To some extent, it’s the government’s job to do what is good for the country and not necessarily what is popular; however, in America, it is expected that the government keeps at least a reasonable split between what it must do and what the public wants it to do. The GOP wants data centers and Flock cameras. The public that elected the GOP to a majority power in every single branch of government wants mass deportations. Immigration was the single, overriding issue for the elections of 2024. Immigration reform should be a win-win issue, because it is both good for the country and what the public explicitly desires. It is therefore entirely reasonable to expect and require the government to act boldly on this issue, especially when it is already acting against popular sentiment.

The Iran War is massively unpopular. One of the great, celebrated features of Trump was “no new wars” — it can no longer be said that Trump started no new wars. Many people ask, “Do air strikes count as war?” Only in America can such a ridiculous question even be postulated. Yes, obviously, the U.S. is at war with Iran.

The Flock camera/data center issue strikes me as the same covert contract that was made for the Iran War. The post-hoc rationalization goes thus: the deal was that the neocons get their war, and in exchange, the GOP will pass the SAVE Act. Of course, no such deal was actually negotiated; it was a covert contract (Google it). How much does the GOP owe us? In strictly legal terms, absolutely nothing. In alignment with the fundamental structure of America, everything (see, we gave them all three branches of government). They owe us everything. In fact, it is impossible for the GOP ever to repay for the damage they’ve done to America since the Reagan amnesty and everything they’ve allowed and shepherded until now.

But, since we live in reality, we must be reasonable. Unfortunately, we must accept that there must be some acceptable standard of repentance that the GOP can reach; otherwise, a sane politics would be impossible. If the negotiation were to begin at the position of “There is literally nothing you can do to repay us for this,” then negotiations would be impossible.

The fundamental understanding of America is that elected politicians are public servants who are obligated to the public to make manifest the preamble of We the People. The public does not owe politicians for their grace (this would be a monarchy), but the politicians do owe the public for bestowing upon them the prestigious powers of government in the first place. In the MAGA era, the poles are reversed: the public is said to owe Donald Trump for the slings and arrows he has taken for the public. This is what is argued, but it is not and never will be true, because it is at odds with the foundational relationship between governed and governor in America.

America voted Donald Trump and the GOP into power, and for that, the GOP now owes America. To a surprising extent, the GOP has delivered on some things. Aside from the actual count of deportations, the cultural shift within government regarding attitudes toward proactively removing immigrants may yet yield untold gains for America — key words, may yet. Until the gains have materialized, pledges to make amends do not settle the debt. Certainly, grace is given where appropriate as the GOP makes good on those promises, for it cannot simply instantly fulfill them, but certainly new debts to the GOP can be created until that debt is settled; to do otherwise would undermine the very concept of repentance itself.

Even if one were to consider that debt settled, managed, or suspended pro tempore as the government makes good on it, the fact that the unpopular Iran War has unambiguously and likely permanently wounded the American Empire and significantly increased the price of petroleum-based fuels, that critical lifeblood of America, means that the government has created for itself a new obligation to the public to make amends. The demand that the public accept Flock cameras and data centers en masse simply cannot be taken seriously without something material being put on the table — not merely promised, but completed. The government has simply done what it will with Iran, and with that materially in progress, only a material concession will suffice in return. Promises that Flock cameras will make mass deportations possible, or that data centers will solve some key geopolitical necessity, are immaterial. We already have promises for mass deportations. We already have the SAVE Act that for some reason isn’t being delivered on. I reiterate: promises about the use cases of Flock cameras and data centers are not enough.

What would be enough? The actual permanent removal of millions of people. The midterm elections are on November 3, 2026. Could the GOP deport millions of people by then? Probably not. How about something more reasonable? Could they deport 100,000 per month from now until then? Two months, two hundred thousand people? They probably could not do that, either, and that is a major problem. This assertion is based on the Trump administration’s claim that:

The Trump administration has deported more than 605,000 illegal aliens, with an additional 1.9 million self-deporting, bringing the total number of illegals who have left the U.S. since President Trump returned to office to over 2.5 million.

These are the same numbers reported almost a year ago:

Release Date: December 10, 2025

Since January 20, 2025, DHS enforcement operations have resulted in more than 605,000 deportations.… Additionally, thanks to the comprehensive efforts of DHS law enforcement, 1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported since January 2025.…

“The Trump Administration is shattering historic records with more than 2.5 million illegal aliens leaving the U.S. DHS has deported more than 605,000 illegal aliens and another 1.9 million have self-deported. Since January 20, DHS has arrested more than 595,000 illegal aliens,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. [emphasis in original]

It’s quite reasonable to expect the government at least to issue updated numbers in order to justify the additional and substantial concessions on the part of the public. That would demonstrate a consistent level of success that could be estimated to continue into the future. It’s entirely possible that the government could oversee the removal of a number of illegals equivalent to the count who entered and remained in the country during the Biden (or whoever was in charge) administration, which would be a major win. In fact, if one were to assume that the government continued precisely on the path it was on last year, we’d be nearing 5 million removals total, and the government could simply release those numbers now and potentially not even have to change its current trajectory.

The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening! President DJT

The Trump administration is using the stick here with no carrot. Surely, if the Trump administration expects the public to accept his government’s demands for data centers, a demonstration that his government’s existing obligations are being fulfilled is appropriate, obligations his government are already obliged to regardless of whether or not the public is willing to accept data centers and Flock cameras? To be clear, reaching 5 million removals would only be the first step in even bringing the public to the negotiating table on the matter of Flock cameras and data centers, because the government has already taken on additional debts to the public with the Iran War, which it now must settle in addition to demonstrating its continued repayment on outstanding debts.

I use the language of debt and loans because Donald Trump is supposedly a great deal maker specifically in the domain of real estate, and one would expect that both he and his surrogates would be understanding of the relationship between his investors (the voters) and what they expect, and would be navigating that relationship immaculately. Certainly, there are some surrogates for Trump who wish to mortgage the country on his promises no matter what, but unfortunately, this does not sell for the vast majority of people. The aggressive tactic of insisting on extreme and absolute loyalty to Donald Trump and the Republican Party only works for the people who already do that anyway — it’s not effective at securing new voters for the midterms. Rather than telling Americans that they will be dumb and poor for refusing further impositions on their communities, one would expect not only a demonstration that deportations have reached almost 5 million, but also a proof-of-concept that Flock cameras will drastically increase the deportation numbers. After all, Flock cameras already exist, so if they are effective, then the data to prove that will exist, and that data ought to be regularly propagandized. If they are only marginally effective, that’s not a really good sell for mass surveillance, something that has always been remarkably unpopular since the foundation of America.

Donald Trump has a strong core fandom, but most Americans don’t care about Trump any more than they care about any other president. The strong fanbase and strong base of haters may make it appear otherwise, but like any other politician, to get people to the polls, the GOP actually has to campaign. They have to meet the people where they are and must plausibly argue that they can give the people at least some of what they want. Instead, the GOP is more interested in figuring out how to force the data center issue through than it is in taking a step back and focusing on winning the midterms. From the Ohio memo: “If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.”

What should be fixed quickly is the fixation on data centers. The data center issue can wait an election cycle, because immigration is the single most important and overriding issue for America. If the GOP does poorly in the midterm elections, it will be because they put the cart before the horse and tried to ram this fixation through to the public instead of passing the SAVE Act and making good on previous obligations, which would have allowed them to build the trust needed to convince the public that the GOP can be expected to act in good faith. If the GOP is willing to risk losing a critical midterm election over data centers, and compromise everything President Trump has done, then why would anyone trust them on anything?

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While typical of the Americas in this respect, it has long been acknowledged that the United States is uniquely progressive among New World nations in its law and society. Mass immigration has begun to change that, and as a consequence, immigration is regarded as the ultimate issue for the right wing in the United States. The attempt to reform the United States’ Jus Soli disposition is consistent with the specific intention of U.S. Senator from Michigan Jacob M. Howard (1805–71) and the general intention of American statesmen prior to the postwar internationalism. However, it is likely that this effort has been stymied for a generation at least, and there is no denying that this is a severe threat to the future of the United States. More than anyone is comfortable to admit, demographic developments in Europe and the Americas are downstream of law, on which every diaspora exerts some level of influence, even if minor.

In the wake of World War II and the Nation-State itself being deemed problematic, nationalist legal frameworks were dismantled in favor of Christian Democracy, and after that the Market-State. This resulted in a general move away from Jus Sanguinis and toward a more permissive and fluid citizenship framework. This is not to say that there is no distinction to be made between Europe and America. The inherent weakness of a Jus Soli framework necessitates a far more active role in policing immigration and visas generally. American policy, unlike that of Europe, can only afford to be hot and cold. Immigration flows have to be a top priority in U.S. foreign policy, because removing anyone once here proves to be extremely difficult. Europe retains a patchwork more committed to Jus Sanguinis, which, combined with its historical homogeneity, means that, provided that remigration governments gain power in the next decade or so, removal should be far easier.

France, from whom we get Jus Sanguinis beginning in the 1804 civil codes, now has a complex patchwork where citizenship passes directly from parent to child, but also passes to the children of those born in France regardless of parental provenance. Many European states have similar laws, mostly stemming from the U.N. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961). The French defense of their soccer team’s apparent lack of French origin being that they were merely born in France is not a positive sign. Still, it is obvious that this sort of framework is superior to the pure Jus Soli of the Americas in light of mass immigration.

Germany once boasted the strongest Jus Sanguinis framework, granting citizenship only patrilineally to legitimate children. The Christian Democrats have significantly whittled this down to the point where Germany’s modern citizenship framework is similar to that of France.

The United Kingdom has perhaps the strongest modern laws in Europe, officially abolishing Jus Soli by statute in 1981. Australia and New Zealand followed this lead. Despite this and its numerous electoral rejections of diversity and immigration, the U.K. suffers from the same problems all Western nations do and will be forced to take the same bitter draught of denaturalizations to stave off becoming Brazil. Many right-wing political leaders in Europe have proven extremely loath either to promise or to enact any sort of denaturalization campaign, and indeed even in the U.S. has this been only tepidly enacted.

The problem becomes apparent that while Europe is moving and the Americas have moved to a more “market state” conception of citizenship, several nations have not. China, Israel, India, the Emirates, Russia, and others retain a muscular nation-state citizenship framework, and have used their expats to great political effect. China has used theirs for technological espionage and foreign infrastructure improvement, Russia has used theirs to gain physical territory, and India’s foreign policy keystone rests on its diaspora community working with the Modi government both to offload excess population and also to provide a ballast in every relevant nation against any sort of hostility to India. This divergence means that essentially America, and to a much lesser degree Europe, must manage world affairs in such a way that the immigration flows are either redirected or remain minimal enough that they do not impact their population. This was a specific policy decision enacted far above the specific level of citizenship law.

Phillip Bobbitt defined the market-state thus:

[A] state depends on the international capital markets and, to a lesser degree, on the modern multinational business network to create stability in the world economy, in preference to management by national or transnational political bodies… Like the nation-state, the market-state assesses its economic success or failure by its society’s ability to secure more and better goods and services, but in contrast to the nation-state it does not see the State as more than a minimal provider or redistributor. Whereas the nation-state justified itself as an instrument to serve the welfare of the people (the nation), the market-state exists to maximize the opportunities enjoyed by all members of society. For the nation-state, a national currency is a medium of exchange; for the market-state it is only one more commodity.

Whatever the relative merits of the decision made and enforced on both sides of the Atlantic to change the State’s raison d’être, its effects are severely felt in the 21st century. In a Jus Soli state, immigration is a foreign policy issue.

Some progress has been made in the United States. Domino after domino of the São Paulo Network has fallen with the destruction of USAID, such that only Cuba and Brazil stand as the final redoubts against the Pan-American right-wing consensus of limited immigration. These victories remain, for the moment, largely electoral and not structural. But should the United States successfully ensure that the Americas can remain free of crime and enjoy years of fair and stable business dealings, prosperity will increase such that immigration may be taken permanently off the table.

Even if they can be politically contained, these issues are electric and represent some of the most pressing concerns for anyone interested in a meritocratic turn on either side of the Atlantic. The laws of citizenship are foundational, and must be grappled with. A market-state can still address questions of denaturalization, and may even be more willing to address those questions. That said, as Tobert Fahey at J’accuse has correctly pointed out, “The great nations of the next century will be founded on ethnically exclusive citizenship.” If America and Europe cannot fortify these moats, a new fortress will have to be created.

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Getty Attacks the Orange Plank Road

Many hours have passed since George Getty stared down A.P. Hill’s Confederates on the Brock Road. In that time, his division has been swelled by the arrival of Winfield Scott Hancock’s 2nd Corps marching up the Brock Road from the direction of Chancellorsville. Hancock rides at the front of his column, with David Birney’s division in the vanguard. Arriving at the crossroads before noon, he has tried to get clear instructions from Meade on what he is to do after securing the vital intersection. The sounds of Warren, and then Sedgwick’s futile assaults to the north, come and go. Regiment after regiment materializes from the direction of Chancellorsville’s silent ruins. The time is passed by felling trees and stacking them on the western edge of the Brock Road.

Confederate skirmishers have been squirrelly ever since Getty saw them off that morning. None of the Yankees can see what is happening inside that forest to their front. Hancock and Getty both agree that it is a waste of Union manpower to sit behind breastworks and stare off into the green visage while their comrades bleed and die to the north.

At 3:15 P.M., after repeated delays and frustrating misadventures, a courier from Meade finally reaches the Brock Road and finds Hancock and Getty sitting together. Hancock receives the dispatches, reads them, and gruffly hands them to Getty.

The Commanding General directs that Getty attack at once and that you support him with your whole corps, one division on his right and one division on his left, the other in reserve; or such other dispositions as you may think proper, but the attack up the plank road must be made at once.

Getty has been itching to hurl his three brigades to the west all morning. He races to issue the commands as Hancock begins to pull his troops away from shovel duty and ready them for close combat. Some 17,000 Federals stare into the waiting, impenetrable forest and prepare themselves for what is about to come. Hancock, whose corps is still strung out on the march, resolves simply to throw his brigades into the fight as they come up. To wait any longer is to throw the afternoon away.

Harry Heth, meanwhile, waits with unease along with his 6,500 soldiers inside that dense tangle of briars and bushes. Every man in every regiment in his division stands at the front. There are no reserves and no reinforcements.

A courier brings orders from General Lee at Widow Tapp Farm. The Old Man wishes Heth to occupy the Brock Road intersection without bringing on a general engagement. Having been forward with his skirmishers earlier and seen the massing blue host, Heth knows that this is impossible.

He dictates a reply and watches the courier gallop back down the Orange Plank Road when the shooting starts.

Scattered reports of gunfire echo out to the front. A minute later, Heth’s skirmishers crash through the thick, tangled mass of trees.

“They’re coming! Yankees thick as fleas!”

Heth’s line steels itself. The gunfire dies away. Quiet reigns.

Mississippians, Floridians, Virginians, Alabamians, Tennesseans, and North Carolinians brace themselves and wait for the Yankees to materialize out of the forest. Sons of Maine, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania pick and plod their way toward their waiting foes. The Confederate line occupies a small, wooded ridge behind a north–south creek called Wilderness Run. It crosses the Orange Plank Road about half a mile west of the Brock Road intersection and continues south for about another half-mile.

The Yankees are heard long before they’re seen. It is impossible to move large bodies of troops in this terrain; the sound of twisting and snapping twigs, briars ripping cloth, bayonets and tin cups clinking against trees, frustrated men swatting leaves and branches away, all waft out of the forest to announce the attack.

Stone’s Mississippians and Cooke’s North Carolinians occupy the line north of the Plank Road. There is no creek to wait behind for them; they sit along a low ridge and stare into the wall of vegetation and shade. The sound of the approaching enemy grows louder. The Confederates, 3,000 strong, level their muskets at the forest before them. Silence reigns over the Confederate line for a brief instant.

Frank Wheaton’s New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians jump with fright as a thunderous volley materializes out of thin air to their front. It slams into them from a scarce 50 yards, the bullets swishing through the trees and branches before striking flesh and bone. The Union line physically bristles like a snake thrashing from side to side as men fall dead and wounded. Those wounded who can do so immediately make their way to the rear. Branches and twigs, severed by bullets, hang limply or fall to the ground. Wheaton’s boys steel themselves and return a volley into the trees to their front. Southern voices ring out with yelps and screams. The roar of battle dies; both sides frantically reload. Unable to see the enemy, soldiers frantically ram new charges into their muskets, their minds tormenting them with images of the unseen enemy doing the same. Any moment now, another volley from the ghosts in the forest will take them. Any moment. Any moment.

It comes, bringing death in its wake.

South of the Plank Road, Lewis Grant’s Vermont Brigade loses any semblance of order as they crash through the breast-high tangle of briars and saplings. The explosion of gunfire to the north warns them that a similar reception is likely waiting for them up ahead.

The 3rd Vermont, under the command of Colonel Thomas Seaver, picks its way forward. Seaver, unwilling to have his regiment ambushed in such a way, resolves to take the initiative in his own hands.

“Come on, boys!” he yells. “Fix bayonets, and charge!”

He plunges forward into the Wilderness. His Vermont men follow him.

Waiting for him are eight regiments of Tennesseans and Virginians under the command of Henry Walker. The single Federal regiment emerges at the base of the ridge as a confused mass of men in blue. The muddy, soggy ground around Wilderness Run slows them further, the earth clinging to their shoes and threatening to swallow them whole.

A single volley devastates the 3rd Vermont and convinces Colonel Seaver of the ill-advised nature of his decision to take the Confederates alone.

All along the line of contact, men in blue go to ground to escape the destruction being rained upon them by their counterparts in gray. Their return fire reaps an equally fearful tally on their tormentors; the 46th North Carolina in John Cooke’s brigade loses 53 men in barely 10 minutes of firing. Neither side can see the other; men fire to the front and at the occasional muzzle flash glimpsed through the forest.

How long has it been? Ten minutes? Twenty? Time is meaningless. All that matters is the ability of the soldier to engage in the mechanical act of reloading and firing his weapon. To move forward is to die; to move back is unthinkable. The last choice, the only choice, is to stand here in this green hell of invisible foes and ghostly apparitions and do the duty required of a soldier.

Grant’s Vermont Brigade goes prone and crawls forward, trying to inch as close as possible, to get a glimpse of their tormentors. Getty’s division is committed on both sides of the Plank Road. Movement stops. The firing intensifies. The front ranks begin running out of ammunition. Those in the front — those who can be — are replaced by reserves. Those who cannot get to the rear scrounge the dead and dying for bullets. Their fire slackens. No such reprieve is granted to the Union men; Southern lead continues to search for them in the Wilderness. A stream of runners bring boxes of cartridges from wagons on the Plank Road and at Widow Tapp’s field.

The Southern fire inflicts ghastly facial wounds upon the prone Yankees. Sergeant Harrison Carll, Company C, 5th Michigan, looks in horror as the man to his left shrieks and gropes at his jaw, shattered by a Southern musket ball. Pieces of the man’s teeth and tongue splatter over Sergeant Carll’s uniform. Private Royster Marsh, Company G, 40th Virginia, catches sight of Sergeant Carll as he jumps to get away from the spectacle. He eagerly rises from cover to take his shot; a bullet takes him in the jaw, too; this one takes teeth, tongue, flesh, and bone with it as it punches a fist-sized hole out of Royster’s neck. Royster falls on his back, thrashing. He gurgles, coughs, splutters, and drowns in his own blood. None of his comrades can spare a moment to help him or even ease his suffering. Every man is on the line; the fire must not slacken. The only chance they have is to shoot it out here, on this line, until dark.

Grant’s Vermont Brigade wavers. The 3rd and 6th Vermont sustain nearly 300 casualties in 40 minutes of firing. The two mauled regiments pull away from the front and retire a few hundred yards into the trees. The 5th Vermont, Grant’s reserve, moves forward through the Wilderness to plug the hole.

Grant, astride his horse, hails Lt. Colonel John Lewis, the regiment’s commander.

“John, it’s hot in there. Give ’em hell!”

Lewis raises his sword in acknowledgment. A Rebel bullet thwacks into his bicep, severing bone. He is carried off the field, and command of the regiment is delegated to Major Charles Dudley.

The 5th walks forward into the storm of lead that had previously eviscerated the 3rd and 6th Vermont. The Green Mountain boys press forward into the mouth of Hell itself.

North of the Plank Road, Frank Wheaton’s Pennsylvanians begin retiring as their ammunition runs dry and the dead and dying can give no more. Earlier, they saved the Union Army from being cut in two. Now, it is as if the Confederates are punishing them for that intransigence, for the audacity to thwart the machinations of the Old Man. Fresh regiments crawl forward through the brush to replace them, enduring the same unrelenting fire that mangled their countrymen and produced a neat line of prone corpses adorned in Union blue with ghastly facial wounds. The agonizing Union advance has barely gotten 400 yards from the Brock Road.

Henry Eustis’s brigade of New Englanders marches forward to support Wheaton’s Pennsylvanians. Elisha Hunt Rhodes of the 2nd Rhode Island, amidst the carnage all around him, gazes skyward and marvels at the birds chirping in the branches above him. The sight of his comrades falling to enemy fire reminds the man of leaves falling in the autumn. They fall continuously, without stopping, as the afternoon wears on.

Eustis’s men also go to ground and frantically fire away at Stone’s Mississippians. Elisha Hunt Rhodes and his comrades cannot see the enemy. Before them is a dark, impenetrable forest that explodes with yellow and orange lights, which remind Rhodes of a lantern play. Death buzzes all around him. He too fires at nothing; at brief muzzle flashes and in a general direction up ahead. Rebel fire thwacks into the trees all around him.

Some of Stone’s Mississippians realize they have the flank of the 2nd Rhode Island in the air. A few dozen volunteers crawl forward until they find themselves in a position to fire down the length of the prone Yankee regiment. They begin picking off the prone Rhode Islanders one by one. Private Michael Moffett is lying down in front of Rhodes; he props himself up to fire another round and collapses with a bullet through his lungs.

Behind the 2nd Rhode Island, the 37th Massachusetts lurches through the forest and enters the maelstrom. The 2nd Rhode Island retires; the 37th takes its place on the firing line, going prone and soon adding its fallen to the carpet of dead and dying. Behind them, the retreating 2nd Rhode Island comes face to face with the vanguard of Alexander Hay’s brigade — part of Birney’s division — as it battles its way forward against the near-impassable terrain. Getty’s division has been shooting it out with the Confederates on either side of the Plank Road for almost an hour; now, at long last, Hancock’s troops begin to add their weight to the Union offensive.

Hays, one of the most beloved brawlers to wear an officer’s uniform in service of President Lincoln, will not countenance a shooting match with the unseen foe. Nor will he suffer to lead this attack on foot.

“Up, boys!” he says to the 57th Pennsylvania. “Move up, and move ’em out!”

