year-old combat veteran who had been wounded at First Manassas, commanded artillery in the Seven Days and Antietam battles and led troops at Fredericksburg, Colonel Upton had come to the attention of General Ulysses S. Grant six months earlier when the young tactician captured a Confederate bridgehead at Rappahannock Station. Abandoning the standard attack—a line of men charging in a wave—he condensed his troops into a human battering ram, a tight column of men surging at lightning speed with one aim: to breach the enemy’s entrenchments. If it had worked at Rappahannock Station, it would work here. Upton was sure of it.

Grant needed something to work at this juncture. Exactly two months had passed since the hero of the Western theater arrived in the East to assume the post of commanding general of all the Union armies. He’d found himself in an awkward command situation with General George Meade, technically still commander of the Army of the Potomac; he had discovered General Lee to be a more tenacious foe than he’d imagined Read More http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/spotsylvaniacourthouse/spotsylvania-history/the-unions-bloody-miscue-at.html