Spotsylvania Court House Battlefield Hike

Today was our second full day camped near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and we needed to get out and hike after too many days driving places.  We decided to visit the Spotsylvania Court House Battlefied, part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Historic Park.  The hiking trails through the battlefied total over 4.5 miles, which we decided would be a good distance.

We decided to follow the hiking trail in an order that matched the chronology and location of the twelve day battle.

The human cost of the battle was unimaginable.  With the Battle of The Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House snuffed out the lives of 60,000 soldiers.  Few of them are remembred individually at the battlefield, except for Major General John Sedgwick who, in the morning of May 9, about two days into the battle, was inspecting his VI Corps line when he was shot through the head by a Confederate sharpshooter's bullet, dying instantly, having just made the celebrated remark "they couldn't hit an elephant at this distance". Sedgwick was one of the most beloved generals in the Union Army and his death was a hard blow to his men and colleagues.  He was the highest ranking Union officer killed in the entire Civil War.

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House can be summarized as three major events:  (1) the assault of Laurel Hill by the Union Army, (2) the taking of the Mule Shoe Salient by Union forces at the Battle of the Bloody Angle, and (3) the Confederates' falling back to General Lee's final line of entrenchments before General Grant disengaged to try to move further south toward Richmond.  The battle was precededed by the Battle of The Wilderness, and then followed by the battles of North Anna, Cold Harbor and Petersburg.  After Gettysburg in 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had incurred an intolerable 98,000+ casualties, leaving Lee’s army too weak to effectively stymie Grant’s Overland Campaign to Richmond and Petersburg in 1864, eventually resulting in Lee’s surrender in Appomatox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.

When the Union Army approached the area of Spotsylvania Court House, the Confederates were entrenched on Laurel Hill.  We followed the path of the three Union assaults on Laurel Hill, imagining that this is what the North's soldiers saw as they climbed the hill under withering fire:

This monument marks the location of the furthest point of the Union advance on its first assault, which resulted in hand-to-hand combat between the two forces:

The battles were fought on farmland near Spotsylvania Courthouse.  One of the unfortunate landowners was Edgar Harrison who, with his wife Ann and their two daughters lived on a knoll in a 1½-story house on their 190-acre farm. When the Civil War broke out, Edgar enlisted with the 9th Virginia Cavalry.  When the Union and Confederate armies met and clashed at Spotsylvania Court House, the Harrison House was caught in the middle. On May 11, Ann and the kids watched as Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell came to the door and proclaimed the house as Confederate headquarters. Gen. Robert E. Lee pitched his tent in the yard. Edgar Harrison was with his unit defending the Confederate flank only a couple of miles away from his home. He watched in horror when shooting and fighting broke out on his property. Fortunately, his family and their slaves had escaped to a neighbor's house.  After the war, the house eventually burned down.  Today, only parts of the foundation remain.  We stopped here for lunch before continuing on around the battlefield. 

While beating back the three Union assaults on Laurel Hill, General Lee constructed earthworks and trenches along what is called the "Mule Shoe Salient," a curved ridge northwest of Laurel Hill where Lee hoped to trap Union troops in crossfire as they climbed to the ridge.  However, Grant's troops circled around and attacked the salient from the north, focusing on the East Angle, or apex, of the Mule Shoe salient, its weakest spot.  Colonel Emory Upton led his men in a creative attack on the salient by running across a field without pausing to fire, in order to reduce the time it took to reach the Confederate earthworks and thus minimize the chances the Confederate defenders had to reload and reshoot before the Union soldiers reached the defenders.

As we hiked, we looked out from the location of the Confederate trenches in the direction toward where the Union soldiers attacked.  There were four monuments erected to memorialize the fallen troops -- by the states of New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Carolina:

This cannon symbolized the line of cannon along the salient ridge, which were captured by the Union forces in Upton's attack.  The Confederate soldiers recaptured most of the cannon, but eventually lost the ridge and many of the cannon, as well as hundreds of soldiers taken captive by Grant's troops.

This was what the Confederate troops might have seen as the Union soldiers advanced toward them as they defended the Mule Shoe salient:

The home of Neil McCoull stood in the center of the Muleshoe Salient throughout the battle of Spotsylvania. It served as a military headquarters for Confederate Corps commander Richard Ewell. During the fighting the McCoull family cowered in the basement. The home was repeatedly struck by small arms fire and artillery rounds, but it managed to survive relatively intact. Nearby outbuildings served as makeshift hospitals for wounded men streaming toward the rear of the fighting.  Afterwards, it was repaired and reoccupied. Fire destroyed the house in 1921. Only the outline of the house remains today.

We hiked from the Bloody Angle, west toward the beginning of our hike, and spotted the wolf sycamore tree in the photo below, that reminded us of the Mule Shoe tree.  The fighting at the Mule Shoe salient was so severe that a 22 inch oak tree was literally shot down by rifle balls.  Soon after the war, what remained of the tree was "liberated" from its owner by the Union army and is now exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution.    

As Grant's forces fought to overwhelm the forces of the South at Mule Shoe, Lee had his troops constructed another line of earthworks and trenches about a mile southwest of the besieged salient.  Here, Kathy follows the path that Lee's troops might have followed when they retreated to Lee's final line of entrenchments --

-- and we reached the location of the trenches, where a short section of earth and timberworks has been reconstructed by the National Park Service to show how the entrenchments might have looked when Lee's troops defended them:

After exploring this final ground of battle, we hiked back about a mile to our trailhead at the Exhibit Shelter on Grant Road where we had started, feeling that we had completed a good hike after too long off-trail.  We drove home, just missing a Christmas parade in Spotsylvania Courthouse, walked the cats and settled down to a long winter's evening, dreaming of more adventures we might have in this three week stay near Fredericksburg.