The first line of Hays’s brigade consists of the 57th and 63rd Pennsylvania. Behind them marches the 93rd New York and 105th Pennsylvania. They come across the prone forms of the 139th Pennsylvania and 37th Massachusetts from Getty’s division. The 2nd Corps men step over their prone comrades and continue forward. Private William Elder, 63rd Pennsylvania, is the first to die. Two bullets slam into his chest in rapid succession; he pitches forward and never rises again.

“Give ’em hell, boys!” Hays roars at the top of his lungs.

His brigade presses forward into the storm of lead. Behind the advancing line of blue, the prone survivors of Frank Wheaton’s and Henry Eustis’s brigade pick themselves up and retire to the trenches on the Brock Road. A stream of casualties from Hays’s brigade soon follows them. As Hays continues to plow forward into the maw of the Wilderness, the stream becomes a river. The sound of musketry swells once again to a crescendo. Thick columns of white and gray smoke climb above the canopy of the Wilderness and lazily stretch toward the evening sun.

Hancock Continues the Attack

South of the Plank Road, the lead elements of Gersham Mott’s division of Hancock’s 2nd Corps appear behind the embattled Vermonters. The eight regiments of Colonel Robert McAllister’s brigade arrive first, cohesion wrecked by the briars and bushes of the Wilderness. To their south, Colonel William Brewster’s Excelsior Brigade also struggles through the forest. No one knows how deep this wood goes. All they know is that they must march, generally, to the west, and that somewhere in these woods the enemy awaits them.

The Excelsior Brigade loses its direction and begins drifting north toward the sound of gunfire and the Plank Road.

Lewis Grant dodges Rebel fire and spurs his horse along his line, exhorting his men to continue firing at the ghosts that are killing them. As he does so, he comes across Major Charles Dudley of the 5th Vermont.

“Charles!” Grant yells. “You see those saplings there, at the base of this damned hill to our front?”

Dudley spots them: a twisted and mauled mass of little trees that are being denuded of their bark by the crisscrossing waves of Minié balls.

“If I get some of these 2nd Corps boys to help us, can you get through there and charge that hill? This has got to be their flank we’re hitting!”

“I think we can, Colonel!” Dudley replies.

Grant wheels his horse around and trots to the rear where he runs into the 3rd and 5th Michigan picking their way forward. Addressing the commanders of the regiments, he again asks if there are men here brave enough to charge into the maelstrom of Harry Heth’s firepower.

“We will!” roar the noble sons of the Great Lakes State.

Grant continues to the south, running into the flank of the Excelsior Brigade. This time, he does not bother to introduce himself.

“You’re about to back up my forward regiment. Do not load your muskets; just keep moving forward!”

At that moment, a “Huzzah!” echoes through the woods. The 5th Vermont, followed by the 5th and 3rd Michigan, charge through the muddy waters of Wilderness Run and begin assailing the hill to their front. Through sheer will, men force themselves through the mud, bulldoze through briars and vines, barrel over saplings, and punch through solid walls of leaves and twigs.

Now, at last, they see the enemy. First Sergeant Harrison Carll pushes through a cluster of saplings and comes face to face with Walker’s battle line. He sees some men flee before him. Then, the Confederates raise their rifles and unleash a brutal volley that takes the 5th Michigan at barely ten yards. The 5th Michigan goes to ground with many of its officers killed and wounded. The 5th Vermont continues forward.

Behind them, McAllister’s men arrive at Poplar Run, but cannot fire into the forest for fear of hitting their comrades in the back. The Confederates to their front are under no such restriction. The terrain before them conceals a packed, target-rich environment. Like those before them, McAllister’s men go to ground to escape the enemy rifle fire.

Slaughter in the Twilight

Meanwhile, Harry Heth is busy preparing his own counterattack. Kirkland’s North Carolinians, who started the engagement this morning and who have been resting at the Widow Tapp Farm since noon, quick-march to the sound of the fighting. The 44th North Carolina deploys on the north side of the Plank Road; the rest of the brigade moves to form a line of battle to its south.

More help is arriving. Robert E. Lee, following the sounds of the battle from Widow Tapp’s front door, directs Cadmus Wilcox to bring his four brigades forward and behind Harry Heth’s division. From the Old Man down to the lowliest private, every Southerner on the field can tell that they have savaged the foe and that now is the time to seize the initiative once more.

Harry Heth is a whirlwind of activity, supervising his line, ensuring a steady flow of ammunition, and paying attention for any opportunity to counterattack. Cadmus Wilcox, riding at the head of his column, finds his fellow division commander off to the side of the Plank Road.

“Well,” Heth says when learning of General Lee’s desires, “let’s go right out and do it!”

On the Union side of the firing line, confusion reigns. More and more of Getty’s men peel away and retreat to the Brock Road as more and more of Hancock’s men enter the maelstrom and get a taste of the thrashing their comrades have experienced for the past hours.

North of the Plank Road, Alexander Hays remains on his horse, exhorting his men to continue the fight and drive the enemy from the woods. He passes behind the colors of the 63rd Pennsylvania and reins his horse to a halt. Private Samuel Dunham, who at that moment had dropped to one knee to reload, happens to look up and lock eyes with Alexander Hays.

Out of nowhere, the General’s head snaps back. Dunham watches as the corps badge on the general’s hat goes spinning through the air, having been struck by a Rebel Minié ball. Hay’s hands convulse. He sways backward in the saddle, which causes his horse to bolt. Alexander Hays crashes to the ground unceremoniously, shot through the head.

Heth’s counterattack begins a moment later. The 26th Mississippi, pulled from the left flank to a position behind the 27th North Carolina on the Plank Road, initiates the charge. On both sides of the Plank Road, the Confederates roll forward.

South of the Road, Walker’s Virginians and Tennesseans swarm forward into the low ground around Wilderness Run. They smash into the Vermont and Excelsior Brigades and split the Union line apart with a well-delivered volley. The Rebel Yell echoes through the fading light of the Wilderness, just as it did a year ago under the watchful eye of Stonewall Jackson.

Major Charles Dudley and the 5th Vermont are swept away by the counterattack. Soon, Rebels are on both sides of the Vermonters. Dudley gives the order to retreat, leaving 7 officers and over 100 men on the western bank of Wilderness Run. The Vermont and Excelsior Brigades run into McAllister’s men on the far side of the creek. There are a few islands of resistance; a few color guards rally and stand firm in the fading light. But most of the men in blue break and run for the safety of the breastworks on the Brock Road.

Behind Heth, Wilcox’s brigades form a line of battle either side of the Plank Road. As they march forward, they enter a landscape of pure nightmare. The firing — which has continued for almost two hours — has set the woods alight. Sporadic fires snap and crackle in the woods either side of the road. The flames create a false dawn that contrasts with the descending twilight. It casts eerie, otherworldly shadows across a landscape that is covered with dead men. Men blink away tears as the smoke stings their eyes.

Sam McGowan’s South Carolinians form up first on the north side of the Plank Road. McGowan moves forward astride his horse. Waving his hat, he leads his cheering South Carolinians forward into the forest. Alfred Scales’s North Carolina Brigade follows suit and deploys south of the road. In front of them, the Plank Road is clogged with ambulances, wagons, and the dead and dying.

McGowan’s brigade reaches the line held by Stone’s Mississippians. An unbroken line of dead Southerners marks out the Confederate front in grisly detail. McGowan himself is startled to realize that many of the men he sees kneeling behind trees and fallen timber are in fact dead, having been shot in the act of reloading.

“Yankees retired a few minutes ago,” one soldier says. “They’re out there to the east, thick as fleas.”

McGowan’s South Carolinians continue forward. Stones Mississippians do not follow. The ordeal they have endured for the past few hours leaves them hollow. Many sit in stunned silence. Some vomit. Others weep.

Scales’s brigade reaches Poplar Run and moves over the prone forms of Cooke’s North Carolinians. Words of cheer and greeting are extended between the Tar Heels. As is the case with Stone’s Mississippians, Cooke’s men remain in position.

The 16th North Carolina positions its left flank on the Plank Road. On its right, the 22nd, 34th, and 13th North Carolina plunge through the muddy waters of Poplar Run and force their way forward. As they enter the woods, they spread out until the entire brigade resembles a massive, dense skirmish formation.

The bursts of musketry rouse the resting soldiers of Hobart Ward’s brigade, who have been manning the Brock Road breastworks as Birney’s reserve. Stragglers stream out of the Wilderness, telling tales of a repulse and general confusion in the fighting to the east.

Ward orders his men forward to stabilize the line. His men jump over the breastworks and race into the darkness ahead. They come across hundreds of wounded Federals who mindlessly shove and jostle their way toward the Brock Road.

Gunfire erupts to Ward’s front as he makes contact with Scales’s men. The North Carolinians fall back to the west, surrendering the ground by inches and dead Yankees.

North of the Brock Road, Samuel Carroll’s brigade — the vanguard of John Gibbon’s division — hurriedly sprints from the south. They take fire from McGowan’s South Carolinians almost as soon as they reach the Brock Road intersection. Carroll’s men return fire into the woods. In the fading light, muzzle flashes briefly illuminate men as if they are black shades. A terrifying lantern show of orange and yellow pushes back against the encroaching night.

Carroll orders his men out of the Brock Road breastworks and into the Wilderness. They grope forward, unable to see much in the fading light. Skirmishers from the 1st South Carolina retire and inform their comrades that the Yankees are coming again.

McGowan’s brigade charges, unleashing a violent, guttural Rebel Yell. They can see nothing to their front except darkness and the outlines of the trees. Carroll’s men fire at point-blank range. The South Carolinians recoil as the darkness erupts in brilliant white light to reveal a battle line of Yankees. Color Bearer Andew Chapman of the 1st South Carolina takes a bullet to the face. He refuses to leave the fight. Unable to see to their front, Stone and Cooke’s prone men hear the Yankee bullets whistling through the trees above them. Thinking it is they who are under attack, the exhausted men fire to their front. Their bullets take McGowan’s brigade in the rear.

Lieutenant John Tolar, of Orr’s Rifles, had told his wife during a leave of absence in the spring that he would never see her again. He dies with a bullet to the back of the skull, his premonition to her fulfilled.

McGowan’s men unleash a ragged volley into the darkness and smoke to the front. The South Carolinians begin to retreat. In the confusion, the 1st South Carolina does not hear the order. Alone in the dark forest, taking fire from three sides, they go prone and pray the Yankees shoot high. They do not. Bullets land among the prone South Carolinians and add to the butcher’s tally.

South of the Plank Road, Ward’s men finally push through the confused mass of Vermont and Excelsior men. They continue forward into the darkness. Ahead, Scales and Walker’s regiments reform and receive them with a disciplined volley. The forward ranks of Ward’s brigade suffer horrific casualties. The Yankees take a moment to reform and deliver a reply that is equally deadly to the North Carolinians and Virginians. The Confederates go to ground and continue firing.

Sedgwick’s Final Assault

By 6:00 P.M., the front north of Saunders Field has stabilized. Both sides furiously dig in, having had enough of being shot at by ghosts they cannot see. Shovels, cups, bayonets, and fingers scrape and claw into the earth. Skirmishers rain a constant deluge of bullets into the forest. Every now and then, a man screams and clutches an arm, a leg, or his stomach as a bullet finds its mark. The digging continues.

The two Louisiana brigades under Hays and Stafford are mixed together on the line, just south of Pegram’s Virginians. Leroy Stafford sits propped against a tree directly behind the entrenchments. In his right hand, he grips his officer’s sword. In his left, he grips a revolver. He knows he is dying. Every breath is becoming more difficult. His eyes feel heavy. The pain is beyond words. Blood drips from the gaping hole in his armpit. His lower body refuses to respond to his attempts at movement.

“Dig!” he calls out. “Dig, boys! They’ll come again before the day is over!”

He is not wrong.

Ulysses Grant is not content to let the evening come without one more push on both the Plank Road and Saunders Field fronts. When he orders Hancock and Getty to continue their assaults on the Plank Road until nightfall, he also orders Sedgwick and Warren to attack Ewell one more time. The Commanding General wants the Confederates as battered as possible until night forces a cessation of hostilities. Every hour, more Union troops from the 2nd Corps arrive from the south, and Burnside’s 9th Corps is finally approaching the crossings at the Rapidan River. He has Robert E. Lee fixed in place, and though the terrain is far from ideal, the enemy is here and shall be fought on this ground.

The evening sun casts long, eerie shadows into the trenches manned by Ewell’s men north of Saunders Field. The earlier repulse of the Louisianans has driven the men in gray to strengthen their trenches. Ditches four feet deep are cut into the earth, logs stacked high to the front, and the ground in front cleared as best as can be to provide clear lines of fire.

Bristling under strongly worded orders from Grant, Warren and Sedgwick prepare once again to throw their commands against Ewell’s line. In the forest north of the field, Yankees quietly fix bayonets and load charges into their muskets. No bugles announce the attack this time.

Faulty intelligence reaches Sedgwick that his corps has overlapped Ewell’s left flank. Rather than lose lives storming the Confederate fortress of wood and earth, why not flank it and roll the Second Corps up like a wet blanket? Such an opportunity is too tantalizing for a man like John Sedgwick to pass up. The critical task is assigned to Brigadier General Truman Seymour under James B. Ricketts’s 6th Corps division.

Seymour is a poor choice. The disgraced victim of repulse at the Battle of Olustee in March commands a brigade of raw recruits from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. His command of the brigade is not even 24 hours old. Raw soldiers, commanded by a man still smarting from defeat, are being asked to perform one of the most difficult and complex maneuvers in warfare.

Sedgwick decides that the gamble is worth the reward. Seymour’s men file to the right and march north through the forest. The rest of the 6th Corps begins moving forward through the brush.

Pegram’s skirmishers make contact first. A smattering of musket fire to the front causes the Confederate brigadier to raise his head in alarm.

“They’re coming again, boys!”

The digging stops. The Virginians reach for their rifles. The fire to the front continues.

Seymour’s brigade is separated from the rest of the 6th Corps. As the evening shadows darken, the Union men grope their way through the Wilderness. All sense of direction is lost. The front line consists of the 110th Ohio and 6th Maryland. These raw recruits grope and stumble forward through a forest that seems intent on retarding their advance.

They emerge into a clearing. Up ahead, a small hill looms. Colonel Warren Keifer, commander of the 110th Ohio, realizes in horror that his men are standing in artificially cleared ground; all around him are the stumps of recently felled trees. That can only mean…

He sees them now, up ahead: a solid wall of breastworks. Confederate flags loom over the top of the entrenchments. He can hear Southern voices.

Keifer halts his regiments and pulls them back to safety. He sends word to Seymour: The enemy is to our front.

The rest of Sedgwick’s corps rolls through the Wilderness a few hundred yards to the south in three massive lines of battle. Pegram’s skirmishers melt back to the safety of the entrenchments. Pegram himself, seated on his horse behind the line, watches in anticipation as the evening shadows vomit forth a Yankee battle line.

The Northerners halt 100 yards from the trenches and deliver a volley. Most of the fire thwacks into felled trees and piled dirt without finding any mark. With bayonets fixed, the Yankees give a “Huzzah!” and charge up the wooded slope. Pegram’s Virginians remain in their trenches, rifles ready, silent and waiting. On come the Yankees, closer and closer. The fading sunlight glints off Northern steel.

Pegram himself gives the order when the Yankees are barely 20 yards from the trenches.

“Fire!”

A wall of flame, smoke, and lead ripples from the Confederate trenches. Musketry roars through the dim forest. Men scream and howl. No Yankees emerge from the smoke to the front; when it clears, all that remains before Pegram’s trenches is a carpet of dead and wounded men.

The crack and pop of fires causes many in the trenches to groan in horror.

Keifer hears the explosion of gunfire to his south. A few minutes later, a courier returns with Seymour’s reply to his report.

Attack at once.

Astonished and assuming that his earlier report of Rebel trenches to his front had not been received, Keifer requests a confirmation of the order and reminds the courier that the position to the front of the 110th Ohio is unassailable. Seymour’s reply is equally as blunt: Attack at once.

The 110th and 6th Maryland move back into the cleared area and ascend the hill toward the Rebel works. Behind their fortress, the soldiers of the 6th Virginia wait until Keifer’s men are within 100 paces. Keifer sees the wall of logs to his front erupt in a brilliant display of orange and white. Bullets swarm around him like angry bees. The front rank of the 110th Ohio ceases to exist. The Yankees stop and return fire. Another volley rips bloody holes in the ranks. Keifer feels something thwack into his left arm. He stumbles forward. His arm stings and does not respond to his attempts to move it. He looks down. A bloody hole is smashed into the forearm just below the elbow. The Ohioans and Marylanders go to ground, firing up the hill at targets they can barely see.

The abandoned pieces of Battery D continue to vex Guv Warren. As the sun sets, he judges the fading light to be the perfect time to reclaim the lost cannon and salvage something of his sullied reputation.

The honor of such an assignment is given to Colonel Peter Lyle and his 9th Pennsylvania Volunteers. In the fading light, the Pennsylvanians assemble at the edge of the woods and dash out into the charred and blackened clearing. Some stumble over corpses that look as though they’ve emerged from a smokehouse. They smell like it, too.

Artillery fire tears into the Pennsylvanians once they clear the trees. The ridge on the far side of the field erupts once again in a brilliant display of white and orange. Shot and shell scream through the darkness and collide with flesh and bone.

They do not reach the guns.

After an hour, Sedgwick’s assault fails to breach the Confederate line in a single place. Brigade commanders cannot stomach these attacks anymore. To march through these impenetrable woods or across the killing ground at Saunders Field, to fire volleys at breastworks while Rebel bullets scythe them down like wheat, is too much to ask. The 6th Corps pulls a ways back into the Wilderness and begins to dig in furiously. Truman Seymour’s brigade is the last to disengage; it remains in front of Pegram’s trenches until well after dark, dying for no purpose in front of the Rebel works. The foolhardiness of the assignment that led to his wounding will gird Warren Keifer until the day he dies.

Darkness and Decision

These final hours of May 5 remind the men of Hill’s Third Corps of those desperate hours at Antietam Creek. The woods continue to conjure fresh Yankee brigade after fresh brigade. Blue regiments flying the Star-Spangled Banner materialize out of the Wilderness as if they have sprung from the very earth at their feet. The only recourse to total annihilation is the profligate expenditure of ammunition.

The evening sun turns the sky blood-red. Shadows lengthen. The day darkens. And still the Yankees come. It has been a long time since the Army of Northern Virginia has been assailed with such determination by its foe. Every enemy assault since the fighting commenced in the late afternoon has been repulsed with a fearsome tally of dead and wounded Northerners and Southerners. Yet still fresh waves of Yankees continue to emerge from the darkness with scarcely a moment’s respite. Hancock throws the 2nd Corps into battle piecemeal as it marches up from Chancellorsville.

At twilight, Robert E. Lee commits his last remaining reserve, Edward Thomas’s Georgia Brigade and James Lane’s North Carolina Brigade of Cadmus Wilcox’s division. The situation at the front is desperate: both Heth and Wilcox report that their lines are being stretched and buckling under Hancock’s hammer blows. The Third Corps is being ground down in a ceaseless shooting match. Sooner or later, something will break.

Wilcox himself leads his last two brigades forward. Thomas’s Georgians deploy north of the Plank Road, and Lane’s North Carolinians move south of it, searching for their brethren in the dark.

Standing astride the Brock Road intersection, Winfield Scott Hancock commits his final assault. The exhausted men of Francis Barlow’s division, arriving mere minutes ago from Chancellorsville to the south, are ordered off the road and into the dark forest.

A.P. Hill himself rides to the front, stumbling into General Lane on the Plank Road.

“Scales is buckling,” Hill reports. “Move forward, and re-establish the line. Your left will rest on Sam McGowan’s right.”

The North Carolinians continue to move forward through the darkness. Ahead, wounded and stragglers from Scales’s line stream through the Wilderness, telling tales of endless hordes of Yankees, of invisible foes, and of a firing that does not — will not — cease.

At Catherine Tapp’s farm, Lee listens to the roar of rifle fire to the front and stares intently at the blood-red sun as it slowly — agonizingly slowly — descends below the trees. Traveller, sensing his master’s unease, stamps his hooves into the hardscrabble earth and flicks his head in annoyance and anticipation. Lee abruptly turns to Charles Venable, his aide.

“Oh, Major, if only night would come!”

A few moments later, Lane and Barlow collide — or more accurately, bungle into one another — in the dark forest. Both sides fire into one another, at muzzle flashes and the brief illumination of lines of battle. The first Union brigade falls back toward the Brock Road. Lane’s North Carolinians pursue, bagging a large mass of prisoners and sending them to the rear. It is a brief triumph, but one that cannot last. Barlow has reserves. The North Carolinians stumble into another Union line of battle shortly after breaking the first.

Barlow himself is on the field, bedecked in his red-striped flannel shirt and barking orders to his brigadiers within earshot. Soldier’s instincts tell him that the enemy to his front is exposed and ripe for a counterattack. It is a hunch that is proven correct.

The 66th New York and 20th Indiana move west through the Wilderness north of the Plank Road. They stumble into Lane’s 7th North Carolina, who assume that they are McGowan’s South Carolinians. A deadly mistake, for McGowan’s men are now several hundred yards to the rear. The New Yorkers fire into the North Carolinians at point-blank range and press forward. More Yankees wrap around Lane’s right flank and fire into his brigade from the left, front, and right. Lane orders a retreat back to the Confederate lines. Barlow orders a pursuit at once.

The 28th North Carolina does not hear the order to retreat. The regiment remains in place until well past dark, as the enemy swarms on three sides, firing into the darkness and refusing to yield. When they finally return to friendly lines, not one man has ammunition remaining in his cartridge box.

Barlow’s division, scattered and disorganized, presses forward through the darkness until they reach the banks of Wilderness Run. A carpet of dead men in blue and gray smothers the ground. The woods explode with light as a Confederate volley tears into Barlow’s men. The deluge of musketry picks up once again.

Astride Traveller, Lee continues to fret and agonize. Night is the only salvation the men of the Third Corps have, and today it seems slow in coming. Every man in the Third Corps counts the minutes, glances at the setting sun, and longs for darkness to put a stop to the madness that is consuming the woods all around.

A scout gallops out of the woods to the north and dashes his horse across Widow Tapp’s field, bringing news of a mass of Yankees to the north moving south toward Hill’s exposed flank.

Unknown to Lee, Gouverneur Warren, at the insistence of General Grant, had earlier dispatched Wadsworth’s division to the south. The Union commander, smarting from his earlier repulse, was eager to exact a slice of vengeance and ordered his division toward Widow Tapp’s field.

The worst possible scenario now presents itself to Robert E. Lee. Ewell and Hill are separated by a mile-and-a-half gap of forest and swamp. It has been a necessary part of the gamble of biting and holding while waiting for Longstreet’s knockout blow, and it seems to have failed to pay off. The Confederate commander knows that he has mere minutes to devise a plan to stymie this latest Union assault.

Assigned to guard the ever-growing mass of Union prisoners is the Third Corps headquarters guard of 150 men in the 5th Alabama Battalion. They are the only organized infantry force not yet committed to the fighting on the Plank Road.

