General-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant was unique among Union commanders in that he conducted the war with only one goal: to destroy Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of the Tennessee. Grant’s plan was simply, as he wrote, “to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources until by mere attrition, if by nothing else, there should be nothing left.” Grant sent Gen. William T. Sherman against Johnston in Georgia and went after Lee himself, beginning with the Battle of the Wilderness of May 5 and 6.

Grant began the campaign with 11#,000 troops that were as well fed and well equipped as Lee’s 62,000 were not. Anticipating Grant’s move on Richmond, Lee maneuvered his army so that the Federals would have to attack in the Wilderness, a dense, eerie forest in northeastern Virginia. Lee hoped to repeat the whipping he had given Joseph Hooker under similar conditions at nearby Chancellorsville the year before, and for a while it looked as though he might. Grant’s advantages in artillery and manpower were all but useless in the junglelike conditions of the Wilderness, but he decided to fight anyway, and for two days the armies clashed blindly among the forest’s undergrowth. Since it was impossible, in the murky haze of combat, to see an enemy even yards away, wounded men were usually left where they fell to die in one of the battle’s many fires. The advantage turned back and forth several times, but the battle had ended in a virtual stalemate by the time both sides decided nothing more could be gained there.

The Confederates lost eight thousand men in the two days; the Army of the Potomac lost about eighteen thousand and looked beaten again. Troops on both sides expected Grant to fall back for regrouping in the pattern of McClellan and Hooker. But Grant, in the strategic turning point of the war, instead ordered his men around the Confederates’ right flank, continuing the drive to Richmond and leaving his reinforcements to catch up. Despite the hammering they had taken, when they learned that for once they were advancing instead of retreating after a fight, Grant’s men cheered their general.

Lee intercepted Grant’s army about eight miles away at Spotsylvania Courthouse and threw up fortifications with lightning speed. Grant again forced the issue, and the twelve-day battle that followed was perhaps the fiercest of the war. The Federals broke through the center of the Confederate line on May 12, but their disorganization and Confederate reinforcements saved Lee’s forces from a disastrous splitting. As Grant and Lee poured men into this “Bloody Angle,” the fighting grew so intense that musket balls completely cut through a twenty-two-inch-thick oak tree. The Union colonel Horace Porter described the battle as “chiefly a savage hand-to-hand fight across the breastworks. Rank after rank was riddled by shot and shell and bayonet