The Killing Ground: Wilderness to Cold Harbor (Civil War)
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0809447681
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Time Life Education (June 1986)
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orders to swing out and come at Spotsylvania from the northeast. Sheridan was ordered to take most of the Cavalry Meade, establishing to take his headquarters two miles east of Todd's Tavern, initially refused to believe that Confederate infantry had beaten Warren's corps But as the to Spotsylvania. morning wore on and Warren's tired regiments were unable provised Confederate line, to dent the im- Meade realized By was facing more noon Meade had received word from Warren that
still finished. in front of the Confederate parapet, were equally desperate. "We had fired three hundred rounds of ammunition per man," remembered G. Norton Galloway of the 95th Pennsylvania. "Our lips were ento four powder from crusted with biting cartridge. Our shoulders and hands were encrusted with mud of our that rifles. had adhered When to the butts darkness came on we dropped from exhaustion." Sometime after last fell quiet. a Georgian midnight the battlefield at
Federals launched a sweeping counterattack and, with Custer's their rapid-firing men using Spencer carbines to advan- tage, drove the Confederates from the Noting that he had suffered 256 field. casualties, General Gregg paid tribute to the Confeder- horsemen "who resisted with courage and desperation unsurpassed." The fight, he added later, "has always been regarded by ate the Second Division as one of Among its severest." the dead was Private John the 5 th Michigan Cavalry ited
long line of low, flat hills. At 4:30 a.m. buglers sounded the advance. Along two miles of line, more than 50,000 infantrymen of II, VI and XVIII able. Corps began clambering out of their works their rifle pits and moving on the Confederate fortifications, still wreathed in morning mists, several hundred yards away. saw an apparently empty and WILSON At 4:30 a.m. on June 3, Union II, VI and XVIII Corps advanced on the lines of Hill and Anderson, until heavy fire forced the Federals to the
quietly from his entrenchments, east to ponder. swing wide to the south- and cross the James River to strike at the hub of Petersburg, Virginia, 22 miles south of Richmond. On the night Confederate save adroitly parried all Grant's di- rect thrusts at but even he felt little time. Like a skillful boxer fighting a heavier too Grant was not a have added twenty years to their age." procession past me," failure easily, to troops in rail of June 12, his columns began to move. The