There is no time to waste. Lee personally orders them north into the woods to find and repulse the enemy. It is a ludicrous task; 150 men cannot hope to stop an entire Union division. The Alabamians respond to such a tall order with customary zeal. The 150 Alabamians fix their bayonets, give a Rebel Yell, and crash through the Wilderness.

Wadsworth’s men are still shaken from their rough handling by Gordon’s Georgians earlier in the day. They do not share their commander’s zeal for vengeance and further bloodshed. Hearing the Rebel Yell echo from the woods to their front, the Yankees panic and retire. The ruse works. Wadsworth himself gallops through the dark, swearing and berating his men for their cowardice. Even he cannot get them back into line and eventually gives up the matter. Revenge will have to wait.

At long last, the sun retires behind the horizon, and night rushes forward to take its place. The roar of musketry fades. Thousands of exhausted men drop where they stand, drained of energy. Since Getty’s initial attack at 4:15 P.M., the firing has not stopped until now. The several hundred yards of forest between the Brock Road and Widow Tapp’s Field is a scene of indescribable carnage. In this small space, for six hours, over 30,000 men have grappled with one another in one of the most desperate struggles for survival of the war. Hill’s men drop where they stand; Hancock’s slowly retire to the safety of the Brock Road trenches. In between the 200–300 yards that separate the two exhausted armies, thousands of wounded men lie helpless and in pain.

The Long Night

For the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, it is the longest night for everyone and the last night for many. It is a night that is black and moonless. Not a star can be seen. The heavens shut themselves off from the world, unable to bear witness to what is happening below.

In front of Dick Ewell’s trenches, stretching east into the forest, a carpet of dead and wounded men covers the earth. Entrails hang from branches and leaves. Flecks of blood and gore speck tree trunks. Smoke hangs low over the ground, stinging the eyes and filling the lungs. Fires crackle and spit, leaping from vines and trees, spreading like extending fingers into the mass of suffering humanity. The fires bring torment and death to wounded and unwounded alike.

In some places, the lines are so close that both sides can hear the other digging in. Banter is exchanged with ghosts no man can see through the darkness and the canopy. The cries of the wounded, trapped in no-man’s land between the armies, are appalling. No rescue party can survive out there; the enemy is too close, and the flames are moving too quickly and unpredictably. The bodies themselves are invisible in the total darkness; one would have to stumble over a wounded man to find him out there. Skirmishers from Pegram and Hays’s brigade periodically fire into the woods to their front. Sedgwick’s 6th Corps men spend the night huddled against the forest floor and frantically digging to give themselves cover. The fighting has stopped.

The killing continues all through the night.

Something is changing. The men themselves are changing. They entered this forest with something resembling a sense of innocence. Despite three years of unthinkable carnage, they have never done the things they have done to one another today. The men in blue and gray, countrymen not three years ago, have killed each other for hours on end, face to face, with bullet and bayonet, without much abatement or relent. They have used cold steel more on this day than on any other day in the war; they have refused to give or accept surrender more times than can be counted; they have felt glee as their bullets find their mark. These men are no strangers to combat and its horrors. But before it had been brief, a few hours here or there, a few minutes of close action before victory or repulse. Here it has been different. Here, in the Wilderness, they have butchered their fellow man at close range for hour after hour after hour. The results of their bloody work are right there over the lip of the trenches where they huddle and sleep. The anguished cries of the wounded waft over them, so close that many a man recognizes the voice of a friend or a comrade amongst the choir of suffering.

No one can save these wounded men. No one ventures forth at the risk of his own life to drag a stranger to safety or offer a few sips of water. The days of such chivalrous acts are gone. Thousands of men huddle in filthy ditches in filthy clothes and listen to thousands of men wail and moan in unabated misery. Some of the skirmish fire aimed into the forest finds its mark amongst the carpet of the fallen. The wailing goes on all night. When the flames reach the wounded, the wailing becomes screaming. The acrid smell of burning flesh stings nostrils and twists guts. The bacon in the men’s haversacks becomes decidedly unappealing.

Behind the trenches of the Louisiana brigade, a figure sits silent and still against a tree, sword clasped in one hand and pistol in the other. During Sedgwick’s final assault, the man had loudly exhorted the Louisianans to hold their ground, to show the enemy the courage and mettle of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and to do their duty. At some point during the fighting, the man’s exhortations had ceased. When the firing had finally died away and the gun smoke cleared, not one Yankee had even touched the Louisianans’ breastworks. Harry Hays, satisfied with the condition of the brigade and the strength of the entrenchments, strides over to the tree and lowers himself to one knee. With tears in his eyes, he gazes on the face of Leroy Stafford, at last in death’s embrace and freed from the agony of his mortal wound. In the darkness, it seems as if Stafford is almost smiling.

Hays blinks away his tears.

“Well, Staff,” he says. “They held.”1

A party of men and horses sets out from the ridge on the western side of Saunders Field. Quietly, they pick their way down the slope, past the charred remains of the victims of the great fire. They resist the urge to gag and vomit at the sights and smells of the human charnel house before them. The party arrives at the silent and unmoving forms of the two howitzers from Battery D. One man looks at the scattered bodies stretching behind the guns toward the Union lines and estimates that at least 400 Yankees have fallen trying to reclaim these pieces. The horses are hitched to the guns and quietly hauled back up the slope and behind the lines of Richard Ewell’s Second Corps.

At an evening council of war, Ulysses Grant sits over a campfire on the Lacy House knoll and agonizes over the suffering of the wounded between the armies. At his feet lay a pile of wood shavings, a pair of shredded gloves, and scattered gold braids. All around him, the army’s ambulances continue to rumble to the rear, each wagon loaded to the brim with those wounded who could be saved.

He is joined by Congressman Washburne and George Meade. The General of the Armies views the past 12 hours as little more than a prelude to what he envisions for tomorrow, the 6th.

“George, as Burnside and Longstreet’s commands have not yet been engaged, and the troops of both armies have been occupied in struggling through thickets and fighting for position, today’s work has not been much a test of strength.”

Meade says nothing. Silently, he breathes a sigh of relief that men such as Charles Griffin, Francis Barlow, George Getty, and Guv Warren are not here to bear witness to such a remark.

“I feel pretty well satisfied with the result of the engagement,” Grant continues, “for it is evident that Lee attempted a bold movement to strike this army in the flank before it could be put into line of battle and be prepared to fight to advantage. In this, he has failed.”

The conversation drifts over to Grant’s plan for tomorrow. The campfire crackles as the general outlines his plan to smash Robert E. Lee and his gray-clad veterans.

As far as Grant is concerned, Lee has selected the Wilderness as the place to fight. In that, he will be obliged, and he will learn that just as Lee is no Bragg or Johnston, neither is Grant a Hooker or McClellan.

The plan is simple: at dawn, the Army of the Potomac will continue its two-front maneuver against the Confederates to the west; Sedgwick and Warren will tie down Ewell’s Second Corps while Wadsworth’s division and Hancock’s command will crush A.P. Hill’s Third Corps in a vise from the north and east; Burnside’s 9th Corps would arrive by morning and fill in any gaps or continue any successful attack as needed. The plan will make use of the Union army’s advantage in manpower and A.P. Hill’s precarious position. Meade is assigned the task of issuing the relevant orders. All night, the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac busy themselves with reorganizing their commands, shifting troops, reordering the lines, and preparing the dense assault columns for the dawn attack. It will be the largest single Union attack in the eastern theater to date.

With the same single-minded determination that saw Vicksburg conquered and Confederate armies in the West defeated time and again, Grant will hurl the Army of the Potomac into the jaws of its foe and remind the sons of the South that the North will not so easily let them go.

At the Brock Road intersection, four men carry a litter out of the Wilderness and gently lift it over the Federal trenches before continuing to the rear. An officer’s cap covers the face of the body on the litter. One of the men trips. The cap falls to the side, exposing the lifeless visage of Alexander Hays. A few paces away, Winfield Scott Hancock, a whirlwind of activity, stops what he is doing and gazes at the fallen brigadier. Every officer in the army admired and respected Alex. Hancock turns away and blinks back tears before continuing to issue the orders to prepare the 2nd Corps’s dawn assault.

Another council of war takes place around a campfire to the south, in the small field bearing Catherine Tapp’s name. Exhausted men sit around it, mute and shaken by the harrowing events of the afternoon. The desperate struggle for survival on this terrible day has been A.P. Hill’s finest hour as a corps commander. His two divisions, through grit alone, have stymied the advance of over 20,000 Federals in these dark and twisted brambles. It is a feat worthy of praise and song.

The pugnacity of the enemy unnerves Robert E. Lee. It is evident from reports from Hill and Ewell that “those people” are not withdrawing despite the futility of their assaults. That is ill news, for it is evident for all to see that A.P. Hill’s corps has little fight left in it. If another assault comes tomorrow, as surely it will, the exhausted men of the Third Corps cannot be relied upon to hold their hard-won ground.

The solution is obvious: Longstreet must arrive before morning and relieve Hill in place. To that end, Lee dispatches Charles Venable to find Longstreet and urge him to march through the night. Time is of the essence.

The Old Man is anxious. He cannot sleep. Hours pass by. Venable does not return. Lee dispatches JEB Stuart next.

“You must impress upon General Longstreet that his corps is needed here before dawn,” Lee tells his cavalier.

Lee formulates his own plan for the coming day. Any minute now, surely, Longstreet’s elite veterans will emerge from the darkness and march up the Plank Road to relive A.P. Hill’s exhausted men. The Third Corps will slide north to plug that bothersome gap and dig in. Ewell is ordered to assault and rout Sedgwick, cutting Grant’s supply line. Longstreet will assault at the same time and occupy the Brock Road. The enemy will be cleaved in two and, whether this upstart from the west whose face he cannot recall wants to or not, be forced to retire across the Rapidan in defeat.

It all hinges on Longstreet’s arrival. To the east, the men of Heth’s and Wilcox’s divisions are jumbled together in a disorganized semicircle about a mile wide and a mile deep. No trenches are dug, for the men are too exhausted to do so. Ammunition is running low after a full afternoon’s firing. Order and organization do not exist out here tonight. Wilcox does not wish to stake his command’s survival on the arrival of Longstreet and presses Hill and Lee to allow him to retire farther west into the Tapp field, leaving only a skirmish line in the Wilderness.

“Damn it, Cad!” A.P. Hill snaps. “I don’t want to hear it. The men shall not be disturbed!”

The night drags on. There is no sign of Longstreet.

Venable returns at last, informing Lee that Longstreet’s men are a few miles away still, but that they had been ordered to rest until 1 A.M. Lee shakes his head.

“This will not do,” he says. “Longstreet must be up before dawn. Kindly inform him of the urgency of his march.”

The hours continue to tick by. The anxiety at Lee’s headquarters continues to rise. Behind A.P. Hill’s line, the Plank Road sits silent and empty. Hill, Wilcox, and Heth begin to fret. Heth himself rides out to the south to try and find Longstreet. He rides for three miles without sighting a single Confederate soldier. The First Corps’s arrival won’t be for hours at least, he fumes. Even at the double-quick, no man could march that distance and arrive before dawn.

At the western edge of Widow Tapp’s field, a 28-year-old colonel named William Poague, commander of the Third Corps artillery reserve, orders his guns wheeled into the field and deployed hub to hub. The cannon face east toward the tree line on the far side. Poague stares into the trees for a moment and feels a sense of foreboding.

“Cut some trees,” he orders. “Stack ’em around the guns good and high!” Something tells him his gunners will need the protection tomorrow. He too looks back to the west. The Plank Road stretches into the night, silent and empty. No sign of Longstreet.

1 A.M. comes and goes. Surely, Longstreet is marching now? No man passes the night at Widow Tapp’s field without at least once turning back to glance at the Plank Road. It remains silent and empty. Poague’s cannoneers fell logs and stack them in front of the guns to form a protective barricade. The young artilleryman cannot escape the feeling of overwhelming dread. This time, it seems, the Old Man may have finally made one wager too many.

Hours pass. Longstreet’s corps fails to materialize out of the night. The first rays of sunlight begin creeping over the horizon. The moonless night fades. Red beams of light cast eerie shadows over the landscape. Gunfire erupts to the north. Ewell’s attack has begun.

As the darkness fades, Heth and Wilcox spring into action, ordering their men awakened and officers to try and create some semblance of a front line. Robert E. Lee stirs from a brief, fitful sleep, and exits his tent. A look of despair mars his face as he stares at the empty field and the empty road before him.

Heth’s and Wilcox’s soldiers stir. Men rub aching joints and eyes stinging from smoke from countless fires. They blink away a weariness that is more than physical and reach for stacked muskets and cartridge boxes. Officers move up and down the lines.

“Get ready,” they whisper.

The fighting men of the Third Corps now look back behind them. There stretches the Plank Road, illuminated by light of a blood-red dawn. It sits there, silent and empty, almost mocking them.

Lee had elected to stake his survival on Longstreet’s arrival. This time, it seems, he has pushed his luck too far.

The anxiety and dread spreads from the officers to the soldiers. It is 4:30 A.M. on May the 6th. The men of the Third Corps are still waking, still rising, still checking weapons, and still stealing glances at the empty and silent Orange Plank Road when a cavalcade of drums erupts to the east.

To Be Continued…

Thumbnail image: Winslow Homer, Skirmish in the Wilderness, 1864

The Fight for Saunders Field

The United States Regulars emerge out of the trees first. The professional soldiers give a cheer as they enter a maelstrom of lead and iron. Across the field, Leroy Stafford’s Louisianans, George Steuart and John Jones’s Virginians, and George Doles’s Georgians take aim at the oncoming tide and fire. After the initial volley rips into the Northern ranks, the order “Fire at will!” is given. Ewell’s men reload and fire as fast as they are able.

In the front line of Ayres’s brigade, the 140th New York and several battalions of United States Regulars take the initial volley and recoil. Colonel Paddy Ryan, the 140th’s commander, yells at the top of his lungs for his men to follow him forward, twirling his sword in the air and striding into the hail of shot. Bullets tear the air around him, searching for flesh and bone. Many find their mark. Men begin to fall as .58 caliber bullets smack into human bodies with sickening thwacks, sending hats, flesh, and pieces of clothing flying through the air. Blood specks across Paddy Ryan’s cheek as the man next to him loses his head to a cannon ball.

“Dress on the colors!”

The storm of lead buffets the 140th like a boat at sea; it drifts to the left, the regiment’s left flank crossing the Turnpike from right to left at a slant. A gap opens between the New Yorkers and the Regulars, who push to the right, drifting out of the open field and into the thick woods. The Regulars cannot see ten feet in front of them, and pick their way through the brush and briars, bullets fluttering through leaves and snapping branches above their heads. The racket they cause as they crash forward alerts Leroy Stafford’s Louisianans, who reload after their initial volley and silently wait behind breastworks for the order to open fire.

South of the Turnpike, Bartlett’s brigade advances in three lines, the first being the 1st Michigan Volunteers. They too are buffeted by a swarm of lead that strikes men down by the dozen. A bullet smacks into Captain David Stanway and severs his arm before he even makes it ten paces out of the tree line. Another bores through the chest of Private George Sawyer and explodes out of his back after perforating his right lung. The 1st Michigan continues forward for a few dozen yards. Every step brings death. The regiment wavers, then halts, then buckles and retires, leaving 64 officers and men dead, wounded, or missing. They’ve been in the fight for scarcely five minutes.

Bartlett’s second line continues forward, consisting of the 44th New York, 16th Michigan, 83rd Pennsylvania, and 18th Massachusetts. Behind the 83rd, the third line, consisting of the 118th Pennsylvania and the 20th Maine — of Gettysburg fame — follows.

Colonel O.S. Woodward, 83rd Pennsylvania, has his left leg smashed to bloody tatters just below the knee. He falls forward, and his regiment passes him by. Another volley bellows out from the far end of Saunders Field. Holes are gouged in Bartlett’s and Ayre’s advancing lines, great gaps appearing where once three or four men stood shoulder to shoulder. The gaps are filled. The line contracts. The advance continues.

From behind their earthworks, Ewell’s men load and fire, the smoke so thick that it now obscures the advancing Yankees. Artillery blasts away, solid shot tearing men apart in bloody sacks of meat and bone.

The 140th New York reaches the swale in the middle of Saunders Field. Above them, another volley rings out from the Confederate earthworks. This one sails overhead, doing little harm.

“Forward, lads! At the double-quick!” shouts Paddy Ryan, sprinting up the hill. The survivors of the 140th follow with a “Huzzah!” Having outpaced the Regulars to their right, they begin to take flanking fire from Stafford’s Confederates in the woods.

The Union soldiers crest the hill, the tree line and the Rebel works now directly to their front. Another volley from George Steuart’s brigade rakes the 140th New York with such ferocity that the entire regiment stumbles backward. Paddy Ryan realizes that every man either side of him within five feet is down.

“Forward!” he yells at the top of his lungs. “Dress ranks!”

The survivors reform into a cohesive line of battle. Holes in the line, where once stood men, are filled by those to the left and right. The gaps are filled. The line contracts. The advance continues.

“Fire!”

Finally, Yankee bullets find their mark. Several of Steuart’s Virginians are shot through the head.

George Griffin watches his men die from the edge of the tree line with a growing and helpless rage. Warren joins him, bristling at the futility of his orders to sacrifice his own men to satisfy the impatience of Ulysses Grant. He stares at the Union line of battle as it continues into Saunders Field, leaving a scattered detritus of fallen men in blue uniforms in its wake. A shell rips a hole in Bartlett’s second line, scattering men like rag dolls and sending arms and limbs cartwheeling through the air.

“This is fucked for beans,” Griffin seethes.

Warren springs into action, ordering two cannons from Battery D, 1st New York Light Artillery, to take position in the middle of Saunders Field and provide supporting fire to Ryan’s New Yorkers.

The two cannons are hitched and moved into the center of Saunders Field, amidst the blizzard of shot and shell. Their horses begin dying as soon as they exit the clearing. Unlimbered and wheeled forward by the crews, the two 24-pounder howitzers get into position and fire diagonally across the Turnpike, aiming for the trees from whence Southern lead pours like rain. They aim too low.

Paddy Ryan does not see the first blast of canister fire; rather, he feels it rip into his men and knock a group of eight forward, eviscerating them from behind, before plowing up the hill and shredding a section of Rebel breastworks. The canister tears apart flesh and wood alike. Another blast follows, taking the heads off a few New Yorkers on the way up to smash into the fallen trees. Ryan’s New Yorkers resolutely continue the shooting match even as blasts of friendly canister fly through their ranks on the way into the Confederate line.

Perched on thick tree branches, Confederate marksmen begin killing the Union artillerymen one at a time.

South of the Turnpike, Bartlett’s men crest the hill, the 83rd Pennsylvania and 18th Massachusetts breaking their stride into a sprint toward the blazing Confederate earthworks.

The two regiments slam into the flank of Ewell’s line.

Right behind the trenches of John Jones’s Virginians, Richard Ewell, Jubal Early, Robert Rodes, and Jones himself are conferring with each other and their headquarters staff. Ewell, knowing that he is not to bring on a general engagement, nonetheless can see that one has been foisted upon him and that he must respond in kind.

Startled by a loud cheer to the front, John Jones and Richard Ewell look up to see the 83rd and 18th crest the hill and sprint toward Jones’s trenches. The sudden appearance of these two regiments from the swale takes the Virginians by surprise. A close-range volley ripples into the Confederate works. Seconds later, the two Yankee regiments crash over the barricade screaming bloody murder. Bayonets thrust forward into flesh, rifle butts crack across skulls, and Jones’s Virginians break. Confederate soldiers fall back, firing into the tangled melee to their front. Many others run for the tree line.

John Jones mounts his horse and gallops forward, urging his fleeing men to rally. Captain Robert Early, nephew of Jubal Early and aide de camp to Richard Ewell, is swept up in the rout. Wrestling with his startled horse, Robert gallops to join his friend in rallying the brigade.

He never makes it. A Federal bullet smashes into his heart and severs his spine. His body is thrown from the saddle and crashes amidst the fleeing Virginians.

Captain Reuben Clary, adjutant to Robert E. Lee, watches helplessly as Pennsylvanians corner Jones. One of them demands the Confederate Brigadier’s surrender; another shoots him off his horse and then steals his sword. Jones dies on the ground, shot through the heart.

The two Yankee regiments continue to the tree line, crashing into the briars and screaming at the top of their lungs. Behind them, the 20th Maine and 118th Pennsylvania struggle over the dead and the dying to keep up with their comrades. William Bartlett, incredulous at his success, spurs his horse over the breastworks and urges his men onward into the forest.

Paddy Ryan cannot see the success of Bartlett’s men to his left. His entire world is centered on his disintegrating regiment, wracked by volleys to its front and right and occasionally by blasts of canister from friendly artillery in its rear. Still, the 140th reloads and fires into the tree line to its front.

Ayres’s second line consists of the 146th New York, commanded by David Jenkins, and two Pennsylvania Regiments. On seeing the Regulars disappear into the woods to the left, Jenkins orders his regiment forward to assist the 140th, all alone and shrouded in smoke and blazing muzzle flashes.

The 146th New York are dressed in the bright red caps, blue jackets, and striped pants of the French Zouaves. “Forward, double-quick!” Jenkins yells, his men following him into the maelstrom of Saunders Field.

Onward the 146th runs, reaching the swale at the center of the field and scrambling up the hill toward the 140th. A blast of canister from Battery D scythes men down. Jenkins, in a fury, orders someone to tell Battery D to cease its firing before continuing to trot up the slope.

The 146th New York fires as it advances, adding its weight to the 140th. Both regiments press into the woods and toward the Confederate works. Steuart’s Confederates retreat behind their breastworks and continue firing into the mass of Yankees now running at them at full speed. Upon reaching the tree line, and having Steuart’s trenches in his sights, Jenkins orders the 146th to throw itself on the ground.

The Zouaves go prone, firing into the trees ahead and at the wall of timber and earth to their front.

Meanwhile, the Regulars to the right of the two New York Regiments continue to drift left and pick their way through the woods. Organizing a line of battle in this second-growth forest is nigh impossible. Commanders resort to using nothing but dead reckoning as they urge their men forward.

The forest in front of them erupts in a cascade of gunfire and gun smoke. Out of nowhere, bullets knock men down like wheat before a scythe. The Wilderness is filled with the horrified screams of dead and dying men.

Leroy Stafford cannot see the Regulars through the thick forest, but he hears them as they approach. His Louisianans fire into the thick mass of green in front of them as fast as they can reload.

Return fire thunks into the trees and felled timber behind which the Louisianans shelter. The shock of the ambush rattles the Regulars. They return fire at nothing, at sounds, glimpses of muzzle flashes, at shadows and brief snapshots of gray among the green vegetation. The forest itself seems to shoot at them.

“Where are they?”

“They’re right there!”

