Twilight of the Confederacy

[Valin]

National Review

The 1864 Virginia Overland Campaign was the beginning of the end.

Mackubin Thomas Owens

May 10, 2014

 

This Civil War sesquicentennial has been very strange. Perhaps its a symptom of our preoccupation with current affairs and our general forgetfulness about our history, but, with rare exceptions, there has been little memorialization of this great and tragic conflict. Indeed, the only Civil War episode to merit any significant mention has been Gettysburg, as if that were the only important event of the war. Gettysburg was indeed the greatest battle ever fought in North America, but it did not end the war. There was much fighting and dying left to do after July 1863. A great deal of that took place during the spring and summer of 1864 during the Virginia Overland Campaign, which sapped the waning strength of the Confederacy but also, given the tremendous loss of life that it occasioned, almost caused the population of the North to turn against the war. Following his successes in the West at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Major General Ulysses S. Grant was appointed by Abraham Lincoln as general in chief of the armies of the United States, and the Senate confirmed him as the first lieutenant general since George Washington. Grant believed that, up to that point, Union armies in different theaters had acted independently and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together.

 

Accordingly, his strategic plan for 1864 called for putting five Union armies into motion simultaneously against the Confederacy. While three smaller armies in peripheral theaters (Nathaniel Banks against Mobile, Franz Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley, and Ben Butler moving toward Richmond via the James River) tied down significant Confederate forces, preventing them from shifting troops from one theater to another, the two main armies, Meades Army of the Potomac and William Tecumseh Shermans army group at Chattanooga, would lock horns respectively with Robert E. Lees Army of Northern Virginia and Joe Johnsons Army of Tennessee on the road to Atlanta. The simultaneous advance of several armies is called concentration in time.

 

As general in chief, Grant chose to accompany Meade as he took on Lee. For nearly 40 days, the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia were in nearly constant contact at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, and Cold Harbor. The 1864 Virginia campaign has led some to dismiss Grant as a butcher, but the truth of the matter is far more complex. This campaign demonstrated that Grant, unlike his predecessors, understood what it would take to defeat the Confederacy. As Grant wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton after the war had ended, he believed that peace would come only when the military power of the rebellion was entirely broken. . . . I therefore determined . . . to hammer continuously against the armed forces of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal section of our common country to the constitution and laws of the land.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

The Wilderness

 

May 5 - 7, 1864

Spotsylvania and Orange Counties, Virginia

 

At midnight on May 3-4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac and the Independent Ninth Corps, numbering approximately 120,000 men, left their winter camps in Culpeper County and marched south toward the Rapidan River fords. At early dawn, Union cavalry splashed across Germanna Ford, dispersing Confederate cavalry pickets there and enabling Union engineers to construct two pontoon bridges.

 

General Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps thumped across the ford at 6 a.m., entering a dense, forbidding woodland known as the Wilderness. Meade intended to push through the Wilderness, wheel his army to the right, and attack Lee’s army, which he assumed would take up a defensive position behind Mine Run several miles to the west. Confident that Federal cavalry was between him and Confederate army, Warren ordered his men to bivouac near Wilderness Tavern.

 

The following morning Warrren resumed his march. No sooner had he started, however, than a courier dashed up with news that Confederate infantry was approaching on the Turnpike. Believing that Lee would fight a defensive battle behind Mine Run, General George Meade ordered Warren to strike the Confederates. The Fifth Corps chief, however, was apprehensive about making an attack in the Wilderness, where dense thickets would make it all but impossible to maintain a battle line and nullify the Federals’ numerical superiority.

http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/the-wilderness.html?tab=facts

[Draggingtree]

Battle Facts

Campaign

Grant's Overland Campaign

Other Battles in This Campaign

Trevilian Station
Totopotomoy Creek
Spotsylvania Court House
North Anna
Cold Harbor

Forces Engaged

Total: 169,920

Each Icon = 5000soldiers

Union

101,895

Confederate

61,025

Total Estimated Casualties

29,800

Union

(Unknown) killed
(Unknown) wounded
(Unknown) missing & captured
18,400 total

Confederate

(Unknown) killed
(Unknown) wounded
(Unknown) missing & captured
11,400 total

Commanders

Union

Ulysses S. Grant

Confederate

Robert E. Lee

Result

Inconclusive

[Draggingtree]

Maps

• Battle Maps »
  
• Historical Maps »
  

View Maps of Other Battles »

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

Thanks!