William Marvel: The Bloody Angle

Many times have I visited the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania Court House, and it’s been raining nearly every time. That’s appropriate, since it was raining on the day in 1864 when that place won its name. Thanks to the National Park Service, most of that Virginia farmland remains today very much as it was then, as Ulysses Grant strove to cut Robert E. Lee’s army off from Richmond.

After a brutal clash in a vast tangle of second-growth timber known as the Wilderness, Grant hurried his troops south again to get between Lee and his capital. Lee’s Confederates raced ahead of him and started digging in north of the county seat of Spotsylvania County, where for four days Grant prodded different points in Lee’s hastily constructed earthworks. Then, in the wee hours of May 12, Grant massed 30,000 Yankees on either side of a vulnerable, projecting angle in the rebel trenches. Winfield Hancock’s corps gathered opposite the western face of the angle, and Ambrose Burnside’s corps assaulted the eastern face.