Bullets sail into them as if conjured out of thin air. The sight of a near-invisible force cutting comrades down breaks the United States Regulars. They pull back, firing at the forest as it spits lead back at them. Then, they begin to run. The 140th and 146th New York, fighting face to face with their opponents, are now alone.

George Steuart watches as the Regulars stream out of the Wilderness into the eastern side of Saunders Field. Realizing that he has the flank of Ayres’s brigade in the air, he orders the 10th and 23rd Virginia forward to hit the New Yorkers and Regulars in the flank. The Virginians leave their breastworks with glee and work their way through the woods until they look down the length of the 140th and 146th New York regiments through their gunsights.

Paddy Ryan jolts as the Rebel Yell explodes from the trees to his right. David Jenkins looks on in horror as a volley from the Virginians scythes across his line, cutting down the regiment’s color bearer. The Virginians slam into the 146th New York. Bayonets, fists, and rifle butts are used in lieu of bullets to continue swelling the butcher’s bill.

The remnants of Ayres’s brigade break under the onslaught. The men in blue, after barely 40 minutes of fighting, sprint for the safety of their lines. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Curran of the 146th, resplendent in a brand-new officer’s uniform, stumbles around amidst the swirling melee. A Confederate bullet smashes into the back of his head as he tries to rally his men.

Colonel David Jenkins disappears in the melee and chaos of Ayres’s doomed attack. He is last seen leaning on his sword before striding into the forest, bullets and muzzle blasts erupting all around him. After that, he is never seen again. Much to the anguish of his family, his body is never recovered; to this day, his final resting place is unknown.

Retreating back down the hill, the 140th and 146th New York take cover at the base of the swale, clinging to the earth as the battle sweeps over their heads. As the rest of Ayres’s brigade retreats around them, the stubborn New Yorkers, fury and hate in their hearts, reload their muskets and fire up the hill into friend and foe alike.

To the south of the Turnpike, Bartlett’s successful attack continues into the woods. Surrounded by fleeing Virginians of Jones’s brigade, a frustrated Jubal Early wheels his horse around and turns to one of his aides.

“Major,” he says, “you will find General Gordon a short distance up that road. Ride to him fast as you can and tell him to bring his brigade up at the double-quick. Tell him he’ll have to charge as soon as he gets here.”

Jones’s rout continues west. The Virginians, running pell-mell with Bartlett’s Federals hot on their heels, run right through the assembled line of Cullen Battle’s Alabamians, who fall back under Bartlett’s advance and come intermixed with the fleeing Virginians.

Erroneously believing that Ewell’s whole line has been broken, Battle’s brigade begins to dissolve as entire regiments stream toward the trenches of Mine Run.

This fleeing mass of humanity exits the Wilderness and streams into the open ground beyond. Before them, Junius Daniel’s North Carolina brigade stands in a line of battle. Daniel rides into the retreating Alabamians and demands to know what is happening. On learning that the Yankees have broken through Ewell’s line, Daniel orders his brigade forward.

The Tar Heels advance at the quick step into the Wilderness.

Bartlett, meanwhile, has stopped his advance, wondering where Ayres is to his right and unaware that his fellow brigade commander has been driven from the field. Daniel’s North Carolinians smash headlong into the 18th and 83rd as the regiments begin reforming. Startled, the Federals fire a volley into the 45th North Carolina as the Confederate battle line materializes out of the briars. In their haste, they aim too high. The return volley, at near-point-blank range, tears bloody swaths through the Federal regiments.

Colonel McCoy of the 83rd Pennsylvania orders his regiment to fall back. Most of the 83rd run for their own lines. Behind Bartlett’s now broken first line, the 20th Maine is picking its way through the briars when it is confronted with the retreating regiment. Daniel’s North Carolinians bellow out of the shadows and plow into the 20th Maine, firing at point-blank range and driving home the bayonet.

Bartlett’s brigade breaks soon after Ayres, and streams out of the western edge of Saunders Field, over the recently captured earthworks, and back down the slope to their own lines. Jones’s Virginians reoccupy their trenches. Furious over their commander’s death, they fire into the retreating Federals and cut down many with a shot to the back.

In the confusion, Bartlett, blood trickling from a grazing wound to his head, reels his horse around as he tries to escape Daniel’s counterattack. The Confederates call on him to surrender. The defiant brigadier shakes his fist and gallops his horse down the slope on the western side of Saunders Field. A Confederate bullet tears through the horse and it collapses atop Bartlett in a somersault of limbs and flesh.

Amazingly, Bartlett manages to crawl from under the dying beast and hobbles to safety with other wounded men.

Sitting on his horse on the eastern woods of Saunders Field, Charles Griffin blinks away tears of rage as he watches the remnants of Ayres and Bartlett’s brigades stream out of the smoke and fire wreathing around the far end of the field. He balls his hands into fists and turns his horse around. He gallops to the rear, cursing the whole way.

Wadsworth Attacks Ewell’s Flank

Lysander Cutler’s Iron Brigade, of Wadsworth’s division, picks its way through the dense forest, having lost contact with Bartlett’s left and unaware of what is happening to its front.

Wadsworth’s advance is subject to harassing fire from George Doles’s Georgians, who did not break when Jones did, and who have remained firmly in their earthworks.

With its right flank separated from Bartlett, the Iron Brigade trudges into the woods near the southern edge of Saunders Field. Colonel Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin braces as a volley from Doles’s Georgians sweeps the Iron Brigade at close range. The 6th alone loses nearly 50 men.

To their south, General Stone’s brigade enters a small clearing in the Wilderness and passes the home of Mrs. Higgerson. The lady leers at the advancing Yankees from her porch, promising that the Confederates in the woods will send them running away without much trouble. Stone’s men laugh and pay her no heed.

The Iron Brigade continues forward into the hail of Doles’s fire. To Doles’s left, the 48th and 50th Virginia have stayed in their earthworks during Bartlett’s breakthrough. The Virginians pour lead into the Iron Brigade, but are shaken by the rout of their comrades to their left.

The 24th Michigan and 7th Indiana crash through the woods into the trenches of the 48th and 50th Virginia. The flag of the 48th is shot out of Color Sergeant Winfield Carter’s hands before a Yankee bullet smashes his leg above the knee. Major Albert Edwards of the 24th Michigan wrests the colors from Carter’s hands, and Private John Opel of the 7th Indiana captures the colors of the 50th Virginia.

The two Virginia regiments break, leaving Doles’s left flank exposed.

The 4th Georgia, on the extreme left of Doles’s line, quickly re-fuses its left flank into an L shape and goes prone as the Michiganders and Indianans chase the fleeing Virginians to the west. Patiently, they wait for the second line, the 150th Pennsylvania, to pick their way forward. The 150th is belatedly trying to follow the 24th and the 7th, having been delayed by enemy fire and the oppressive terrain.

The 4th Georgia unleashes a volley at point-blank range, wreaking havoc on the Pennsylvanians. Undeterred, the sons of the Commonwealth return the favor with their own volley. The two battle lines begin blasting away, so close that men can see the whites of their enemies’ eyes through their sights.

Early’s aide finds John B. Gordon at the head of his brigade, marching in column up the Turnpike about a half-mile from Saunders Field. Gordon hears Early’s instructions, then replies: “Major, do me a favor — give the instructions yourself to each of my commanders while I ride forward and see the situation.”

The aide does as requested, while Gordon gallops to find Jubal Early. The column quickens its pace. Pretty soon, the wounded from Doles’s brigade stream past. Ahead, the constant roar of musketry rings out. Smoke begins to thicken in the sky above the canopy. Most of it is white gun smoke, but many note the presence of columns of dark, black smoke.

Gordon reaches Early and Ewell just behind the line in Doles’s sector.

“General Gordon,” Ewell says, “the fate of the day depends on you, sir.”

Sardonically, Gordon replies, “I think I can change the situation here.”

“Try your hand,” snaps Ewell, before riding off to the north.

Gordon draws his sword and wheels his horse around to his fast-approaching brigade.

“Forward into line on the right!” he calls out. “Right oblique, load as you march!”

His brigade shakes itself into a line of battle in minutes. Behind Gordon, the firing swells to a crescendo.

“Soldiers, we have always driven the enemy before us, but this day, we are going to scatter them like the leaves of this forest!”

The Georgians move forward a moment later, silent so as not to alert the Iron Brigade of what is coming. Marching at an oblique, the Georgians move to the right of Doles’s brigade, past the Confederate trenches, and toward the clearing of the Higgerson Farm.

They catch Wadsworth’s division in the tangled and twisted morass of the Wilderness.

Gordon’s brigade slams into the gap between the Iron Brigade — stymied outside of Doles’s trenches — and Stone’s brigade just as it leaves the Higgerson clearing. A powerful volley rakes the Yankees all along their line. Next, the Rebel Yell explodes from the canopy, followed by hundreds of screaming Georgians. With bayonets fixed, they tear forward into the startled Federals.

Gordon, realizing that he has caught two Union formations in a gap between their lines, quickly has his brigade split down the middle and swing left and right like barn doors opening to the outside. The Iron Brigade reels as its flank caves in. Stone’s brigade breaks, the men streaming past Mrs. Higgerson, who sits on her porch and laughs with glee as her earlier predictions are realized.

Lysander Cutler tries to rally his Iron Brigade, but it does no good. For the first time in their history, the stalwart western boys in iron break and run. The 7th Pennsylvania, lost in the tangled morass of the Wilderness, is taken prisoner in its entirety. Junius Daniel’s North Carolinians join the fray. Daniel swings his brigade around to hit the V Corps artillery at the Chewning House, threatening the rear of Crawford’s division still ensconced on the plateau. Seeing the North Carolinians threaten his rear, Crawford begins pulling his division away from its commanding position and back toward the rest of the 5th Corps lines. The position in which he sat all morning had offered the best chance Ulysses Grant had of striking Powell Hill’s exposed flank. It is surrendered at 2 in the afternoon, with hardly a shot fired.

The Destruction of the 146th and 140th New York

The end comes swiftly for the 140th and 146th New York. Chasing Bartlett’s and Ayres’s retreating men, swarms of Confederates hit the two New York regiments from both flanks as they huddle in the swale north of the Turnpike.

Brightly colored Zouaves fall like flies, cut down at point-blank range as they huddle against the earth. Paddy Ryan, who has fought so hard to salvage the hopeless situation, finally realizes that there is no more to be done. He orders the retreat back to the 5th Corps trenches.

The two New York regiments scramble to the rear and the safety of the Union trenches. The two guns of Battery D continue to fire across the Turnpike into George Steaurt’s position, reaping a tally of Rebels as they emerge to finish off the New Yorkers. Steuart’s 1st and 3rd North Carolina barrel out of the woods and make for the guns.

A final volley of double canister from the two pieces carves a bloody gap in the North Carolinians. Undeterred, they sweep over the cannon, bayonetting and shooting many of the Union artillerymen as they flee. Of the dozens of horses that pulled the cannon and ammunition caissons to the center of Saunders Field, none remain alive.

At that moment, remnants of Cutler’s Iron Brigade stream into Saunders Field from the south, pursued by a hodgepodge force of Gordon’s, Battle’s, and Doles’s men.

Battle’s 6th Alabama crashes into the Federal guns, and an officer from the regiment claims them as his. Furious, Steuart’s North Carolinians insist the guns belong to them. The argument intensifies until the Confederates are more focused on arguing with each other than hounding the retreating Federals. In this chaos, the remains of the 140th and 146th New York slip back into the trees.

Paddy Ryan stumbles into the trenches that he had left barely an hour earlier and looks around in mute shock at the pitiful state of his men. One of his Lieutenants settles down next to him, face black with powder and blood dripping from the side of his head.

“My God,” Ryan mumbles, “I’m the first Colonel I ever knew who didn’t know where his regiment was after a battle.” Then, the young Colonel buries his hands in his head and weeps.

The 140th New York loses 268 of the 524 men who stepped off into Saunders Field. The 146th New York loses 302 of its 556 officers and men. Barely 10 men above the rank of Sergeant respond to the regiment’s evening roll call.

Guv Warren has watched the repulse of his assault with a quiet rage. That rage is compounded by the sight of men in gray milling around two of his cannon. While Saunders Field swarms with Confederates, Warren brings up his two reserve brigades from John Robinson’s division, who have just arrived on the scene. These fresh troops are aghast when they come within sight of Saunders Field and the carpet of blue-clad corpses that mark the line of march and repulse of Charles Griffin’s division.

Warren’s reserves explode out of the tree line even before the last remnants of the Union assault have made it back to safety. Some of the retreating Union troops join their comrades or are swept up in the howling charge. This second assault takes the Confederates in the open by surprise. In a minute, Robinson’s men are within shouting distance of the Confederates and their captured guns. A murderous volley rakes the gathered Rebels and sends the rest scrambling up the slope.

With only two brigades, it is pointless to assault Ewell’s position again. Robinson orders his men back into the safety of the tree line as fire from the ridge begins to land among his men. Withdrawing to the safety of their own lines, one Confederate soldier places a small Confederate flag on the wheel of one of the cannons. It is a ploy to tempt more Federals into the open, and it works.

The 9th Massachusetts takes the bait, charging into Saunders Field on its own initiative and being thrown back by a hail of iron from the ridge beyond. They leave behind 12 officers and 138 men for their trouble, having failed even to reach the cannons.

Griffin’s Way of Talking

The saga of Charles Griffin’s doomed assault is communicated to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac via a cascade of gunfire. For an hour, the sounds of volleys and a trickle of wounded men emerge from the forest. After an hour, things go quiet again. The trickle of wounded men does not cease.

A pile of wood shavings lies at the feet of Ulysses Grant. Having finished annihilating yet another stick, he searches the ground around him for another. He acquires an acceptable twig and resumes his task. He slides the blade down the length of the twig, smiling to himself as a shaving of bark curls like a finger and falls to the ground at his feet. Around him, Meade and his staff occupy themselves with the gargantuan task of bringing the Army of the Potomac into something resembling a battle formation. Grant, judiciously trying to avoid stepping on the sensitive Meade’s toes, nevertheless listens for the word attack.

The crashing of hooves causes his head to snap up. An officer, a general of some rank by the stars on his collar, reins in his horse and practically jumps off the animal before it’s even stopped. The man, red-faced with rage, nearly sprints toward Meade and his gathered staff officers.

Grant sees his own aide, Rawlins, tense up.

“Damn you!” the red-faced man screams, pointing a finger directly at Meade and his staff officers. “Damn you, I had him! I drove God-damned Ewell three quarters of a God-damned mile into that God-damned green hell, but where was God-damned Sedgwick? Where was he? My God-damn flank ass-up in the air, who in his right mind would order a charge like that! If Sedgwick hadn’t been slow, if you,” he again points at Meade, “hadn’t been so God-damned hotheaded, we’d have driven him out of those woods! General Warren and General Sedgwick have been derelict in their duty, and my men are dead because of it!”

Grant rises. So does Rawlins, who Grant can see is also turning cherry-red.

“Damn you,” spits the stranger. “God damn you, George, you’re a murderer. You’re all a bunch of murderers!”

With that, the stranger turns on his heel, climbs back on his horse, and spurs it back west toward the front.

“That man,” Rawlins announces to Meade, “just displayed open insubordination to you in front of the Commanding General! Why in the hell are you letting a man such as General Griffin, a subordinate, speak to you in such a way without cashiering him and placing him under arrest on the spot?”

Grant notices Meade’s own choler begin to rise; the tension between him and Rawlins has been obvious since the latter’s arrival in March. He steps forward, interposing himself gently between the two men.

“Easy, John. George, who is this General Gregg? You ought to arrest him.”

Meade, wordlessly, looks down at Grant’s tunic, which is unbuttoned. Silently, as if he were a father and Grant a little boy, he begins to button up the man’s coat, gently and methodically. He says nothing until the last button is fastened and Grant looks uncharacteristically put together.

“It’s Griffin, not Gregg,” Meade says in an almost sanguine voice. “And that’s only his way of talking.”

The Fire

It has not rained in Virginia all year. The heat has long sucked much of the moisture out of the dirt and shrubbery. Small twigs, bushes, and endless coils of briars and vines have withered and dried out. Dead wood, once scattered, is now concentrated and stacked together to form snaking lines of breastworks.

It starts out as one of a million; all morning as the battle at Saunders Field progressed, there had been several small fires, each discharge of a musket setting off leaves and twigs nearby. Most fizzle out. The smoke of burning organic matter becomes indistinguishable from the white-blue haze of gun smoke that covers the western edge of Saunders Field. It matters not to the fighting soldiers; both types sting their eyes, make them water, cover the battlefield in eerie hues of orange, gray, blue, and white. Only those far away, if they happened to look at the sky in the direction of the sound of gunfire, might have noticed a few ominous columns of angry, gray-black smoke reaching to brush the sky, and understood what was portended.

It has not rained all year. The ground is dry. The earth has no moisture. One musket discharges. One among thousands. The soldier who fires it is lost to history. The bullet fired by that musket does not just kill the man at which it was aimed; it kills thousands.

It has not rained all year. The ground is dry. Fuel is all around.

First, a leaf. Then another. Then twigs. Then larger twigs. Then the grass. A breeze carries it farther. The first felled log catches. The white-blue haze of gun smoke fades. The haze becomes an ominous orange-gray. Noses twitch. Eyes sting.

“Oh, God,” one man moans.

It happens so fast. Too fast.

The earthworks occupied by Jones’s Virginians catch first. The flames spread amongst the dry and parched grass. They cause men in gray to scatter out of their trenches. Thankfully, the flames pass quickly; too quickly for any Federal attack to capitalize on.

The relief is short lived. It has not rained all year. The ground is dry. Saunders Field becomes a charnel house. The smoke billows down into the swale below the Confederate line, where hundreds of wounded men cough and struggle to breathe. The smoke is not the worst of what is coming.

The flames follow the smoke, pushed by a gentle breeze. Coughs become screams. The men on both sides of Saunders Field cannot believe what they are hearing. Those cannot be men out there, screaming — no, shrieking — like something out of Hell. Not even animals scream like that when they are cooked alive. These men are veterans of a dozen battles. They’ve grown, if not used to, then accepting of, the awful post-battle chorus of wounded men, of men who’ve had their arms and legs shot to ribbons, men whose entrails spill out from bloody holes in their bellies. The cries for water, the cries for Mama, for mercy, and for death are nothing new to these men. This is different. This is men, helpless, being cooked alive. This is men who are conscious as their blood and the water in their bodies boils inside of them. If there is a Hell, it cannot be worse than what is happening out there between the lines.

Those who are unwounded scurry out of harm’s way. To them, the fire is just a nuisance. Those who cannot, who have had entire sections of bone in their arms and legs pulverized by .58 caliber bullets, who are in too much pain from leaking holes in their chests and abdomens to move, scream to the heavens in terror and fear as their skin gets hotter, as the air itself gets hotter, as that dreadful licking and crackling sound gets louder and louder, as they begin to sweat, as the wool of their uniforms begins to get unbearably hot, as the metal of their belt buckles, their wedding rings, the coins in their pockets, begins to cook into their flesh. Those who retain the use of at least one of their arms grab the ground and pull themselves away from the heat behind them with all their might. Their fingernails gouge the dry, black earth. It has not rained all year. The ground is dry. The grass is dead.

The flames reach them. The screams unify into one chorus, a choir of the damned, a sickening ode to pain itself. The screams become unworldly. Their uniforms ignite. Saunders Field becomes a twisted opera of human torches writhing on the ground.

Their ammunition ignites with sickening pop-pop-pops. Wounded, burning, writhing men disappear in white smoke as ignited ammunition burns them and sends Minié balls barreling through hands, feet, arms, legs, guts, chests, and fingers. The bullets fly all around, slamming into wounded men beside them. Some who have the use of an arm or a leg lose it. Their struggle to escape the fire ends the same: in agony, in disbelief, in an animalistic orgy of fear and pain, feeling the heat boil their sweat, feeling the heat singe their hair and their eyebrows, feeling the flames lick their feet, their shoes, their trousers, feeling the smoke choke the air out of them. It is a mercy to pass out before the fire reaches them fully. Not all — not many — are granted that mercy.

The island of safety in Saunders Field is the Turnpike, a wide, dirt firebreak that becomes a lifeline of hope to hundreds of men. Most who survive the first fire are those who found themselves felled within a few paces of the Turnpike. Soon, it is jam-packed with wounded men. For the rest of the day, as fighting continues to rage north of the field and as further Union attacks make futile gestures to cross its charred surface, fire from both sides will land among these helpless men, who can do nothing except lie there in agony and pray to escape the inferno alive.

The color of a man’s uniform does not matter. Blue and Gray alike run from the flames, crawl from the flames, help each other to the safety of the Turnpike. Unable to sit and bear the chorus of suffering humanity, men from both sides of Saunders Field break from their trenches and dash as close to the roaring inferno as they dare. They pull the nearest wounded to safety. No sharpshooter’s bullet looks for them this time.

It has not rained all year. The ground is dry. The fire moves quickly, consuming all before it. Man, beast, and shrub withers and succumbs to its ravenous advance. A pall of orange-gray smoke obscures Saunders Field. From this impenetrable wall of gray fog emanates the sound of men who are burned alive, helpless, unable to move. Another breeze pushes the wall of smoke to the east, toward the trenches of the men of the 5th Corps, who have stared at the sight before them in mute horror, tears of disgust, rage, and helplessness staining the cheek of many who would call themselves “tough men.” Many a tough man retches at the sweet, sickly smell of roast pork that wafts over them with the breeze and the smoke.

Saunders Field lies blackened, a charred no-man’s land between the armies. It is covered with smoking, steaming man-sized lumps, burned black beyond recognition.

It began with fire on the mountain. Now the world burns.

Sedgwick Arrives on the Field

Their progress has been hampered by the terrain and by Confederate skirmishers, who have killed them from behind trees and bushes and set the woods alight to slow them down. As the morning gives way to the afternoon, the lead elements of John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps finally begin crawling onto the Saunders Field battlefield.

In the van of Sedgwick’s long blue column, the division of Horatio Wright picks its way through briars and smoke. They have heard the earlier battle and are eager to get into action. At the very front of the long blue column marches the brigade of Colonel Emory Upton, a young, fanatical abolitionist whose blood is hot with battle lust. Among the brigade commanders of the Army of the Potomac, Upton stands out as a young man without a military education who nonetheless has a knack to formulate innovative battle strategy and carry it out with successful results. He also covets a brigadier’s star.

Upton rides forward to the northern edge of Saunders Field. He scans the charred open ground and concludes that it is not the place for his brigade to fight.

“Our left flank,” he announces, “will be this tree line.”

Upton’s brigade shakes itself into a line of battle, two lines deep, amidst the haze of smoke and thick vegetation. A tenuous connection is established with Warren’s 5th Corps troops, who are little more than a disorganized mob after the hell of the morning’s combat.

