Originally aired on May 05, 1995 - In part 36 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes a horrific battle in Spotsylvania, Virginia on May 12, 1864. It is known as the Bloody Angle.
#36 – The “Bloody Angle”
Combat is a terrible human experience; and while all battles are detestable, some are so shocking as to defy belief. Such an engagement occurred 130 years ago this month in Virginia.
General U. S. Grant had initiated another Union offensive by leading the huge Army of the Potomac southward across the Rapidan River. Confederates under General Robert E. Lee blunted that advance in two days of hard fighting in the Wilderness. Badly beaten, Grant would not give up. Nor did he even take time to lick his wounds.
The Federal army dashed for the vital crossroads of Spotsylvania Courthouse. If Grant could get there first, Lee would have to do the attacking. Yet the Confederates moved faster and secured the town. Lee threw up five miles of earthworks. At one point in that defensive position, the line was a horseshoe-shaped arc or salient – a great loop that bulged out to the north. Grant considered this upside down “U” in the Confederate line to be Lee’s weak point. It became the target for a Union attack.
At 4:30 a. m., May 12, 1864, the headlong contest began as rain came down in sheets and fog hung thick. Massed lines of Federals smashed into the west side of the salient. Hand-to-hand fighting lasted from dawn to dawn, in wet and hazy light, over a stretch of breastworks known thereafter as the “Bloody Angle”.
What one authority called “the wildest, bitterest infighting of the entire war” took place that day. Men of blue and gray slugged it out for endless hours. Fighting madness turned soldiers into killing machines. In a battleground only 400 yards wide, the width of the earthworks was all that separated the two battling armies. Never before on earth had so many muskets been fired so fast on so narrow a front and at such close range.
Individual soldiers would leap up onto the parapets of the trenches and fire down into them as fast as companions would pass loaded muskets up to them. When one was shot down, another would jump up and take his place. Dead men fell on top of wounded men, and unhurt soldiers coming up to fight would step on the hideous, twisting, moaning pile of wounded men.
Combatants fought with clubbed muskets and bayonets; some injured soldiers were trampled out of sight in the mud, artillery batteries would come floundering up into close-range action and then fall silent because gun crews were killed. The intensity of the gunfire blasted trees and logs into splinters. In the center of the battle line was a stately oak tree 22 inches in diameter. The pick-pick-pick of thousands of rifle balls chopped down the tree within a few hours.
By nightfall, the Union army had gained a square mile of useless ground. Corpses lay five deep in the mud. Some of the bodies had been struck so many times by bullets that they were little more than bits of rag and bone.
During the night of May 12-13, while fighting continued in the darkness, Lee’s engineers desperately completed a new defensive line a mile to the rear. After 23 hours of battle, Confederate soldiers abandoned the line and fell back to a new and more secure position. What happened at the “Bloody Angle” cost North and South more than 15,000 casualties. General “Stonewall” Jackson’s old Second Corps caught most of the onslaught and suffered the worst. The proud Stonewall Brigade, Virginia’s first infantry brigade, lost so many men in the battle that it ceased to exist as an independent unit.
A Union officer spoke for survivors on both sides when he stated: “I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania, because I should be loath to believe it myself were the case reversed”.
