"Historians frequently debate about which battle or battles were the most important and most decisive in the American Civil War. Some say Gettysburg. Others say Vicksburg. Still others point to the Atlanta campaign because it guaranteed President Lincoln's reelection. A strong argument, however, can be made that the most consequential battles of the Civil War were fought in the spring of 1864 between the Rapidan and James Rivers in Virginia in what became known as the Overland Campaign. In those days of brutal and incessant warfare, Union General Ulysses S. Grant saved the Union.
We are in the midst of the anniversary of those battles, fought by the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia from May 5 to June 12, 1864. It was Grant, the victor of battles in the western theater of the war, versus General Robert E. Lee, who, though outnumbered, had bested every Union commander in the east, except George Meade at Gettysburg. Until the Overland Campaign, the Army of the Potomac and Army of Northern Virginia had waged warfare in battles separated by months of recovery and planning. The Confederate General James Longstreet knew Grant well, and after learning that Grant was coming east warned Lee: "That man will fight us every day and every hour until the end of the war." Longstreet was prophetic. Grant's strategy was simple: The larger and better-equipped Union army would undertake "active and continuous operations of all the troops that could be brought into the field, regardless of season and weather." In other words, it would be a war of attrition, and Grant's object would not be cities or places, but Lee's army.
The most comprehensive account of the Overland Campaign is found in five volumes written by the historian (and current attorney general of the Virgin Islands) Gordon Rhea. In those works, he describes the battlefield of the Wilderness as "a broad stretch of impenetrable thickets and dense second growth that had replaced forests cut down to fuel local iron and gold furnaces." There were, Rhea noted, "few negotiable roads, clearings were scarce, and visibility rarely exceeded a few hundred feet." Parts of the battlefield were familiar to both sides. Lee's remarkable victory at Chancellorsville a year before was won over some of the same ground, and skeletons from some of the dead at Chancellorsville still dotted some of the fields. When the fierce, disjointed fighting ended on May 6, the Army of the Potomac had suffered more than 17,000 casualties (dead, wounded, captured, missing), while Lee's army had suffered about 11,000 casualties. One soldier commented on the fighting in the Wilderness: "It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth."…"
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