A few hundred yards to the west, Leroy Stafford’s Louisiana Brigade picks its way through the tangles and briars, the momentum of their earlier counterattack against the United States Regulars carrying them forward. The hotheaded Stafford urges his Louisianans, dregs from the wharves of New Orleans, forward into the dark forest. As more of the 6th Corps shakes itself into line, the sound of men crashing through the underbrush is heard plain as day.

On Upton’s right, Thomas Neill’s brigade of Maine and New York men sprint through the forest, desperately trying to get themselves into a line of battle before the approaching Rebels slam into them. This time, it is the turn of the Southerners to be taken by surprise.

A volley rips out of the impenetrable wall of trees and bushes to their front, scything down men and tearing bloody holes in the Confederate ranks. Again, it is as if the woods themselves pour hot lead into flesh. Men scream with unearthly howls of surprise and pain and clutch their stomachs, arms, and legs. The shock is beyond anything these men have experienced before; it is if they are under attack by ghosts. It is as if this dark, impenetrable green wall of vegetation and vine is shooting at them, deliberately aiming to smash limb and bone with hot lead.

The Louisianans do not break; these men never break. The rascals of the Confederacy level their muskets and return fire into the brush, into the unseen foe. Order deserts the gray and blue lines. The firing becomes disorganized, frantic, indiscriminate. Bullets thwack into twigs and branches, sending wood shavings flying like miniature artillery shells. A steady stream of sawdust wafts gently to the forest floor. More brushfires start. The blue-gray haze of gun smoke becomes acrid and foul.

To Stafford’s left, the Stonewall Brigade picks its way through the Wilderness, trying to reestablish contact with their comrades. The 5th Wisconsin takes Jim Walker’s Virginians in the flank, scything down dozens of men of the 5th and 33rd Virginia with a well-timed volley. To the horror of “Stonewall” Jim, the 5th Virginia breaks and runs for the rear.

The bald-headed brawler rises in his stirrups, fury and defiance dripping from every syllable uttered out of his mouth.

“Remember your name!”

The 5th Virginia reforms. The brigade re-fuses its right flank. The Wisconsin boys are invisible, masked behind trees and brush. But the audible noise of reloading, of ramrods sliding into gun barrels, the sounds of teeth tearing cartridge paper, waft over the steadying gray line. The two battle lines are invisible to one another yet are scarcely 40 yards apart.

“Give ’em hell, boys!” Walker shouts. The Stonewall Brigade answers with a volley that tears bloody holes into the 5th Wisconsin.

Furious musketry consumes the Wilderness. There is no beauty in this, no elegant maneuver; neither heroic charge to break a faltering line, nor brave defense to hold one. It is war, stripped of its trappings and gallantry and denuded to its most base form: organized murder. The sons of Virginia, Louisiana, New York, and Pennsylvania simply load their single-shot muskets and fire through the trees at foes unseen. It will continue this way until one side breaks or everyone is dead.

Stafford realizes that his position is not tenable. Everywhere around him, his men die, cut down as if by invisible ghosts. Directly in front of him, the 1st Louisiana begins to fall back, pushed back by the weight of fire to their front. They pass Stafford on either side of him. He wheels his horse around to exhort his men to hold their ground.

A bullet takes him in the armpit, severing his spine and lodging itself in his shoulder blade. Stafford keels forward at a grotesque angle and falls off his horse. The nearest soldiers quickly carry him off the field. His pain is evident; tears streak from his eyes, and he grimaces to keep himself from screaming as his litter is jolted and rattled over the uneven terrain.

Hearing the crescendo of firing to the north, Jubal Early commits his last reserve: the Virginians under John Pegram and Louisianans under Harry Hays. Hays, at the front of his column, comes across Stafford’s Louisianans as they fall back to their own trenches. Stafford himself is propped against a tree, delirious with pain. His exhortations to his men sing over the roar of musketry.

“Damn them,” Hays yells. “Damn them, and charge them!”

His Louisianans follow their commander into the maelstrom. They advance and fire, practicing the light infantry tactics of the French Zouaves. The Yankees to their front begin to retire, leaving a carpet of fallen men in blue in their wake. Hay’s Louisianans advance over a carpet of gray, their countrymen and neighbors.

More 6th Corps men are filing into line. Wright’s entire division is deployed in line of battle in the Wilderness. The brigade of General O’Neill fixes bayonets and advances into the blazing torrent of rifle fire to their front. Again, there is no order, no beauty, no elegance. It is butchery at close range and invisible foes. Men fire at sounds and smoke.

The carpet of the dead grows thicker. The Yankees advance. Through briars and brush and swarms of lead, they finally meet the foe face to face. Both lines erupt into chaotic firing. Thick white gun smoke envelopes the lines of Blue and Gray. Uniforms catch fire from discharges. Then comes the bayonet.

Cold steel slithers into flesh. Men howl like stuck animals. Others, terrified of being skewered like pigs, frantically reload and fire their muskets into the faces, mouths, and eyes of the foe at point-blank range. There is no room in this constricted mass of vegetation to use the musket as a club. Through the tyranny of the terrain, men in gray and blue must do that which they have until this moment found abhorrent: give the enemy the bayonet. It is one thing to shoot a man. It is quite another to club his head with the butt of a musket, to see blood, tooth, and bone spray out from the ruined face of a man once your brother. But to see the terror in the eyes of a man who was your countryman scarcely three years ago, to feel your blade rip through clothes and flesh, hear the foe’s unholy shrieks, wrestle him to the ground, resist him as he kicks and thrashes and as your blade exits out the back and pins him to the ground until at last, mercifully, he expires — it is a horror these men fear, and it is a horror they cannot now escape.

Some 20 minutes pass before it ends. Harry Hays, realizing that more and more Yankees are hitting his line, orders his Louisianans to fall back. They leave over 250 men in the woods north of Saunders Field. In 20 minutes, Harry Hays’s brigade is reduced to 500 effectives, the size of a large regiment. Some of the Union regiments that face the Louisianans in that hellish half-hour lose over a third of their number.

Both sides disengage and give each other space. Men begin frantically digging in. Artillery from both sides begins firing into the woods. Smoke from a dozen brushfires threatens to choke the living. In between the lines, wounded men moan, howl, pray, suffer, and die.

Next: “Armageddon in the Dark Forest, Part IV: Longest Day, Longest Night”

Dawn, May 5, 1864

Winfield Scott Hancock rises early and in good spirits. The smell of brewing coffee and pine glides over the sleepy camps of the Army of the Potomac. As the sun begins to climb in the eastern sky, his men prepare to resume their march south. To the north, Warren’s 5th Corps likewise prepares itself for another day of hard marching. In stark contrast to Hancock, Warren is unnerved when he is notified of Meade’s last-minute changes to the cavalry deployments for the day. Due to the complete lack of a Federal cavalry screen on Warren’s front, he compensates by ordering that a picket be deployed to the west to screen the 5th Corps. Having tangled with Robert E. Lee at the edges of the Wilderness during the previous fall campaign, Warren is keenly aware of the danger his corps is in, strung out along the road and completely blind to the movements of the enemy.

The division of General Charles Griffin is ordered to march west down the Orange Turnpike to screen the 5th Corps. He is to hold that position until the rest of the 5th has marched south, then he is to reform his men in march column and bring up the rear. By the time that happens, John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps will be fully across the Rapidan and will be close behind Griffin on the line of march.

At Army headquarters, Grant is hopeful that Burnside will make good time today and rejoin the army before noon. The rest of the Army of the Potomac’s command staff know to expect far less of Ambrose Burnside.

Not long after sunrise, Hancock’s 2nd Corps assembles in march column and continues south toward Todd’s Tavern. The men of the 2nd Corps are glad to leave the eerie ruin of the Chancellorsville battlefield behind. As they move south, they run into a column of Union horsemen, causing a momentary traffic jam. The situation is solved through Hancock’s personal intervention, as he directs the 2nd Corps to make a slight detour to the east and south. The road they travel is the same road used by Stonewall Jackson to crush the Union Army’s flank at Chancellorsville a year ago.

First Contact on the Orange Plank Road

At 5:00 A.M., James Wilson leads all but one of his cavalry regiments south from Parker’s Store toward Shady Grove Church and the Carpathian Road. Left behind at Parker’s Store, to keep a watch on the Orange Plank Road, is the 5th New York Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Hammond. At first light, Hammond sends Companies I and K farther west to scout the Orange Plank Road. Command of the assignment is given to Captain William Carey.

In column of fours, meaning four horsemen abreast, the two companies of cavalrymen trot down the Orange Plank Road. On either side of them are near-impassable woods. Carey cannot conceive of a worse place to maneuver large bodies of infantry, let alone the army’s cavalry and artillery, than a forest with sparse roads and visibility of barely a few yards.

The Union horsemen barely make it half a mile.

As he crests a low rise in the road, Carey halts his horse in stunned disbelief. Barely a hundred yards in front of him, in the half-darkness of the dawn, four dark shapes bolt into the woods and disappear into the morning fog. Horsemen.

In the silence that follows, Carey and his men strain to listen for sounds of the enemy. From the darkness comes the sound of clanking canteens, the shouted commands of officers, and snapping twigs and tree branches.

Infantry are marching down the Plank Road toward him.

It is the 47th North Carolina, of William Kirkland’s brigade, vanguard of A.P. Hill’s Third Corps. Having risen early, the Confederates are already marching east along the Turnpike and Plank Roads, ready to intercept the massive Union Army on its march south.

Carey quickly wheels his horsemen around and retires them up the road a few hundred paces. The Confederate horsemen emerge from the woods to shadow them. Each time Carey tries to wheel around again to confront them, the enemy withdraw back into the woods. The sound of the approaching infantry grows louder.

Carey does not know what unit is out there; nor does he know their strength or intentions aside from the fact they are marching toward Parker’s Store. He decides to test the enemy. Carey orders two soldiers, Privates Nick Darsy and Job Coddington, to empty their seven-shot Spencer carbines into the North Carolinians. The two men comply, and send a rapid volley toward the Confederates. The answer is a volley by files from the 47th.

The skirmish begins in earnest, with the scattered Union horsemen frantically firing their seven-shot repeaters, slowing the Confederate battle line. Return volleys smack into the dense trees on either side of the Plank Road. As the weight of fire begins to shift in favor of the more numerous Rebels, Yankee horsemen begin to fall. Company K, 5th New York Cavalry, suffers the first casualties of the Overland Campaign.

Carey remains mounted, a ghost in the eerie dawn fog, shouting orders and commands to his men. Slowly, they are being forced back. Kirkland brings up the second regiment in his column, the 44th North Carolina, and sends it into the woods to flank the New Yorkers.

Carey, while riding along his thin line and shouting orders to his troopers, comes across a recruit, new to the regiment and the Army, standing tall in the middle of the Plank Road, blazing away at the men in gray. He barks at the young man to get out of the open and pick his targets more carefully. The young boy, rattled by his first taste of combat, does not heed Carey’s command. He aims his repeater and fires again, pauses, and looks up at the mounted Captain.

“Oh, Captain!” he cries, voice brimming with youthful excitement. “I killed one!”

No sooner have the words left his mouth than a Confederate Minié ball slams into the side of his skull. The young lad dies without a sound. Carey must go on, to tend to the still living under his command. The body is left in the middle of the Plank Road.

Picket Duty on the Orange Turnpike

Charles Griffin is the perfect man for the job of screening the 5th Corps during the morning of May 5. A West Point grad and seasoned Indian-fighter, the mustached son of Ohio is a martinet and a brawler. Brazenly outspoken and profane to a fault, he has a peculiar habit of dismounting during battle to give instructions to Union artillerymen and even taking over the process of loading and firing the cannons.

Griffin marches his division west down the Turnpike for a mile before deploying it — with great difficulty — in line either side of the road. The 140th and 146th New York and the 1st Michigan, all under the command of Colonel David Jenkins, are pushed farther west to screen the division. The rest of Griffin’s men resume their morning routine of boiling coffee and waiting until it is time to march. None of the boys in blue expect a fight today.

Griffin’s division holds its position through the dawn and for an hour past sunrise. Word from Warren reaches him that it is time for Griffin to retire east, fall in line, and take up the rear of the 5th Corps’s column. The Indian-fighter from Ohio is all too glad to do so; picket duty is cavalrymen’s work.

From the position of Jenkins’s outpost, the Orange Turnpike cuts a slightly uphill swath through the dense Wilderness. The Union soldiers quickly grow tired of staring at the barren path, waiting for phantom Rebels to materialize out of the morning fog. When the orders come down to prepare to retire east, all are eager to leave the boredom of morning picket duty behind.

As an afterthought, a Union private glances west one last time toward the Turnpike. Doing a double-take, the private squints his eyes. Just above the trees, glistening in the morning sunlight, a faint brush of dust trickles into the sky. Calling out to his commanding officer, the private now sees dark blots on the road, blots that slowly materialize into horsemen.

The horsemen peel off to the right, revealing a column of men in gray uniforms, slouch hats, and shouldered rifles. The Union pickets stare in mute disbelief as a column of Confederate infantrymen emerges out of the fog like phantoms.

Major George Hopper, 1st Michigan, is finishing breakfast with his commanding officer, Colonel William Throop, when a captain scrambles over toward him. “Colonel, the enemy are coming, horse, infantry, and artillery!”

Colonel Throop springs into action at once, ordering a message sent to Griffin and telling the assembling 1st Michigan to deploy back into skirmish order in the woods south of the Turnpike. Jenkins, once notified, cancels his orders to march his three regiments back to join Griffin’s division and spreads the two New York regiments in skirmish order on the north side.

Colonel Throop, still standing in the middle of the Turnpike, can now see the approaching column of Confederates in the growing morning light. He expects a charge, but instead sees the gray-clad infantry halt and begin filing off to the left, out of sight. The column of infantry seems to be without end. Colonel Jenkins also witnesses this eerie sight: an endless stream of men filing off the road to the left and right, out of sight, disappearing into the thick, dark woods. He has never felt more alone in his life.

To deceive the enemy, Major Hopper orders six men to form a column of two abreast and march across the road, into the woods, then turn around and to the same in the opposite direction. Mimicking the motion of the Confederate column, Hopper’s ruse gives the appearance of a similar Union column of infantry filing off to the left and right of the Turnpike. It is a clever ruse, but one that cannot last forever.

A mile to the east, at Wilderness Tavern intersection, Warren is mounting his horse, ready to begin the day’s activities and guide his men south to the Chewning Farm and the Orange Plank Road. From his perspective, all is well.

His tranquility is shattered by the sound of a panting horse. At full gallop, Colonel Throop’s messenger comes into the General’s bivouac. Having informed General Griffin of the approaching enemy column, the man had been immediately ordered on to find the 5th Corps commander.

Shock ripples through Warren and his entourage. How could this be? Lee is supposed to be miles away, filing into the old earthworks at Mine Run. Warren assumes that Griffin’s jumpy pickets have been spooked by a small detachment, meant to slow the 5th Corps advance.

“Tell Griffin to get ready to attack at once!” barks the commander of the 5th Corps.

A note is then drafted for the eyes of George Meade and Ulysess Grant.

Unconfirmed reports of enemy movement along the Turnpike. Likely a diversion. No modifications to the movement of the V Corps necessary. Such demonstrations are to be expected and show the necessity for keeping well closed and face toward Mine Run and prepared to meet an attack at once.

Warren has not even had a chance to dispatch his note to Meade when another messenger sent by Griffin arrives, his horse also out of breath from riding at full gallop. It is a note from Griffin himself, a man whose judgment is beyond question.

Rebel infantry are on the Turnpike, forming into a line of battle. Behind them, the pickets can see large clouds of dust.

Warren includes this information as a postscript to his message to Meade and Grant, then orders Griffin to send out skirmishers to ascertain the strength of the enemy on the Turnpike.

Griffin assigns the duty to the brigade of General Joseph Bartlett. Companies I and K of 18th Massachusetts and two companies of the 83rd Pennsylvania are chosen for the task. The four companies begin picking their way forward through the Wilderness, struggling to maintain contact and cohesion. After a few minutes, they come to the edge of a quarter-mile clearing called Saunders Field.

They see a clearer picture of what faces them: on either side of the Turnpike, which bisects Saunders Field, lines of Rebel infantry file to the left and right, occupying a wooded ridge on the western edge of the field that offers a commanding view of the entire clearing. Eager to get closer and ascertain as much information on the enemy as possible, the four companies are ordered forward into Saunders Field.

The Yankee skirmishers run headfirst into the skirmish line of the 25th Virginia. Part of the brigade of John Jones, Edward Johnson’s division, Richard Ewell’s Second Corps, these veteran Confederate infantrymen spring their ambush flawlessly.

Shots ring out before both skirmish parties melt away toward their respective lines. Private Josiah Siple, Company E, 25th Virginia, aims his musket at the retreating form of Private Charles Wilson, Company I, 18th Massachusetts. He exhales, steadies himself, and squeezes the trigger. Charles Wilson does not feel the bullet punch through his chest; he is dead before he hits the hardscrabble earth. The Massachusetts farm boy, just weeks past his 18th birthday, becomes the first Union infantry fatality of the Battle of the Wilderness.

The Confederates begin to entrench along the ridge, the shouted commands of their officers to fell trees and prepare breastworks clearly audible to the Union soldiers in the eastern tree line. After the retiring Union skirmishers report to their commanders, Brigadier General Bartlett retires the 18th Mass and 83rd Pennsylvania into the tree line to await further orders.

On the Confederate side, George “Maryland” Steuart supervises the deployment of his brigade of Virginians and North Carolinians to the north of the Turnpike. The Confederates begin digging in farther into the tree line. Behind Steuart’s brigade, the elite shock troops of the Stonewall Brigade under General James Walker emerge from the dust cloud and turn north, behind Steuart’s brigade, along a small dirt track called the Culpeper Mine Road. The Confederate line of battle begins to extend into the forest like a finger uncurling.

Behind the Stonewall Brigade, Leroy Stafford’s Louisiana brigade grope their way through the dense woods and try to establish contact with Steuart and the Stonewall Brigade. Stafford’s Louisianans are the rear of Edward Johnson’s column. A few minutes behind the Louisianans comes the vanguard of Robert Rodes’s division, caked in the dust kicked up by their comrades to the front. Filing to the right of the Turnpike are the brigades of Cullen Battle and George Doles. The men file behind the line of Jones’s brigade as it continues to entrench. The Georgians of Doles’s brigade march farther into the woods before aligning in a roughly oblique line to Battle’s brigade, leaving a gap between themselves and Jones’s Virginians.

In the rear, the North Carolinians of Junius Daniel and Georgians of John B. Gordon halt in column formation as the Confederates pause to see how the situation develops.

Gouverneur Warren, having made his way to the front, is aghast at the strength of the enemy before him at Saunders Field. All along the ridgeline before him stretches a battle line, three ranks deep, with the angry mouths of cannon protruding from the trees on the far side. Dirt flies into the air as the Confederates begin entrenching. They have no intention of leaving. This is no diversionary force.

“They have discovered our movements!” he exclaims. He orders Charles Griffin to bring forward his entire division and put it back into a line of battle. A flurry of orders is issued to suspend the V Corps’s southward march toward the Chewning Farm and the Orange Plank Road. Warren dashes off another message to Meade, this time informing him of the gravity of the situation. The V Corps is alone out here, in front of an enemy of undetermined but considerable strength.

He must hold the 5th Corps together until Sedgwick can arrive to reinforce him. So far, there has been no sign of the 6th Corps.

On either side of the Turnpike, two of Griffin’s brigades under Roman Ayres and William Francis Bartlett form into a line of battle and pick their way through the tangled mass of the Wilderness until they reach the tree line bordering their side of Saunders Field. Their dander up from the earlier skirmish, the 18th Mass and 83rd Pennsylvania march into Saunders Field. In a line of battle two ranks deep, the two regiments march across the field and into a low swale at the field’s center, staring up at the ridge occupied by the Confederates. The slope on the Confederate side is so steep that it offers a degree of protection from gunfire from the crest of the ridge. Two volleys ring out from the Union line, the bullets sailing harmlessly into the trees above the Confederate position. Return fire kills a few Yankees, and the two regiments withdraw to friendly lines. The morning has so far been marked by little more than bluster and light skirmishing with few casualties for either side.

Meade Learns of Ewell’s Arrival

At 7:15 A.M., George Gordon Meade realizes that he is in for a fraught day. As has become the norm for every Union commander, the tranquil morning is interrupted by the sound of thundering hooves and the shouts of an excited courier.

“General Warren begs to report that Lee has infantry on the Turnpike, less than two miles from Wilderness Tavern!” exclaims the breathless courier.

Meade hastens his pace and arrives at Wilderness Tavern in a few minutes. A few minutes later, Warren arrives with an entourage of staff officers, barking orders and clearly trying to arrest the southward march of the 5th Corps and get it into a line of battle facing the enemy.

“Well, Guv, if there is to be any fighting this side of Mine Run, let us do it right off!” Meade proclaims. The entire day’s plan of march is canceled on the spot, on his own authority. He sends off one of his own couriers to find Hancock, still far to the south at Chancellorsville and dangerously isolated from the rest of the army. Sedgwick is ordered to hasten his march from Germanna Ford and link up with Warren. Burnside, still too far away to be of any use, is ordered to redouble his effort to join the army. Meade has little confidence that the 9th Corps and its whiskered commander will materialize before tomorrow.

Having arrested his army’s southward march, Meade dispatches another messenger to notify Grant of the situation. The Pennsylvanian believes that Lee is only trying to delay the Army of the Potomac’s march through the Wilderness, and will not give battle within its dark and twisted depths.

In halting the Army of the Potomac in the middle of its march through the Wilderness, Meade unknowingly does exactly what Lee hoped. Before the Virginian’s marching columns lies a confused, strung-out force that is not expecting the hammer blow he has in mind.

Grant approves of Meade’s plan at once, feeling a sense of hope that the rumors of cowardice and intransigence that had plagued the Army of the Potomac were just that.

“If any opportunity presents itself of pitching into a part of Lee’s army, do so without giving time for disposition,” he writes back.

To Grant’s annoyance, and then fury, Meade only pays attention to the first half of his orders. Meade, Warren, and Sedgwick both begin taking precious time to get their troops in disposition, even as Ewell’s men shake themselves into battle formation and begin to carve a fortress out of the hill overlooking Saunders Field.

Advance Toward Parker’s Store and the Brock Road

It has been two hours since the Rebel bullet tore through the young Union cavalryman’s brain in front of Captain Carey. Two hours of skirmishing, of falling back, of being flanked, of taking casualties. With Robert E. Lee and A.P. Hill breathing down his neck, Kirkland has deployed his entire North Carolina brigade in line, slowly and methodically pushing through the dense forest either side of the Turnpike. Swarms of Confederate skirmishers constantly threaten to envelop the spaced-out line of Companies I and K, 5th New York Cavalry. Only the steady leadership of Captain Carey and the profligate use of their repeaters have succeeded in slowing the enemy advance.

