The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, fought May 8â21, 1864, was the second major engagement of the Overland Campaign during the American Civil War.
Confederate troops created the Muleshoe on the night of May 8, 1864, while attempting to weave together two lines of earthworks that ran at right angles to one another. Lee recognized that it was inherently weakâsubject to Converging fire from many directions. To bolster the line, he constructed stout trenches, fortifying them with upwards of 30 cannon. Even so, the Salient remained his most vulnerable point.
By May 12, the Confederates had established a line of earthworks from Laurel Hill to the Fredericksburg Road. Seeing the merit in Emory Upton’s earlier attack, Grant massed 20,000 men of Maj. Gen. Winfield Hancockâs II Corps opposite the tip of the âmule shoeâ salient in Leeâs line. Lee noted the Federal movement, but mistakenly believing that Grant was withdrawing, removed his artillery from the area. When Hancock’s men advanced that morning, they briefly broke through the Confederate infantry line. Lee sent in reinforcements just as Grant hurled more troops at the Confederate works and Burnsideâs IX Corps attacked from the east. Fighting devolved into a hand-to-hand, point-blank slugfest which lasted for nearly 20 hours and claimed roughly 17,000 casualties; one of the bloodiest attacks of the entire war. Union soldiers described the carnage as a âpanoply of horror,â a âpandemonium of terrorâ and a âliteral saturnalia of blood.â One Federal soldier described the scene as âa Golgothaâ â a place of skulls. âI have, as you know, been in a good many hard fights, but I never saw anything like the contest,â wrote one Louisiana soldier. After the attack, the âmule shoeâ salient became known for all time as the Bloody Angle.
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