4 MAY 1864 – THE OVERLAND CAMPAIGN BEGINS

Overall commander of the U.S. Army Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant initiated his Overland Campaign on 4 May 1864, seeking to deal a series of hammer blows to General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and bludgeon the enemy into submission on the road to Richmond.

The campaign began as Major General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River in northern Virginia on 4 May 1864. This opening move attempted to bypass the Army of Northern Virginia’s right flank, allowing Union forces to cut through the rugged terrain of the Wilderness.

In the Wilderness, Union and Confederate soldiers battled in an almost trackless forest in which the opposing sides could hardly see each other and the severely wounded fell victim to spreading flames from underbrush set afire. At Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle, for over twenty hours, opposing troops grappled from opposite sides of a breastwork in a pouring rain in some of the fiercest hand-to–hand fighting of the entire war. At Cold Harbor, perhaps 5,000 Union troops fell in the first hour of a hopeless, bungled attack that Lieutenant General Grant would forever regret having ordered.

The grim, pitiless contest inflicted almost 100,000 casualties and foreshadowed the massive industrial conflicts of the twentieth century. After six weeks of bitter, unrelenting combat, General Lee’s rebel army was besieged at Petersburg, and the nation was that much closer to Appomattox Court House and eventual reunion.

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