They have been pushed back to the Parker’s Store clearing. The entire 5th New York Cavalry has been thrown into the line in an attempt to stem the oncoming gray tide. A few miles up the Plank Road sits a gap between Hancock’s 2nd Corps, much of Sheridan’s cavalry, and the 5th, 6th, and 9th Corps strung out on the march. A.P. Hill’s Third Corps is posed to ram itself right between that gap after it has swatted the 5th New York Cavalry aside.

All that stands between the Confederates’ vital intersection with the Brock Road is the 5th New York. If the Confederates can capture this intersection, about three miles up the Orange Plank Road from Parker’s Store, then the Union army will be split in two.

This reality is plaguing Carey’s mind when the Rebel Yell erupts from the forest. Swarms of Minié balls strike out toward the 5th New York’s skirmish line. A line of battle in gray and butternut emerges from the wisps of smoke and fog, barreling toward the dismounted Yankees.

Seeing plainly that there is no more to be done, Colonel Hammond orders the 5th to mount and evacuate the Parker’s Store area. The emerging Rebels cut down several cavalrymen as they mount and flee across the clearing and into the woods. A scattered trail of dead men and horses marks the mile-long route of the battle since Captain Carey ran into Kirkland’s North Carolinians at dawn. Since the first shots were fired on the Orange Plank Road, the 5th has lost 50 men: 16 killed, 21 wounded, and 13 missing. A few score dead and wounded North Carolinians and an hour-long delay of Powell Hill’s march to the vital Brock Road crossroads are the tally exacted by Colonel Hammond’s troopers.

As the 5th New York disappears into the opposite forest, Kirkland’s brigade fully emerges from the woods into the Parker’s Store clearing. Having fought nonstop for nearly two hours, Kirkland halts his men and clears them off the Plank Road either side of Parker’s Store. Marching up the road in column of fours is the North Carolina brigade of John Cooke, making for the Widow Tapp farm, two miles up the Plank Road and one mile from the Brock Road intersection.

From the last wisps of the morning fog, leisurely striding their horses along the column of North Carolinians, three riders in gray emerge. Robert E. Lee, Ambrose Powell Hill, and Willian N. Pendleton are greeted with hearty cheers from the North Carolinians. Lee doffs his hat and urges the men to make haste. Having risen at 4 that morning, he is eager to drive Powell Hill’s corps forward into whatever awaits. Behind the three horsemen in gray, the divisions of Henry Heath and Cadmus Wilcox march four abreast. Ahead lies a small clearing and the home of Catherine Tapp, a widowed dirt farmer in her seventies. Beyond her small shack, a mile up the Plank Road, the Brock Road crosses the Orange Plank Road on its way south. Whoever controls that crossroads will control the unfolding engagement.

Meade Learns of Hill’s Whereabouts

Having focused his attention on the situation developing on the Turnpike and at Saunders Field, Meade does not give much thought to the Plank Road front. After all, Wilson’s cavalry division was supposed to be screening that section of the Wilderness; if anything were amiss, surely he would have heard about it.

Such is not to be. Wilson and his entire cavalry division, save for the 5th New York, have disappeared south and have been cut off from the rest of the Army by Hill’s eastward lunge. It is not until a message from General Samuel Crawford, commanding the vanguard division of the 5th Corps as it marches south, reaches Meade that the true gravity of the situation is revealed. Crawford, from his position that morning on the hill behind the Chewning Farm, witnesses and hears the skirmish of the 5th New York, and as the sun rises, can see long columns of gray-clad infantry marching east down the Plank Road to his front, obviously headed for the Brock Road intersection.

After Crawford’s message reaches him at 10:15 A.M., Meade finally realizes once again that he has underestimated the audacity of Robert E. Lee. Crawford’s report dismays one of the Army of the Potomac’s commanders and delights another. Ulysses Grant, realizing that his enemy is marching out from behind the Mine Run entrenchments to meet him, swells with elation. With a few adjustments and some luck, he will have his chance to meet Robert E. Lee on the field of battle and bring the Army of Northern Virginia to its destruction.

“Order Hancock back to this position,” he tells Meade. “And have Burnside and Sedgwick make haste.”

The General of the Armies, wearing a brand-new pair of gloves purchased for him by his wife, then sits down on a stump, grabs a piece of wood, and begins to whittle it with a knife. Around him, the headquarters is a flurry of frenzied activity as the staff attempts the arduous task of arresting the Army of the Potomac’s southward march and getting it into battle formation is underway.

Close Call at Widow Tapp’s Field

Lee chooses the small clearing that bears Widow Catherine Tapp’s name as his headquarters. As he dismounts, the sound of galloping hooves alerts him. Sandie Pendleton, staff officer in Ewell’s Second Corps, emerges out of the forest. He brings an update from Ewell: the Second Corps is digging in at Saunders Field and can see columns of Yankees marching south toward the Chewning Farm, which sits square in the middle of the mile-long gap between Ewell’s and Hill’s troops.

Lee reiterates his orders to the Second Corps’s commander: Do not bring on a general engagement until Longstreet has joined the army. As Pendleton gallops into the dark, twisted maw of the Wilderness to deliver the message, the sound of firing erupts to the north, in the direction of the Brock Road.

The 5th New York, their backs to the Brock Road, rallies and meets the advancing North Carolinians head on. These North Carolinians belong to John R. Cooke, who has replaced Kirkland’s tired infantry in their duel with the elusive New Yorkers.

“Heth must press them,” General Lee says, and a few minutes later: “We must have that crossroad.”

It is a picturesque scene: Traveller quietly nibbles on the grass some 20 feet away, while Lee himself rests under the shade of a large chestnut, conversing with A.P. Hill, who is bedecked in his famous red shirt, only worn when he expects to do battle. Walter H. Taylor and Edward Palmer, Lee and Hill’s respective aides de camp, chat about the morning’s deployments and unfolding events.

A few minutes past 11, Jeb Stuart emerges from the Wilderness, reporting that his cavalry has checked the advance of a mounted Union column on the Carpathian Road. Tom Rosser’s Laurel Brigade has encountered the wayward cavalry division of James Wilson and checked its move south.

Stuart’s aide de camp, Alexander Boteler, lies down under the shade of the chestnut tree and dozes off.

Something catches Lee’s eye. Abruptly, he turns away from Stuart, staring in disbelief at the northern edge of Widow Tapp’s field. There, emerging from the impenetrable green canopy, emerges a line of battle bedecked in Union blue and flying the Star-Spangled Banner. The battle line halts as it emerges from the clearing, both groups of men staring at each other in disbelief.

Lee calmly turns his back toward the Union troops, instructing Taylor to do the same, and to follow him slowly. He methodically strides toward Traveller, mounts his horse, and once the party is mounted, spurs Traveller into a gallop toward the Orange Plank Road.

Alexander Boteler is awakened from his doze to see Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, Walter H. Taylor, and other mounted men galloping past him, nearly running him down. Boteler turns his head to the northwest, and sees the Union battle line, bayonets fixed and advancing toward him. Searching for his horse, he realizes that it has wandered away from where he had been napping.

Hunched over, he runs toward it, ignoring the shouted commands to stop and surrender from the approaching Yankees. In a marvelous feat of athleticism, he jumps astride his horse and spurs it after the fleeing generals.

The equally startled Union infantry, Companies C and K of the 1st Pennsylvania Reserves, are unaware of the prize they have let slip through their fingers. Feeling exposed in the middle of Widow Tapp’s field, hearing gunfire behind them on the Orange Plank Road, and unable to see into the foreboding forest that rings Tapp’s farm on all sides, the Yankees pull back into the safety of the trees and return toward their position at the Chewning Farm.

The Race to the Brock Road

The 5th New York reels backward under the thunder blows of John Cooke’s North Carolinians. Their morning has been one continuous odyssey of retreat and repulse; a grinding retrograde up the Plank Road, past Parker’s Store and Widow Tapp’s field, scrambling through the thickets, swamps, and creeks of the green morass either side of the road. With blood and iron, the 5th New York has slowed the advance of Harry Heth’s division. Along the banks of the shallow Wilderness Run, the New Yorkers face the skirmish lines and regiments of the North Carolinians, making up for their lack of numbers with a heavy volume of fire from their repeating rifles. Every minute, the amount of lead pouring into the Federals seems to increase as Heth’s skirmishers creep forward and around the 5th’s skirmish line. The sound of thousands of lead projectiles snapping through leaves and trees reminds Colonel Hammond of a swarm of angry bees circling over his head.

At his headquarters, Ulysses Grant’s patience begins to fray. It has now been some three hours since contact with the enemy on the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road. Meade had promised a vigorous assault on the Turnpike immediately; yet Warren has not moved forward. Hancock is still some three miles to the south of the Brock Road intersection, while reports from Colonel Hammond place Powell Hill’s men only a mile from that junction.

Believing that he is at the precipice of the great decisive battle of the war, Grant begins to eschew the divided command structure he had set up with Meade in the preceding months. Bypassing the Army of the Potomac’s commander, Grant orders Warren and Sedgwick to attack along the Turnpike, and orders the division of George Getty, under Sedgwick’s command, to detach itself from the 6th Corps and to march south to the Brock Road intersection.

Getty’s lead units are about two miles from the intersection of the Plank Road and the Turnpike; the only organized Federal force that may be able to beat Powell Hill to the punch. Grant orders Getty to double-time it to the intersection. Once there, he is to hold it against any Confederate attack, and then — in conjunction with Hancock’s 2nd Corps moving up from Chancellorsville — attack Powell Hill and smash him.

George Getty is a competent soldier, cool under fire, and dutifully quick-marches his division south toward the sound of Colonel Hammond’s gunfight with Harry Heth. He immediately sees the danger to the Army if the Confederates gain the Brock Road. With haste, Getty and his staff officers spur their horses to a gallop and leave his division in a cloud of dust. They make their way to the intersection in just 30 minutes. The intersection feels quite insignificant: just one dirt road heading south, and another slightly wider dirt path crossing it from west to east.

Already, there is the acrid smell of smoke and fire, and the eyes tinge in discomfort as wayward wisps glide through the air.

Union cavalry, the last of the 5th New York, emerge from the forest like ghosts. Getty is appalled. “My God, you look strung out!” he exclaims to Colonel Hammond.

Hammond, thoroughly wrecked by the morning’s fight and the devastation of his command, simply replies, “Rebel infantry are advancing along the Plank Road. Good luck to you,” before leading what is left of the 5th New York north and away from the fight.

Getty sends an aide back up Brock Road. “The men must come at the double-quick,” he says. “Even if it kills them, they must come at the double-quick!”

“Gather ’round!” he orders the rest of his staff. “On me!”

Wafts of smoke drift out of the woods, obscuring the Brock Road and the Turnpike in eerie shades of red and orange. The headquarters flag flutters in a soft breeze, snapping to and fro.

Concealed by the solid wall of briars and pines, the North Carolinians come. The sound of men moving through the underbrush, the shouted commands of officers, the sharp snap of twigs under human feet, and the rattling of bayonets and canteens can be heard plain as day. A column of infantry in gray turns the corner of the Orange Plank Road and begins to cover the final hundred or so yards to the Brock Road.

Sharpshooters pick their way forward and take shots at the mounted party. A bullet snaps by Getty’s head. Then another clips the sleeve of an orderly, startling the man and his horse. A third tears out a piece of fabric of the headquarters flag. Getty’s hands begin to shake.

“Be still!” he orders. “We must hold this point at any risk; our men will be up soon.”

He wills his hands to stop shaking. He cannot show fear, not in front of these men, not now. No one moves. Man and horse defiantly stare down the advancing Southerners and remain unfazed as Southern lead tries to find them.

The advancing Rebel column is now 80 yards from the Brock Road. Getty can see an officer, sword in hand, striding confidently ahead of the column. The sword rises, tilts, and the advancing column moves into a line of battle. Skirmishers creep to the edge of the tree line, taking more shots at the mounted group of Union officers through the haze of smoke.

Another bullet pierces the headquarters flag, sending ribbons of thread fluttering to the ground.

Another strikes an orderly in the shoulder. The man doubles over and falls out of his saddle.

A third bullet rips the throat out of a horse and sends man and beast tumbling into the red dirt of the Brock Road.

Getty refuses to look north, staring straight ahead at the advancing North Carolinians. He grips the reins of his horse to steady it, feeling the air around him shudder as more lead flies his way. It is over. Time has run out. In moments, the Confederates will be swarming amongst the mounted Union men, and the Brock Road intersection secured for Robert E. Lee. And to top it all off, they’ll have bagged an enemy division commander…

The sound of wheezing soldiers and the clink of canteens against belt buckles breaks the contest of wills between George Getty and Harry Heth. Panting, Frank Wheaton’s Pennsylvanians sprint down from the north, rifles clutched close to chest, to form up in front of the mounted Union officers. Scarcely have the Pennsylvanians interposed themselves between Getty and the Confederates that the command “Halt! Front! Fire!” rings out.

The Pennsylvanians fire into the woods, enveloping Getty and his entourage in a cloud of thick gun smoke.

“Bayonets! Forward! March!”

The Pennsylvanians press forward, driving Heth’s skirmishers back. Lewis Grant’s Vermont Brigade files past the advancing Pennsylvanians and begins to form their own line of battle to the south. They too push forward into the tree line and clear out Confederate skirmishers. Men begin to hack down trees and stack them on the far side of the Brock Road, building protective breastworks from which to fire on any advancing Confederate force.

George Getty, through his will and luck alone, has prevented the Brock Road from falling into the hands of Robert E. Lee. The nearest fallen Confederate lies less than 30 yards from Getty’s horse. The sacrifice of the 5th New York Cavalry and the determination of a single Union commander have bought just enough time to close the gap between Hancock and the rest of the Army.

Skirmishing at Saunders Field

Private Phil Crites, Company B, 25th Virginia, peers over the edge of the breastworks to stare at the dead Yankees in the middle of Saunders Field. His eyes are drawn not to the corpses, but to the stuffed haversacks on top of them. Crites is hungry, so much so that his empty belly is driving him to madness.

For several hours, no Yankee has emerged from the far tree line, and the men of the Second Corps have continued to shake themselves into a line of battle extending into the tangled morass of tree and brush either side the Turnpike and Saunders Field. Officers warn their men not to venture into the no-man’s land of the field, for it is too dangerous to make such a dash under the waiting muzzles of Union skirmishers.

Crites does not heed the warning. He springs over the wall of timber and dirt and sprints down the slope, reaching the small swale where the dead Yankees lie. He drops to one knee, arms outstretched greedily for the haversack of the nearest dead Yankee.

A shot rings out. A bullet takes Crites in the thigh.

Sam Lynch, also Company B, recoils as Crites’s leg is kicked out from under him by an unseen force. The bullet strikes him so hard that it lifts the Virginian off his legs, which kick and flail as he crashes to the earth on his back. A cry of pain wafts from the thrashing Crites. Sam and three comrades volunteer to retrieve him.

“Sam,” pleads Private John King, his best friend. “Please, don’t go.”

Lynch does not heed King’s pleas. He and three others dash into the corn stubble field and spring down the hill. No shots ring out from the tree line of the far end. The small party reaches Crites, who is gasping with pain and who clutches his bloodied leg.

The four men grab the thrashing Crites by his arms and legs. They start to lug the mortally wounded man back up the slope. John King, watching intently from the cover of the breastworks, cannot take his eyes off the spectacle. He begins to hope the Yankees will allow his friends to get Crites off the field of battle.

A swarm of bullets take the party as they begin climbing the hill. In horror, John King watches as Sam Lynch drops Crites, grabbing his own stomach, and looses a shriek of such pain that King can scarcely believe a human being can utter it. The other three men drop Crites and run back up the slope, chased all the way by Yankee bullets.

John King cannot look away. He wants to jump over the breastworks and drag his wounded friend to safety but knows that it is impossible. The two men have been close friends since the beginning of their service in the army. They have shared the hardships of three years and many campaigns. The animalistic shrieks of the gutshot Lynch pierce John King’s ears. Helpless, he grips the edge of the breastworks until his knuckles turn white.

John puts his head on the log in front of him, closes his eyes, and begins to weep as the hellish chorus of Sam’s agony continues. He hears Sam plead for help, hears him call his name, hears Sam call out to his mother, and hears Sam beg for water, for mercy, and then for someone to shoot him.

John King will survive the Civil War. He will walk out of the hellish Elmira Prison Camp in June 1865, make his way home, and try to rebuild his shattered life. A few years after the war, King will marry and have children. He will live a long and somewhat prosperous life, dying in his nineties in 1920.

Yet, in his dreams and moments of quiet and solitude, he will be tormented by the sound of Sam Lynch’s screaming. When he closes his eyes, he will be taken back to this May morning, back to Saunders Field, where he will see Sam’s legs thrashing in the air, where he will see Sam clawing at his belly — as many gutshot men do — with such force that he rips the buttons of his jacket clean off and tears his undershirt to ribbons. He will hear the pitiful wailing of his dying friend and will remember the terror and helplessness he felt on that day.

No one saves Sam Lynch, and no one puts him out of his misery. The sight of his best friend helplessly writhing between the lines and the sound of his ugly death will stay with John King until the day he dies.

Warren’s Hopeless Task

Gouverneur Warren is having one of the worst mornings of his military career.

A morning that started disagreeably with the discovery of the Second Corps bearing down on him has turned frustrating, and now humiliating. It has been a nightmare to get his other divisions into a line of battle. James Wadsworth’s division struggles through the tangled Wilderness to connect with Griffin’s southern flank. Sam Crawford, ensconced on the hill at Chewning Farm, refuses to move and continues to report the presence of columns of Confederate infantry marching down the Plank Road to his front.

Warren would have liked to attack that morning, but with only Griffin’s division deployed correctly, it would be fruitless. Every few minutes, Griffin’s skirmishers can hear the low groan of falling trees as Ewell continues to carve a fortress on the high ground at Saunders Field.

Ulysses Grant loses his patience shortly after noon. He had expected, and hoped, that Meade would pitch into Lee immediately upon discovering the movement of Confederate troops along the Turnpike. Yet, news of the advance on the Plank Road and the near-sundering of Hancock’s 2nd Corps from the rest of the army seems to have unnerved George Meade.

Grant can feel the men around him slipping into a defensive mindset, letting their caution and, frankly, fear of Robert E. Lee overtake their sense. He will not suffer such caution in his presence.

In front of the headquarters staff at the Lacy House, Grant not-so-subtly questions the bravery of Meade’s army and orders him to launch an immediate assault on the Rebels in Saunders Field with whatever force can be brought on hand.

Meade, shocked and smarting, tries to point out the obvious: Warren is still getting the 5th Corps in line, and Sedgwick’s 6th Corps has not made it through the morass of pine and briars to form a line of battle or even connect with Griffin’s exposed northern flank.

Grant does not care.

After receiving curt orders to push Warren into the enemy, Meade departs to find the 5th Corps commander. When he delivers Grant’s order, Warren protests. He correctly points out that such a piecemeal assault, with only half his strength and no support from Sedgwick’s tardy command, would be doomed to fail.

Meade’s temper flares at Warren’s intransigence. He launches into a profanity-laced tirade at Warren, in front of the man’s staff and nearby soldiers. Finishing his reprimands with an order to attack now with whatever force is on hand, Meade ends the conversation by stating, “We are waiting for you.”

An embarrassed and equally smarting Warren overrules the objections of General Charles Griffin when he conveys the order to him. Against the better judgment of every man from the Army’s commander to the brigade commanders assigned to carry it out, the 5th Corps prepares to charge across Saunders Field.

The attack will be made by the divisions of Griffin and Wadsworth. Griffin will assault across Saunders Field, with Roman Ayres’s brigade advancing on the north side of the Orange Turnpike and William Bartlett’s brigade advancing on the south side. In the trees to their south, Wadsworth’s division will pick its way through the Wilderness until it finds Ewell’s trenches, somewhere out to the west.

Leaving their trenches, Ayres’s and Bartlett’s brigades pick and pry their way forward the hundred or so yards to the edge of the tree line on the eastern end of Saunders Field. By the time they arrive at the edge of the clearing, order in the ranks is gone. A storm of lead and iron spits out of the Confederate breastworks on the western side of the field. Rifle and cannon shot shred the air above the Union line as it emerges from the Wilderness. The men lie down on the ground and wait.

The fire deforests the canopy above their heads. Shells splinter trees and branches, causing a steady rain of sawdust and chippings to drift onto the backs of the prone men in blue. The suspense is almost unbearable. Every man looks across the quarter-mile field, takes note of the swale at its center, gazes up the slope on the swale’s far side, and at the crest of the hill now sheathed in smoke and afire from end to end with muzzle blasts.

Both Romeyn Ayres and Joe Bartlett do not want to do this. They do not want to make this assault. They stare across that agonizing expanse of corn stubble and briars, up that deceptively gentle slope a quarter-mile away, and know they are about to sacrifice the lives of their men for no gain. They view what is about to happen as insanity; Ayres cannot fathom why they are being forced to march into a killing ground. They will have no support on their right flank; Sedgwick is nowhere to be seen. There is no telling how thick those woods are with Rebels.

But they can do nothing to stop what is coming. The decision has been made; the order is given. It is not the first time in this conflict that officers in command of a body of men have balked at such an order, to charge a position strongly held by the enemy without support or expectation of success.

And it will not be the last.

At once, bugles sound, the melody carrying above the crashing din of shot and shell. The prone Yankees rise, shoulder arms, and dress their ranks. Then, at the behest of their commanders, three lines of men in blue step out of the shade of the trees, into the corn stubble field, and begin their quarter-mile march toward death.

Next: “Armageddon in the Dark Forest, Part III: The World Burns”

Thumbnail image: The rolling hills of Saunders Field are visible from the Wilderness Exhibit Shelter (National Park Service)

– John Esten Cooke

It begins with fire on the mountain. Before dawn on May 4, 1864, the Confederate signal station at Clark’s Mountain, overlooking the Rapidan River and the sprawling encampments of the Union Army of the Potomac on the river’s northern shore, lights a signal fire to warn Robert E. Lee that the summer campaign season is officially beginning. It has been nearly 11 months since the titanic clash at Gettysburg left the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia smarting from the loss of over 28,000 men. In the time between July 1863 and May 1864, the Army of Northern Virginia and Army of the Potomac have shadowboxed across a front spanning more than 90 square miles with no result. After a mutually frustrating summer and fall campaign, the two armies settle into a staring match along the winding banks of the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers. For a brief moment, an uneasy peace has returned to war-ravaged Virginia. The fire on Clark’s Mountain is a portend to an end of that peace and a resumption of hostilities between the Blue and the Gray.

The Gray

Gettysburg has wounded them. The privations of the previous winter have weakened them. These men have suffered much since the heady days of the previous June, when they marched triumphantly into Pennsylvania. Lee’s gaunt army is no longer the same force that carried the field at Manassas and Chancellorsville. On May 2, the Army of Northern Virginia’s returns list a strength of 66,000 men across the three infantry and one cavalry corps.

