A Brief Summary Of The Wilderness Battle

The Wilderness Campaign included one of the most deadly and gruesome battles in the war, and particularly one of the most confusing. It created the first stage of a major Union offensive toward the Confederate capital of Richmond. At midnight on May 3, 1864, the Army of the Potomac with about 120,000 men, left their winter camps in Culpeper County in Virginia and marched south toward the Rapidan River fords. Around dawn, Union cavalry splashed across Germanna Ford, conversing the Confederate cavalry pickets and allowing Union engineers to construct two bridges for pontoons. General Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps trotted across the ford at around six in the morning entering a dense, forbid woodland known as the Wilderness. Meade wanted to plow through the Wilderness, take his army to the right, and attack Lee’s army of the Confederates, which he thought would be a defensive position
Believing that General Robert E. Lee would fight a defensive battle behind the Mine Run campaign, Union General George Meade ordered his army to strike the Confederates. The Fifth Corps chief, however, was anxious about making an attack in the Wilderness, where thick briars would make it all but impossible to maintain a fierce battle line and invalidate the Federals’ numerical ascendancy. While Warren and Meade debated the excellence of an encounter along the turnpike, the Confederate corps built strong dirt banks west of Saunders Field. When Warren’s troops stepped out of the woods into the open range, the Northern Virginia army collected a fearful toll of casualties. The North received a momentary breakthrough just for a short amount of time, but the arrival of the Union Sixth Corps did little more than extend the front and elongate the list of