Throwing a Mule Shoe
May 1864: Battle of Spotsylvania
William Terdoslavich
The Yankees did not fall back like they always did before. Two days of bitter fighting in the dense woods of the Wilderness left Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in possession of the battlefield—technically a victory. But the Army of the Potomac, under the strategic control of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, had just sent two corps past Lee’s right flank. Hurriedly, Lee pulled his troops south, trying to keep his army between Grant and Richmond.
In previous years, the Army of the Potomac would be under the command of someone more foolish or cautious. Lee could get away with dividing his forces, turn a flank, and strike the Army of the Potomac hard where its commander least expected. That was not going to work with Grant, who maintained constant contact and always looked to turn Lee’s flank.
For the next week, the advancing Union forces breathed down the necks of the retreating Confederates, looking to catch some careless division or corps out of place and smash it. Lee took great care to make sure this never happened. When the Army of Northern Virginia stopped near Spotsylvania Court House, the infantry whipped out their tin mess cups and bayonets and began to dig. In a few hours, they raised a knee-high dirt wall. But by the end of the day, that position would be a six-foot earthen wall fronted by a ditch, lined with a tangle of sharpened tree branches pointing out, topped with logs, and interspersed with loopholes and firing positions. One man behind an earthwork was equal to three in open ground assaulting him.
And so the line ran straight from west to east, except in one place where some high ground caused the Confederate line to bump out northward toward the Union Army. That was how the Mule Shoe came to be. Every southern soldier from corps commander down to private thought the position was poor because it could be fired on from three sides. Lee wasn’t wild about it, either, but he let it stand.
It was Grant who would not let it stand in the way.
Grant’s Plan, Upton’s Gamble
The Civil War was undergoing a tactical change. Armies were now digging in to defend their ground. A frontal assault against a prepared position usually got a lot of soldiers killed. In the past, these trenches were “accidental,” like the sunken road at Antietam, or the railroad cut at Second Bull Run. It was trench warfare, only in 1864 instead of 1914.
If the prepared position was a difficult nut to crack, then get a better nutcracker. For the Union, that was Colonel Emory Upton. He saw a simple solution: advance across the shortest stretch of open ground at the double-quick. Do not pause to fire. Rush the dirt walls. Penetrate the enemy perimeter and fan out. Follow-on troops will widen the breach. Eventually the enemy will be overwhelmed and the position taken.
Upton had demonstrated these tactics by taking Lee’s bridgehead across the Rappahannock the previous fall, capturing two brigades. His reputation did not escape notice afterward. So when Grant gave the job of capturing the Mule Shoe to corps commander Major General Horatio Wright, he turned to Upton to work his magic again. Twelve regiments were picked to form the assault force and divided into an advance guard, a follow-on force, and a reserve, altogether numbering 5,000 men.
Upton did his own reconnaissance, identifying a stretch of forest that sprang eastward to the western edge of the Mule Shoe, about halfway up its length. The woods would cover his force while it staged. It was only two hundred yards from the objective. He then made sure all twelve regimental commanders looked at the ground, and made sure they all understood the plan. The attack was set for May 10.
Wright also acquired the division of Brigadier General Gershom Mott to assault the northern edge of the Mule Shoe at the same time. The defenders were expected to crumble if they got hit from two sides in a converging attack. But Mott’s start line was more than 1,200 yards away. Worse, Mott received a contradictory order from the Army of the Potomac’s commander, Major General George Gordon Meade, to tie in Wright’s corps with the corps of Major General Ambrose Burnside, which was operating to the east of Wright’s position, as well as to attack the Mule Shoe.
Sloppy staff work was making Mott’s mission impossible. Wright ordered Mott to begin his attack on the Mule Shoe at 5 that evening. New orders came from Grant and Meade pushing back Upton’s attack from 5 to 6 P.M., but that order never reached Mott. So Mott attacked on time, with just two brigades, his striking power reduced to just 1,500 men. His troops weaved through a forest, slogged waist-deep through a bog, blew away a Confederate picket line, and finally advanced into open ground, where southern infantry and artillery then began using the Union troops for target practice. The attack went nowhere fast. As bodies piled up faster, Mott pulled his troops out.
Now Upton got his forces ready for attack, still slated for 6 P.M. Three Union batteries began pounding the Mule Shoe. At 6:35, Upton began his rush job, leading his brigade in the first wave. Rifle fire took down men left and right, but the column maintained its push, rushing through obstacles right up to the parapet, hitting the first of three trench lines manned by the brigade of Brigadier General George Doles. Upton’s lead regiments rushed the Confederate guns before they could rake the breakthrough with case shot. Union follow-on forces were close behind.