The Army has been enmeshed in a chronic food shortage since the autumn of 1863. Daily rations for each soldier amount to a handful of wheat bran and beef so poor in quality that it smells like glue. These men are no stranger to privation and hunger, not by the war’s fourth summer, but the winter they have endured has stretched them to their limits. The incompetency of Lucius Northrop, Commissary-General of the Confederacy (and personal friend of President Davis), the ever-strengthening Union blockade, and the ravages of war upon the fertile farmlands of the Southern states have all constricted the fledgling Confederacy’s ability to feed its own army.

Forced to spread his army out due to food shortages, Robert E. Lee has endured a year of personal hardship and frustration. When he is not facing the enemy on the field of battle, Lee often engages in a war of words with the Confederate government over the condition of his army and Richmond’s tendency to strip him of valuable troops to defend secondary theaters in Virginia and North Carolina. Much needed men are detached to defend the Virginia and Carolina coasts, weakening the already outnumbered Southern force that faces off against the Union host.

In addition to food shortages, the Army of Northern Virginia is faced with a shortage of its most important and necessary resource: manpower. By February 1864, Richmond tacitly admits that the South is bled dry and institutes mandatory conscription for all White males aged 17 to 50. While these conscription measures do yield some fresh recruits for the manpower-starved Confederate formations in Virginia and Georgia, the South will go into the war’s fourth summer outnumbered on all fronts by margins of 2 or 3 to 1.

Though the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia lack provisions, they remain steadfast in their faith in their commanding general. Robert E. Lee is the South’s finest military champion, and with his person lies the last remaining chance for the fledgling Confederacy’s desperate bid for independence. His soldiers are aware that their foe outnumbers them in men, guns, and horses, that the Yankees across the river are far better provisioned and want for neither food nor shot. Even still, the men in gray are confident that once battle is joined again, their commanding general will put the invader to rout once more. Their belief in General Lee — “the Old Man” — is absolute. He is almost like a father to them. They have charged all but Hell itself for him time and time again and are resolved to do so once the enemy crosses the Rapidan.

The Blue

Gettysburg has given them a taste of that which they have sought for so long: victory. The Army of the Potomac is a different force compared to its main antagonist; indeed, the Army of 1864 is a different force from that which triumphed in Pennsylvania last summer. It is a polyglot force of volunteers, conscripts, bounty hunters, immigrants fresh off the boat, abolitionist zealots, and a core of veteran soldiers who have bled for three summers to preserve their beloved Union.

Unlike their counterparts in gray, the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac do not suffer chronic want of food and forage. They are well fed, well provisioned, and well armed with modern weaponry: rifled cannon, rifled muskets, and an increasing prevalence of repeating rifles that outmatch any small arm carried into battle by their foes.

As has happened several times, the Army begins its march under the watchful gaze of new leadership. George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, still commands the Army, but joining him is a new presence, one whose name had previously only been known to the soldiers through the written word of the newspaperman.

Fresh off his promotion to Lieutenant General by President Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, conqueror of Vicksburg and hero of Shiloh and Chattanooga, arrives in Washington in February to assume command of all Union armies in the field. Having correctly deduced that the 90 miles between D.C. and Richmond remain the war’s critical battlefront, he elects to join Meade and the Army of the Potomac for the coming summer campaign. Grant intends to allow Meade to exercise command of his army and wishes merely to observe the coming fight if possible. He has no desire for the complex political machinations that have come to define the Army of the Potomac’s command structure. As General of the Armies, he must exercise authority over troops from Virginia to Louisiana, and his plan for 1864 is to do just that.

Having learned from the setbacks suffered in Georgia in 1863, Grant resolves to bring the North’s overwhelming advantage in manpower to bear against the South. All along the frontier between North and South, the Union armies will advance into the heart of the Confederacy at once, denying the ability of the South to use interior lines to shift troops from quiet theaters to more threatened ones as happened at Chickamauga in September 1863. From Louisiana to Atlanta, the Shenandoah Valley to the Virginia coast, massive Federal armies prepare to descend upon the remaining vestiges of Confederate territory. The South will have no chance to concentrate her scarce manpower or mobilize an effective defense. As the coup de grâce, Meade and Grant will seek out Robert E. Lee and bring him to battle in Northern Virginia. With luck, the rebellion will be crushed in one swift stroke, and the most devastating war on the North American continent finally brought to a close.

Grant’s Plan

Resolved to bring Robert E. Lee to battle and destroy him, Grant and Meade spend the spring months poring over maps of Northern Virginia and pondering the best route by which to resume the march on Richmond. It is Meade who first suggests a variation of a previous Union campaign plan: to cross the Rapidan north of the town of Fredericksburg and march south to get between Lee and Richmond. Once in position, the Army of Northern Virginia will have no choice but to engage the Army of the Potomac on ground of Meade’s choosing. Given a second chance to fight a Gettysburg-style engagement, Meade is certain of his army’s chances of success.

At first, Grant is hesitant. Meade’s plan is not new or original; it is almost the exact same plan proposed and executed by the disgraced Joseph Hooker, who met with disaster and misfortune when his attempt to cross the Rapidan culminated in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville. Nevertheless, Meade is persistent, and wins Grant over to his strategy by listing out the advantages to such a move.

First, by moving “to Lee’s right,” the Army of the Potomac will have the Rappahannock River to its back, allowing for easy riverine transport of supplies and ammunition as they become needed. Second, such a maneuver allows the Union army to cover Washington, D.C., even as it moves farther south. Finally, a march down eastern Virginia allows for the Army to take a direct shot at Richmond and tear the heart out of the Confederacy. One major obstacle haunts the Army of the Potomac’s commander as he plans his move under Grant’s watchful eye.

The Wilderness of Spotsylvania is a near-impregnable tract of second-growth forest and dense shrubbery. The Union army has twice met with frustration within its depths: it was from out of that dark forest that Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates emerged liked ghosts to crush the flank of the Union army at Chancellorsville, and it was within its depths that Meade and Lee sought battle with futility during the Mine Run campaign of the previous autumn. The forest is so dense that large maneuvering formations of men are limited to the use of the few roads that crisscross its primordial depths. The only landmarks of value are the odd farmer’s field or crossroads buildings — stores, churches, etc. — that give a traveler any point of reference by which to orient himself. Within the depths of the Wilderness, the advantage of the Union army’s rifled artillery and superior numbers will be naught.

The success of Grant’s flanking maneuver will hinge on the ability of the Army of the Potomac to march south through the dense forest before Robert E. Lee can march east and confront them. Meade’s worst fear is to have his troops caught on the march in the middle of the Wilderness; unable to maneuver and support one another, the Union corps risk being defeated in detail. With the presidential election a mere six months away, any setback for the North risks the reelection chances of Abraham Lincoln and the ascension of a peace candidate who will grant the South’s desire for independence in order to stop the bloodshed.

Marching south through the Wilderness as quickly as possible, the Union troops will pivot west once they reach the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road, overrun the formidable trenches at Mine Run before the enemy can occupy them, and slam into the still marshalling Confederates in open country to the west of the Wilderness. By outflanking the Southern defensive lines and flushing the Confederates out of the Wilderness and Mine Run fortifications, the destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia will be concluded with minimal Federal loss. It is a good plan, an ambitious plan, and one that suits the aggressive mind of General Ulysses Grant. But no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Lee’s Plan

Around noon on May 2, Robert E. Lee and the corps and division commanders of the Second and Third Corps1 ascend Clark’s Mountain. From the commanding view of the mountain’s summit, they can clearly see the Army of the Potomac stirring in its encampments. After sweeping the vista before him with his binoculars, he predicts that Grant “will cross the Rapidan, perhaps at Germanna and Ely’s Ford.” He instructs his subordinates to prepare their commands for a march into the Wilderness.

The Army of the Potomac begins its march 36 hours later. By sunrise, the lookouts on Clark’s Mountain can see the massive blue columns snaking their way across the Rapidan and disappearing into the distant green mass of the Wilderness. The Confederate scouts immediately light the signal fire to warn their comrades of what is coming. This flicker of orange light is noticed by Union signal troops across the Rapidan, and Meade and Grant are soon alerted that their maneuver has been detected.

It begins with fire on the Mountain.

Advance to Contact

The first shots of what will become known as the Overland Campaign are fired from a group of soldiers belonging to the 1st North Carolina cavalry. The Confederates’ targets are the vanguard of General James Wilson’s cavalry division, in the midst of crossing Germanna Ford. They are the first wave of the massive Union infantry column currently sorting itself into a march formation that will stretch for miles.

The initial volley from the North Carolinians provokes a furious counterattack. Union horsemen draw their sabers and charge. The North Carolinians, realizing that what they are facing is no mere raid but something far larger, mount their horses and scurry into the darkness.

It is 3 in the morning on May 4.

Wilson spurs his column of horsemen south at a rapid pace. An engineer by training, brought east by General Grant, he is a natural combat commander and has the complete trust of the commanding General as well as Phil Sheridan, commander of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry. Wilson’s objective for May 4 is to screen the flank of Warren and Sedgwick’s columns as they cross Germanna Ford into the Wilderness, and to reach and secure Wilderness Tavern, a small outpost at the crossroad of the Germanna Plank Road and the Orange Turnpike.

At the same time that Wilson’s troopers are driving away the menacing North Carolinians, the first elements of Hancock’s troops cross the Rapidan River at Ely’s Ford and make for the silent, ruined edifice of Chancellorsville. His corps is screened by the cavalry division of General David Gregg.

The Federal march has been ongoing since midnight. The idea is to get as much of a head start on Lee as possible, to minimize the time that the Army of the Potomac will be vulnerable as it marches through the Wilderness. Under the cover of darkness, Federal engineers throw up massive pontoon bridges across the river to speed the rate of advance. By the time the sun claws its way into the eastern sky, the Union army is already in the midst of its crossing. The sight greeting the Confederate lookouts on Clark’s Mountain is breathtaking: blue columns snaking their way north and south, as far as the eye can see. The heads of the columns — Warren’s vanguard — are snaking toward the distant green tangle of the Wilderness.

Signal troops on the north side of the Rapidan spot the Confederate signal fires at 9:30 A.M. Grant and Meade are quickly notified. Meade, anxious with anticipation, has barely slept and is agitating for his army to cross the Rapidan as soon as possible. The success of the Union offensive depends on their ability to pass through the Wilderness into open country to the south.

Union progress on the morning of May 4 is good. Winfield Hancock’s 2nd Corps, which crosses the Rapidan River farther east at Ely’s Ford, reaches the burnt-out ruins of Chancellorsville at 9:50 A.M. — his objective for the first day of Operation Wilderness. The sight that greets the arriving Union soldiers is grim; everywhere amongst the charred ruins of the once-grand house and strewn about the crossroads and clearing are the skeletal remains of man and beast. Veteran soldiers, some of whom fought on this very ground, wonder if this or that skull is the remains of a comrade hastily buried during the previous May. The new recruits look into the empty eye sockets of the slain and wonder if they too will share the same fate.

Lee Marches East

The signal fire on Clark’s Mountain ignites a frenzy of activity in the Southern camps. The Army of Northern Virginia has been stirring from its winter slumber ever since the lookouts on Clark’s Mountain detected the signs of the Army of the Potomac’s mobilization on May 2. The artillery limbers, hitching horses to cannons and caissons. Fitz Lee’s cavalry division, spread out all along the Rapidan from Germanna Ford down to Fredericksburg, provides Robert E. Lee with a steady stream of information as to the progress of the Union army as it moves south into the Wilderness and Chancellorsville areas. The intrepid gray horsemen avoid battle with their blue counterparts in Wilson’s division as it pushes west down the Orange Plank Road.

The news that the enemy army is on the march finally prompts Lee to decide as to how he will meet Ulysses S. Grant in battle. Out of the question is the possibility of disengaging and moving farther south; as Lee sees it, doing so will delay the inevitable confrontation and move the front ever closer to Richmond. The only option is to march east and meet the enemy in battle. Lee is still unsure of how exactly such a meeting will develop. What he cannot do is surrender the initiative to the larger Federal army as it moves on his flank.

The soldiers of the Second and Third Corps are ordered to prepare three days’ rations and file into march column along the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Roads. Longstreet’s corps, farther south near Gordonsville, is ordered to march to rejoin the rest of the army with all possible haste. For the two Confederate formations closest to the enemy — Ewell’s and Hill’s troops — the march toward the Mine Run earthworks begins at 11:00 A.M. Riding at the head of Hill’s column on the Orange Plank Road, Lee sets a brisk pace for the Third Corps. There is no time to lose.

“Enemy has struck his tents,” reads a telegraph sent to Richmond. “Infantry, artillery, and cavalry moving toward Germanna and Ely’s Fords. This army in motion toward Mine Run. Can Pickett’s division move toward Spotsylvania Court House?”

No reinforcements can be sent yet, and Lee must pull his army — scattered by necessity — together quickly and do so while on the march. His cavalry, in a welcome reversal from its dismal performance in Pennsylvania, sends constant reports on May 4 as they skirmish with Union horsemen and glimpse Federal infantry pushing into the Wilderness.

Grant Crosses the Rapidan

Ulysses Grant, astride Cincinnati, his war horse, crosses Germanna Ford shortly before noon, to the cheers of marching soldiers who holler and wave their hats as he passes. Accompanying him is an entourage of newspapermen, staff officers, and Congressman Elihu Washburn — Grant’s political mentor who sends a steady stream of updates to Washington.

Setting up his headquarters with Meade on the south bank of the river, Grant notices the brand-new headquarters flag of General Meade — a golden eagle in a silver wreath on a lavender backdrop. Smoking a cigar, a bemused Grant asks Meade, “What’s this? Is Imperial Caesar anywhere about here?”

The two men confer quietly as John Sedgwick’s 6th Corps begins to file past, following Warren’s 5th Corps into the Wilderness. A steady stream of couriers from Hancock — five miles away at Ely’s Ford — keep Grant and Meade apprised as to the progress of the 2nd Corps.

For both wings of the Army of the Potomac, the march is grueling. Having started at midnight, some of the soldiers have marched 25 miles by noon. Discarded overcoats and blankets line the road as desperate soldiers try to lighten their loads. Following artillery and supply units happily help themselves to the discarded contents of the infantry. As the day progresses, more and more knapsacks are slung from the barrels of Union cannon.

Grant and Meade anxiously await news from the signal troops watching Clark’s Mountain and the Confederate troops manning the Rapidan line. All day, a flurry of signals from Clark’s Mountain are decoded. About the same time as Grant crosses the Rapidan to join with Meade, a decoded message to Ewell is brought before them.

We are moving.

Meade, having fought Robert E. Lee as a commanding general for the better part of the year, knows what is coming. He advises Grant that the decoded message means that Lee is coming to meet them and will not sit passively behind his fortifications along the Rapidan. For not the first time — and to his growing annoyance — Grant is reminded that Robert E. Lee is not Braxton Bragg or John Pemberton or Joe Johnston. He is not one to surrender the initiative, and he never backs down from a fight.

“This is just the information I wanted,” Grant remarks upon learning of the decrypted message. “It shows Lee is pushing out to meet us.”

The Army of the Potomac is making perfect time. Hancock and Warren have crossed by midmorning and are reaching their first days’ objectives. Union cavalry under Generals Wilson and Gregg have pushed deep into the Wilderness and have kept their Confederate counterparts from interfering with the Army’s movements. The 2nd, 5th, and 6th Corps have made excellent time and reached their first day objectives without incident or delay. As the Federal commanders see it, the news that Lee is marching to meet them does not require the alteration of Operation Wilderness. They have stolen the march on Lee and now know precisely where the Confederate commander is headed.

Cavalry Maneuvers

The afternoon of May 4 is dominated by the cavalry maneuvers of James Wilson’s Union cavalry division, tasked with screening Hancock’s 2nd Corps and pushing west to find the Army of Northern Virginia.

By morning, advance elements of the Union cavalry have pushed west down the Orange Plank Road to a small collection of wooden buildings called Parker’s Store. Upon reaching the store, Wilson turns his column south, leaving behind a small detachment of the 5th New York Cavalry to screen the Orange Plank Road. Wilson, a former infantry commander newly assigned to the cavalry, is unsure of himself and unfamiliar with the requirements of commanding a formation of mounted horse. Whether by fate or a lack of judgment, he leaves one regiment to guard the road by which A.P. Hill’s corps is approaching to slam into the march columns of the Army of the Potomac.

Evening of May 4

As the sun begins to settle below the horizon, the soldiers of Ewell’s and Hill’s corps make camp in the vicinity of the Mine Run entrenchments. Erecting his headquarters tent near the home of Mrs. Rhodes in New Verdiersville, Lee takes stock of the situation facing him and of late-evening intelligence brough to him by Jeb Stuart. As Wilson and Gregg’s cavalry screens push west during the afternoon, the intelligence from Lee’s cavalry begins to dry up as the Confederate horsemen are pushed east toward their own lines.

All that is certain by evening of May 4 is that Union cavalry is moving west and south in force, and that Union infantry continues to move south into the Wilderness. What Lee must know is the direction of march of the infantry: Are they moving south to Richmond, southeast to Fredericksburg, or west to confront him?

Resolved not to wait idly while his opponent plans his destruction, Lee resolves on the evening of May 4 to continue the march east on the morning of May 5. As he sees it, the initiative hangs in the balance, and the chance to strike at the Army of the Potomac while it is out of position is an opportunity too great to pass up. It is a massive risk.

Lee will be engaging the Army of the Potomac, whose exact strength and dispositions he does not know, with fewer than 35,000 men in five divisions. Longstreet is still not up with the army, and one of Hill’s divisions under Richard Anderson is still watching the Rapidan line in case Grant tries to force a crossing of the river in Lee’s rear. But, knowing that the formidable trenches of Mine Run offer a good position to fall back on, Lee assures himself that the risk of seeking battle on the 5th is worth the reward. If he is lucky, he will pin the Army of the Potomac in the Wilderness and neutralize its numbers and artillery. Then, with the Union troops stuck and disorganized in the thick terrain, he will unleash Longstreet’s veterans and annihilate the Army of the Potomac under the canopy of this dark forest.

Here, then, is a chance to reenact Stonewall Jackson’s flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville, nearly a year to the date of the event. Here lies the opportunity long denied him: to catch his foe in a position where he may be decisively defeated and send the invader back across the river. The gamble is enormous; Lee will have to prevent his army’s destruction in detail on the morrow while his reinforcements march to the sound of the guns. Should he fail, then the Army of Northern Virginia — the South’s last, best hope of independence — will face the destruction he wishes to inflict on Ulysses S. Grant.

But Lee knows that the stakes demand nothing less. Every day, he can feel his beloved Virginia grow weaker as she is ravaged by endless war. Every day, he can see the fledgling Confederacy crumble against the superior economic and industrial might of the North. Once it was hoped that the Old World would ride to the rescue of the fledgling Confederate nation. That hope died a slow death, first at Sharpsburg, then with Jackson, and finally amidst the roar of Meade’s cannon on July 3 at Gettysburg’s stone wall. The last hope left, the only hope, is to outlast the enemy, to inflict such a blow upon the Union’s military might that the Northern populace abandons the war and the Radical Republicans in the White House and Congress are swept from power in the upcoming November election. Everything hinges on what will transpire in Virginia over the coming days.

Shortly after dark, Grant and Meade huddle around a campfire and go over the day’s events. A faulty report places Jeb Stuart’s cavalry near Fredericksburg; fearing for the safety of his lumbering supply trains, Meade orders Sheridan to peel off most of the Union cavalry and assign it to guard the supply trains. Sheridan bristles but complies.

By letting his paranoia of Jeb Stuart get the better of him, Meade unknowingly exposes his right flank to Robert E. Lee by leaving only Wilson’s cavalry division — the smallest division in Sheridan’s command — to cover the entire frontage of the Army of the Potomac. Not only does Wilson lack the numbers to do so, but he is also dangerously out of position and out of his depth in executing such a task. The ambitious march routes for the infantry are suspended. Instead of continuing south and then swinging west, the Army of the Potomac will establish itself on a convex line from Germanna Ford to Shady Grove Church. Warren is to move to Parker’s Store and connect with Hancock, while Sedgwick is to take up Warren’s old position astride the Orange Turnpike. Burnside, late as always, is to force-march the 9th Corps to rejoin the Army of the Potomac.

If Burnside were to join the army, Grant and Meade’s numbers would swell to over 120,000 men, but at the cost of surrendering the better part of a day of maneuvering and the initiative.

All day, the crowd of newspapermen have pestered Grant with questions. Sylvanus Cadwallader of the Chicago Times asks perhaps the most famous question:

“General Grant, about how long do you expect it will take you to get to Richmond?”

“I will agree to be there in three to four days,” Grant replies with a smile, “provided if General Lee becomes a party to the agreement. But if he objects, the trip will undoubtedly be prolonged.”

Meade’s paranoia aside, the mood at army headquarters is confident on the night of May 4. Within a day, Grant will have his entire army to throw against Lee, who according to reports is merely filing into the old position at Mine Run. Grant stays awake until midnight, reviewing dispositions with Meade, before he retires to his tent to catch a few hours of sleep.

To the south, a lone infantryman of the 6th Corps sees the faint flicker of campfires to the west and the unmistakable dark pall of smoke climbing above the canopy of the Wilderness. He alerts his superior officer, who brushes him off by insisting that it is just Federal cavalry. The vigilant soldier is sternly warned not to discharge his weapon or cause any undue panic, and that anyone out to the west doubtlessly wears Union blue.

It is actually the infantry of Dick Ewell’s Second Corps, settling around their campfires for supper and to get a few hours of sleep. The veterans in gray are eager for the fight that is expected tomorrow. As Grant predicted, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia do indeed “object to the arrangement,” and tomorrow they intend to make their objections known.

Next: “Armageddon in the Dark Forest, Part II: Nowhere to Run”

Thumbnail image: Kurz & Allison, Battle of the Wilderness; Desperate Fight on the Orange C.H. Plank Road, Near Todd’s Tavern, c. 1887

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Recently, an article was published by a particular individual that got some attention for, I believe, its naïve adherence to what some may consider outdated thinking. Most people who like the sentiment in the article don’t speak like the author does anymore. However, it crudely and sloppily said the quiet part out loud. The author in question goes by the name “My Political Two Cents” and, according to his Substack, is a 15-year-old Indian (dot, not feather) who lives in Australia. I do not recommend seeking out his content or engaging directly with the particular article in question, titled “Cultural Homogenisation Is a Massive Force for Good.” It isn’t good or insightful or a good use of your attention, but it does serve an unintended purpose which I will be addressing here.

Others have already done a point-by-point refutation of Mr. Cents’s article. I will still give a short overview. The article is a synthesis of adolescent, half-baked libertarian clichés and 1990s-era Boomer Liberalism. The author combines these two ostensibly separate frameworks into a three-part defense of globalized Liberalism. Basically, his thesis is that Liberalism is good because voluntary consumption of corporate slop (e.g., McDonald’s) helps everyone on Earth relate to each other, which can help decrease racism and xenophobia, promote basic human rights and democracy, and eventually lead to utopian world peace. Have you ever seen the infamous clip of Anthony Bourdain in a German restaurant talking about how eternal race-mixing helps eradicate the evils of racism and Nazis? Imagine a teenage Vivek Ramaswamy giving a 10th grade presentation of the same sentiment, and you will know the spirit of the piece.

