Tag Archives: wilderness

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This Month in the Civil War – June, 1864 Cold Harbor to Petersburg- by S. McBride

 

The Union’s Army of the Potomac had suffered a terrible loss of men in May, 1864 in battles at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, but General Ulysses S. Grant was committed to bringing the bloody and costly War Between the States to an end before the year ended. The Confederates had suffered considerable losses as well.  Grant’s plan to prevent Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia from being reinforced as Grant moved his troops toward Richmond was to have diversions in other places. Union General Franz Sigel had fought forces under Confederate General John Breckinridge at New Market in the Shenandoah Valley in mid-May.  Greatly outnumbered, Breckinridge had called up cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, some of them boys as young as 15, and most of whom were killed or wounded.  But they defeated Sigel.

Read the entire article in the June 19th issue of the Express.

 

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Battle of the Wilderness – Part 1 – by Sandy McBride

 

When Ulysses S Grant arrived at the encampment of the Army of the Potomac north of the Rapidan River in Virginia in May of 1864, he was eyed by the veteran soldiers now under his command with a degree of curiosity.  One officer, seeing the new supreme commander of all Union forces for the first time, commented that he was “stumpy, unmilitary, slouchy.”  Indeed, he was a short man, not stately in demeanor, and he tended to be a bit frumpy in his attire.  But the men who had faced defeat, retreat and failure time and again under more flamboyant generals noticed what many others had already noticed about Grant.  Said one soldier, “We all felt that at last that the boss had arrived.”

 

Read the entire article in the May 15th issue of the Express.