The Confederates would not take this like sitting ducks. Lieutenant General Richard Ewell, whose corps controlled the Mule Shoe, rushed his brigades to counterattack northward into Upton’s force. Upton’s follow-on regiments were now coming into play, trying to roll up the Confederate positions inside the Mule Shoe.
Ewell finally got his counterattack going, with four brigades striking Upton’s force from the southern base of the Mule Shoe while the two brigades pressed Upton’s force from the north. The Union regiments fell back to the breach, taking cover on the outside of the parapet. Now was the time for Upton to commit his reserve force of three regiments, but he was shocked to find they were in the thick of the action already. Now the men were all mixed up. Upton could no longer tell any regiment where to go or what to do.
It was now nightfall. Wright was alarmed. He asked Grant for advice, and the reply was simply to pour in more men to hold the ground. But the corps commander saw Upton’s attack faltering against increasing enemy reinforcements. He sent one regiment out to cover Upton’s retreat. By 7:30 P.M. it was over. Upton was rewarded with brigadier’s stars on the spot, but fully one-fifth of his attacking force was dead, dying, wounded, or missing. The Confederates may have lost several hundred more, but the killing stroke that was supposed to break Lee’s position failed. The Battle of Spotsylvania would go on.
Two Days Later . . .
Grant’s stubborn nature was now getting the better of him. If he could not go around Lee, he would go through him, and now that meant striking the Mule Shoe with greater force.
So on a rainy, muddy May 12 the attack was renewed, with Hancock’s corps striking the position from the north and Burnside’s corps hitting it from the east. The attack would begin at dawn.
Ewell was expecting an attack . . . again. Union troops staging at their start lines could be very noisy indeed, even when they tried to keep quiet. By this time Lee had removed his artillery from the Mule Shoe to begin consolidating the Confederate line. Now Ewell wanted his guns back, but they were not handy when Hancock’s men rushed the earthworks en masse. It took only thirty minutes to break into the Mule Shoe. Ewell rushed six brigades north again to counterattack. With no guns in place, this would be a straight-up fight, infantry only. By 7 A.M., the Confederate counterattack had Hancock’s men pinned to the edge of the Mule Shoe. By 10 A.M., the bodies were beginning to pile up on both sides as brigades slugged it out at close range. The swift stroke was again becoming a bloodbath.
A supporting attack by Wright’s corps went nowhere that morning, merely adding to the body count. Now Grant was going to commit Major General Gouverneur Warren’s corps to attack a western sector of Lee’s line to relieve the pressure on Hancock and Wright. But Warren and his division commanders saw little hope of success assaulting a prepared position, so they sat. When Meade found out, he blew his stack and made the attack order peremptory—Warren had to obey it promptly and without discretion. The attack was stopped cold, with the Union suffering massive casualties.
By 2 P.M., the edge of the Mule Shoe was renamed “the Bloody Angle.” Two Union corps pressed the perimeter while one Confederate corps desperately defended the ramparts. The notoriously tardy Burnside finally made his attack in midafternoon against a portion of line covered by Lieutenant General Jubal Early’s corps at the base of the Mule Shoe, but the attack was quickly undone by a flanking attack by two Confederate brigades. Burnside retreated.
By nightfall, Grant canceled plans to renew the attack. Union troops held their ground. Confederate units were pulled out after midnight to new positions prepared across the southern base of the Mule Shoe.
At sunrise on May 13, Grant advanced his forces into an abandoned position filled with mud, blood, and the dead. He paid for that hollow victory with the loss of 9,000 men. Lee may have lost between 5,000 and 8,000 men that same day, defending a position not worth keeping. Much of the loss was concentrated in Ewell’s corps. It started the campaign at the Battle of the Wilderness with 17,000 men, but had only 6,000 left after surviving the Bloody Angle. One of Ewell’s divisions suffered 75 percent losses over the week, mustering only 1,500 once the fighting stopped.
Overall, the Battle of Spotsylvania had run from May 8 to 21. Union losses amounted to about 18,000 total—2,735 killed, 13,416 wounded, and 2,258 missing. The hectic pace of marching and fighting did not leave the Confederacy with much time to devote to paperwork, so losses went unrecorded. Estimates run to about 13,000 casualties.
No battle would be won in a single, daring stroke. No war could be won in a single day’s fight. Wilderness and Spotsylvania were merely back-to-back battles, and the losses suffered there were only the beginning as Grant moved south.
Worse was yet to come.