By the way, I don’t blame this author for having an affinity for Liberalism. Global Liberalism allowed his parents to move from the Subcontinent to a nice place like Australia. Liberalism gave him access to you, man of the Anglosphere, linguistically, culturally, financially, physically, and spiritually. It is only natural for such a person to appreciate the vehicle that gave him access to a superior land and race and culture. His attempt to invoke the spells of Liberalism as a means to allow more of his kinsmen to access you is par for the course with his race.

What is worth your time, and your soul, is a careful reflection of what the idols of the age are. This is what every man can do from first principles in response to the wickedness of the age. Mr. Cents is expressing his positive belief in the state religion of Liberalism. He frames the state religion as a good that results in what he thinks are beneficial results for everyone involved. He is what the Liberal wants the savage convert to be: condescending of the base Culture and Traditions while expressing fake gratitude for consumer globalism.

You know better. You know that GDP growth, as it currently exists, is fueled in part by hiring retarded subcontinentals to drive freight trucks for slave wages. Such truck drivers proceed to murder your kinsmen on the roads without an ounce of remorse, if they are even capable of remorse in the first place.

You know that global supply chains are barely maintained and poorly operated by subcontinental Merchant Mariners like the crew of the MV Dali, a Singaporean container ship that destroyed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland in 2024.

You know that new homes are more expensive than ever and are of garbage quality because they are built by slave Hispanics who don’t care about delivering you a quality finished product.

You know that Internet services like YouTube and Twitter are nearly unusable because of massive quantities of AI slop peddled by subcontinentals in leadership positions at American tech companies.

You know that the access to you, which Mr. Cents desires and loves, is the exact mechanism that gave subcontinental monsters access to 250,000 White women in the UK, and that number is just what was able to be counted by Rupert Lowe. You know that the true number is likely much higher.

None of these atrocities against you, or the many other examples I could give, exist as isolated events. All are facilitated in service to the state religion of Liberalism. There is a reason that Christ our Lord through the Apostle Paul says that the love of money is the root of all evil. Such evil is among you in your libraries, your grocery stores, your schools, your streets. What is there to be done? Why am I taking the time to write this piece in response to Liberal trash? Because this conflict is ultimately religious, and the only chance we have against the religion of Liberalism is a positive hope in the faith and tradition given to us through Christ.

I have been meditating on King Josiah in recent months. For those of you who are not familiar, Josiah was king in the southern kingdom of Judah after Judah and Israel split into two kingdoms. He appears near the end of the kingdom of Judah and is the last righteous king before the sack of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar. I highly recommend brushing up on King Josiah, both in the end of 2 Kings and in the end of 2 Chronicles in your Bible. There is quite a lot of wisdom to glean from Josiah, but I want to focus on his early years. Josiah is the grandson of Manasseh, the most wicked king of Judah. He comes to the throne at the age of 8. When he is 16 years old, he begins to seek the God of his father David. Having sought God on his own for four years, at the age of 20, he begins to purge his kingdom of idols, images, Asherim, and the like.

Having done what he could on his own, in the 18th year of his reign at the age of 26, Josiah receives a new revelation. A new revelation for him, to be precise, but a revelation that was much older than himself. After the initial round of physical idol purges in Judah, Josiah sets himself to rebuilding the Temple that had fallen into disrepair. While cleaning out the Temple, his priest finds a copy of the Law of Moses that had been lost and forgotten in the Temple. Upon hearing the Word for the first time in his life, Josiah publicly makes a covenant to God before the whole country to follow the Law of Moses. Josiah leads his people in doing the same. He proceeds to throw the greatest Passover feast, a symbol of the coming Christ, in hundreds of years. Afterwards, Josiah does a second, more intense round of purges. Not just of physical images, but of the mediums, spiritists, teraphim, deities, pagan priests, cult prostitutes, and ALL other abominations to God that escaped the first purge. He goes so far as to dig up the bones of enemies who had died and burn them on the pagan, false altars in an act of intentional defilement before slaughtering the living evil priests and burning them on the altars. As they had passed many a child through the fires, they too were passed through the fires.

There is no sense of so-called freedom of religion with Josiah. There are no limp-wristed appeals to free will or choice. There is no separation of church and state. There is no respect of other religions or faiths. There is no tolerance of evil in his domain. All such things are idols to the god of Liberalism. Josiah makes an intentional and specific covenant, and his nation will follow his lead. Josiah wields his God-given authority as king to use force against the abominations to God and does not allow any trace of his grandfather’s wickedness to remain. As is stated in the 23rd chapter of 2 Kings, verse 25:

Before him there was no king like him who turned to the Lord with all his heart, all his soul, and all his might, in conformity to all the Law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him.

At the start of his reign, before he receives the Word that had been lost in the Temple, Josiah does a decent job on his own through his own will. God was certainly helping him before the revelation, but Josiah realizes that his work is incomplete after reading the Word and fully devoting himself and his people to God. The same can be true in our own lives. You might be a capable man of good stock, but you are not enough on your own. Josiah’s best work is done only after he reads the Word and makes a covenant with God. Only then does he act in a manner that the Holy Spirit describes as unlike any king before or after him. We ought to follow the example of Josiah. Having done what we can on our own through our own strength, we are called to hear the Word and be invigorated through supernatural wisdom and strength to take the next steps. Read your Bible, and listen to the Word that God has revealed to you. This is the key to standing against the wickedness of the Liberal age. The young priest from the Subcontinent has his religion of Liberalism. His kinsmen coming after him have their demons from the pits of Hell as their gods. You have Christ, and you need to be stronger in your faith than they are in theirs.

Like Josiah, the generation of our grandfathers is a notoriously evil generation. Like Josiah, we are in a nation that has a long history of following false gods. Josiah’s reign is about 300 years after the reign of King David. That whole time, with few exceptions, Judah had been in a near-constant downward movement away from God. Our nation is similar. While the wickedness of our grandfathers’ generation was particularly bad, America has been progressing through Liberalism, a product of the Enlightenment, for its entire history. Some eras are better than others, but the general trend is certainly there.

There is another element to the reign of Josiah that we need to understand. Josiah knows that the judgment is coming no matter what. The evil of his grandfather Manasseh and many of the other kings further back angered God so much that God goes so far to tell Josiah: “My wrath burns against this place, and it shall not be quenched.” This is before he enacted the second round of major reforms. Knowing that God’s wrath is coming, Josiah still follows God’s commandments. We today, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, have no such guarantee of immediate judgment in this life. We have the blessing and freedom in Christ to love one another. “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”

What an amazing joy! What a beautiful light in the present darkness! Our immediate doom is not revealed to us. All the more reason to remain hopeful. Freedom in Christ requires love of friends, love of one another, and the privilege of following God’s Word. In Christ, we don’t have to listen to the subcontinental priests of Liberalism, and we don’t have to follow the wickedness of past generations who followed that evil religion. Only through Christ can we, like Josiah, fully be prepared to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. What is the answer to the darkness that wants access to you and yours? Read your Bible, love your friends, and don’t bow to the Liberalism of the age.

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It would be a vast understatement merely to say that the world of J.R.R. Tolkien is known and respected by almost everyone on the Right. More than 100 years after Professor Tolkien began to lay the groundwork for his expansive legendarium, his body of work remains globally acclaimed for its tremendous breadth of vision, its deep roots in the Western mythos, and the transcendent Christian morality that suffuses its every story. As such, Tolkien’s fictional world of Arda has frequently served as both a place of refuge and an enduring source of inspiration for so many of us against the darkening skies of the modern world.

As millions of fans have come to know, Tolkien’s stories often diagnose the problems of modernity with surprising accuracy and candor, but also manage to resist the black pill that many of his would-be successors have so eagerly imbibed. A devout Catholic, Tolkien directly witnessed the horrors of the Great War as a young man, and remarkably came through them without flinching in his faith or convictions. Resultantly, his characters are deeply human in their portrayals, making so many of them both instructive and highly aspirational.

Tolkien’s fictional universe formally launched in 1937, with his first published novel and bestseller, The Hobbit. Based on bedtime stories he had told to his young sons, it is widely considered his most accessible story — and for good reason. To this day, I’ll never forget spending my summer vacation at age 7 taking it on as my first-ever “real book” in the basement of my parents’ home. And while the novel remains much more open to younger readers than many of Tolkien’s subsequent works, its themes and characters are no less inspiring for a more mature audience.

Background

To set the stage for those who still haven’t read it (you uncultured swine), the plot of The Hobbit revolves around the Quest of the Lonely Mountain in the high fantasy setting of Middle-Earth. Some 150 years before the story begins, a thriving kingdom of dwarves dwelt peacefully beneath the great mountain of Erebor (a.k.a., the Lonely Mountain), winning enormous wealth through the mining of precious stones and metals. But predictably, these good times were not to last. Indeed, they came to a violent end when the wicked dragon Smaug descended upon the dwarven kingdom, killing hundreds and conquering the Mountain and its great hoard of treasure for himself.

After many decades, a small contingent of the surviving dwarves resolve to retake the Mountain, in a forlorn effort to reclaim both their wealth and their pride. With the help of the wizard Gandalf and unlikely protagonist Bilbo Baggins, they brave many dangers before ultimately reaching the Mountain. In the final stage of their long journey, they are aided by the men of Lake-town (or Esgaroth), a city built on the Long Lake that sits a short way south of the Mountain — just beyond the boundaries of the dragon’s desolate realm. And although the narrative remains brief in its treatment of the Lakemen, it is one among them who will ultimately emerge as the story’s truly heroic figure.

Eventually, of course, Bilbo comes into direct conflict with Smaug, who cleverly deduces that his enemies have received help from the Men of the Lake and resolves to repay them for their insolence. Soon, he leaves the Mountain in wrath, and wings his way toward Esgaroth with murder in his heart. It is at the very precipice of his onslaught that we first encounter the epic hero of the story: Bard the Bowman.

The Bowman

Bard is notable among Tolkien’s many heroes for his rapid introduction and his remarkably brief character arc. Unlike the epic figures of Middle-Earth’s legendary past (whose lives and stories often span many centuries), we meet Bard only a few moments before he is put to the ultimate test. But despite the rushed nature of his appearance, he is far from lacking in depth as an aspirational figure.

Just as the dragon sets off to exact his vengeance, Bard stands with other men on the quays of Esgaroth, no doubt engaged in the dull monotony of their daily routine. The sight of a sudden burst of fire on the mountaintop rouses them from their tedium, leading most to speculate about the happy improvements they believe are sure to come when the dwarves inevitably return southward with the treasure in tow.

But in grim tones, Bard cautions them to remember the danger of their situation so close to the dragon’s lair, much to their derision. His fellows mockingly accuse him of being a prophet of doom, always warning of dangers that never seem to materialize.

But as the dragon rushes toward Esgaroth, his fire becomes more visible, leading the more foolish to become excited that something interesting finally seems to be penetrating into their usual humdrum. Bard, however, immediately recognizes the situation for what it is and rushes to alert the Master of the town, a bureaucrat concerned only with the maintenance of the town’s economy. Bard manages to convince the Master to sound the alarm, but only just before the cowardly man flees the town in his personal boat, leaving the people leaderless and unprepared to face the coming attack.

As the dragon sweeps over the town, he kindles it to fire, killing many. Homes are destroyed, and the people are driven from their homes, desperately piling into boats to flee wherever they can. The Master is nowhere to be found; the townsmen are left disorganized and without a chieftain to lead them.

But amid this scene of destruction and despair, all is not lost. To quote directly from the text:

But there was still a company of archers who held their ground among the burning houses. Their captain was Bard, grim-voiced and grim-faced, whose friends had accused him of prophesying floods and poisoned fish, though they knew his worth and courage. He was a descendant in long line of Girion, Lord of Dale, whose wife and child had escaped down the Running River from the ruin long ago.

Unlike the fools and money-keepers who predominate among the Lakemen, Bard is a man of action — one of great lineage who has not forgotten his people’s past, or his own duties to them. Readers will know that Dale was once a great city of men, built in the vales outside the Lonely Mountain, that was also destroyed during the dragon’s sack of the dwarven kingdom.

Though we learn nothing of the steadfast companions who fight alongside him, Bard is clearly a man capable of inspiring others to fight for what they believe in, even during a time when sincere conviction is very much out of fashion. When faced with an existential threat, they rise to the occasion with courage and discipline, in a display of consummate martial prowess. Their captain’s organizational capacity very clearly extends beyond simple inspiration.

In the end, though, even this cohort of brave men are no match for the power of the dragon. As flames spring up all around them, Bard’s valiant companions are forced to flee with the rest of the more timid townsmen. But even as his home and his world collapse around him, Bard stands alone, singularly resolved to fight to the bitter end.

At last, all but one of his arrows are spent in defense of his people. Further resistance seems futile. But just as defeat seems imminent, something quite unexpected happens:

Suddenly out of the dark something fluttered to his shoulder. He started — but it was only an old thrush. Unafraid it perched by his ear and it brought him news. Marvelling he found he could understand its tongue, for he was of the race and line of Dale.

At his moment of greatest despair, Bard receives an almost divinely-ordained messenger in the form of the Thrush. The bird reveals a critical piece of information to perhaps the only man in Esgaroth with ears to hear its message. Prior chapters describe how the Thrush came to know of the dragon’s vulnerability, but Bard knows only what he hears from it in the moment:

“Wait! Wait!” it said to him. “The moon is rising. Look for the hollow of the left breast as he flies and turns above you!”

Bard does not comprehend how or why he can understand the Thrush’s speech, or how it came to know of the dragon’s weakness. He simply seizes the moment and presses his slim advantage for all that it is worth:

Then Bard drew his bow-string to his ear. The dragon was circling back, flying low, and as he came the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered his great wings.

“Arrow!” said the Bowman. “Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!”

At this ultimate strait, Bard places all his trust in the weapon of his forebears. When the dragon swoops low over the town, he releases the black arrow in one final, desperate stroke. It finds its mark with perfect precision:

The black arrow sped straight from the string, straight for the hollow by the left breast where the foreleg was flung wide. In it smote and vanished, barb, shaft and feather, so fierce was its flight. With a shriek that deafened men, felled trees and split stone, Smaug shot spouting into the air, turned over and crashed down from on high in ruin.

Full on the town he fell. His last throes splintered it to sparks and gledes. The lake roared in. A vast steam leaped up, white in the sudden dark under the moon. There was a hiss, a gushing whirl, and then silence. And that was the end of Smaug and Esgaroth, but not of Bard.

The Man of the Hour

After the dramatic death of the dragon and the destruction of their town, the survivors are understandably left in a state of greatly heightened emotion. They reach the shores of the Lake as refugees — simultaneously elated by their deliverance from the dragon’s wrath and distraught over the loss of their town and what it will mean for their futures. Many begin to look for someone to blame, and (quite reasonably) focus their ire on the Master, who cravenly abandoned them in their moment of dire need. Others bemoan the apparent demise of the great man who stubbornly held the line when others would not. But just at this moment of mourning and doubt, the hero reemerges to stand tall once more:

And in the very midst of their talk a tall figure stepped from the shadows. He was drenched with water, his black hair hung wet over his face and shoulders, and a fierce light was in his eyes.

“Bard is not lost!” he cried. “He dived from Esgaroth, when the enemy was slain. I am Bard, of the line of Girion; I am the slayer of the dragon!”

Bard’s sudden reappearance throws the crowd into a state of frenzy, with many demanding that the Master be instantly deposed and that Bard be proclaimed king on the spot. But even when the politically adept Master manages to redirect the townsmen’s outrage toward the dwarves for awakening the dragon, Bard remains unflappable to the rash impulses of the crowd or to any distraction from the people’s immediate needs following the disaster.

True to his noble lineage, Bard gracefully diffuses the escalating tension and leads by example, personally caring for the wounded at a time of tremendous uncertainty. These actions quickly win him an even greater respect, priming him for direct leadership in the unprecedented events that are to follow. And when the suddenly unguarded treasure of the Mountain triggers a new and multidimensional conflict, Bard once again proves himself a capable leader, securing both a military victory and a just settlement for the people he defends.

Bard the Based

We presently find ourselves in a moment not entirely unlike Bard’s own before the dragon’s attack on Esgaroth. Much like him, we foresee civilizational threats looming on the horizon, and often find ourselves simply standing by in quiet desperation, while fools and liars insist that deeply troubling realities are of no consequence.

This is not a historically uncommon place in which to find oneself. As Oswald Spengler famously observed in The Decline of the West, once-great civilizations commonly tend toward entropy and decay when they begin to favor apathy over the hard-won wisdom of the past.

But Tolkien offers us a compelling counterexample in the figure of Bard the Bowman. Unlike so many of his fellow townsmen, he remains keenly aware of his lineage and stubbornly refuses to acquiesce to the shallow materialism of the age. We learn that he is not well-liked by most of the townsmen for this attitude, yet he still manages to command their respect for his undeniable reputation as a courageous and competent man.

The existence of his small band of companions reveals that his words must not have fallen on entirely deaf ears, and we can only surmise how these more perceptive men must have rallied around him to prepare for an uncertain future. When the dragon comes at last, they valiantly spring into action with Bard at the helm, readily filling a void left by the cowards and dotards who have hitherto governed their town. A prior episode in the story reveals that the town’s designated watchmen are embarrassingly lax in their duties; we can reasonably infer that Bard must have identified this failure and quietly prepared his fellows to serve as an unofficial bulwark against future threats.

The Hobbit provides no indication that either Bard or his followers are experienced warriors prior to the coming of the dragon, and indeed much of their resistance proves ineffective. But while they fail to harm the enemy (at least initially), they crucially provide the people with a vital window to escape the town’s ruin, enabling a great majority of them to survive the devastation.

And even when all seems finally to be lost, it is Bard’s recalcitrant belief in his own duty and his heritage that enables the ultimate victory. Only at his most desperate moment does he encounter a mythic figure of fate in the form of the Thrush, who offers him an outside chance to right the colossal wrong he faces down. With his people’s fate hanging in the balance, he does not flinch, and succeeds in winning a stunning victory against the direst of odds.

As such, Bard offers us a template for the type of man that we all must aspire to become amid our own culture’s decline. He is clear-eyed, shrugging off the derision of those who foolishly forget the harsher realities of life. He is capable, observing weakness and independently devising informal solutions. And most importantly, he is fearless, modeling his own actions on the heroes of the past and willing to gamble his very life for what he believes in most strongly.

Tolkien’s contemporary, G.K. Chesterton, once wrote: “Fairy tells do not teach children that dragons exist — children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales teach children that dragons can be killed.”

Bard is a man who internalized a similar wisdom, and who stubbornly refused to cast it aside in the name of politeness, fashion, or comfort. Such resolute men frequently echo throughout Tolkien’s works, from the ancient Rangers of the North to the steadfast Riders of Rohan, neither of whom would give up the fight even when their kings had already failed them. They were men who remembered exactly what they stood for, regardless of what their circumstances might have seemed to portend. To quote Tolkien once more, “The old that is strong does not wither.”

As we survey the storm clouds on our present horizon, we must endeavor to uphold our own duties as men who remember the ancient truths, and who doggedly stand by our people’s history, traditions, and culture. And within this struggle, we must never forget the vital truth at the very center of Bard the Bowman’s story: even dragons can be killed.

Thumbnail image: Bard and Smaug, tolkiensofficial on Instagram

The mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, recently had his finance department publish a list of wealthy NYC property owners and addresses. This is Patronage 101. Implied is that his loose coalition of discontents will be able to loot, pillage, and plunder these largely-unoccupied properties. More shrewd low-lifes will likely engage in squatting. Due to the tendency toward squatters’ rights in NYC, it will be a nightmare to evict them once they have a fake rental agreement to wave around. The police are unable to intervene, as the war between “landchad” and “rentoid” is a civil matter. This is a blatant invitation to take from the rich and give to yourself.

While my sympathy for the ultra-wealthy is somewhat muted due to the “k-shaped economy” currently crushing the middle and working classes and the prolific looting operations the wealthy elite themselves engaged in during the ’08 crash and Covid, there will be decent people caught up in this affair. Remember, the Left’s definition of “wealthy” starts at “has nicer things than I do.”

The Boomer Right will likely view this as more proof that Islamo-Communism (as opposed to the Islamo-Fascism we were worried about from 2001–15) is rising in the U.S. Their conceptualization of Mamdani is that he’s a dedicated Marxist-Leninist and also a devout Wahhabi who also supports transgenderism and other leftist social causes: intersectionality made manifest in a shrimpy subcontinental from Uganda (following in the footsteps of Gandhi in benefiting from “colonialism” in the African continent while decrying colonialism abroad).

Mamdani, if he is capable of reading anything longer than 500 words, certainly hasn’t read Das Kapital. His professed beliefs on social policy would get him executed in any country with an Islamic government enforcing Sharia law. I’d speculate that he doesn’t really enjoy spending time around Dylan Mulvaney or similar characters. The man has no consistent ideology you could summarize, especially not some mystical unified theory of progressivism that smooths over the contradictions between Guevara’s “racism,” Stalin’s “homophobia,” Islam’s rigid patriarchism and professed attitudes toward homosexuality (yes, we know about Thursdays), feminism’s ball-busting misandry, and progressivism’s extreme antitheism (although it does tend to focus solely on orthodox Christianity).

Nonetheless, older conservatives have excitedly proclaimed that Mamdani is the face of both the Islamic conquest of the U.S. and also the Soviet conquest of the U.S. at the same time. In reality, he’s the only thing that could unite all of the disparate leftist causes: he’s a looter, and he wants all of the nice things. They can go back to infighting when every last nice thing has been requisitioned from the dirty, filthy, racist colonizers. If you’re curious what that looks like, turn your eyes toward Zimbabwe or South Africa.

People can’t seem to stop thinking that Mamdani worships Stalin and Mao as legends and Marx as their prophet. In reality, his probable pantheon more closely resembles Mugabe, Mandela, and their prophet Noel Ignatiev. Neither Mugabe nor Mandela read Ignatiev (it’s not entirely clear whether Mugabe could read), but they both managed to obey his commandment to “abolish whiteness” and seize the spoils. It’s this commandment that animates Mamdani and his supporters, not some lofty commitment to communism or Islam. He’s a scrawny Third-World pillager — nothing more, nothing less. It wouldn’t be remarkable if there weren’t so many scrawny Third-World pillagers in the U.S. ready to unite behind his banner (at least long enough to accomplish Ignatiev’s mission).

There is no “ideology” to disprove. There is no “owning the libs.” The Reaganite mantra of Mamdani and his followers’ ignorance being because “they know so much that isn’t so” is a farce. They know exactly how the system works, what they want, and how to get it. Accusations of “hypocrisy” and “inconsistency” don’t work on them because their only ideology is the ideology of resentment, and their only goal is conquest.