'No Retreat' Grant Faces Lee in Wilderness

The Battle of the Wilderness, fought May 5–6, 1864, was the opening engagement of the Overland Campaign during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The newly appointed general-in-chief of the Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant, personally led the Army of the Potomac south across the Rapidan River in what he hoped would be a quick maneuver around the right flank of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, Lee engaged Grant where he had engaged Joseph Hooker almost exactly a year earlier—in the seventy-square-mile patch of tangled undergrowth known as the Wilderness. The battle that resulted was uncoordinated, bloody, and often confused, with a testy Grant pressing Lee's men on May 5 and very nearly breaking through the Confederate lines on May 6. Lee was famously restrained by his men from leading a countercharge, and his top lieutenant, James Longstreet, was seriously wounded when he was accidently shot by Virginia troops near the spot where, at Chancellorsville the year before, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had been similarly wounded. Unlike Jackson, Longstreet survived, and amid burning trees the Confederates won a tactical victory. Grant, however, refused to turn back, confronting Lee again and again until finally stalling before Petersburg.