Michael retweetledi
On this day in 1864, the most savage 20 hours of the entire Civil War unfolded on a patch of Virginia farmland the size of three city blocks.
At 4:35 AM, in heavy fog and pouring rain, 20,000 men of Hancock's Union II Corps charged silently up a hill. Confederate pickets, soaked and exhausted, fired one volley before being overrun. Within minutes, the Federals had captured nearly an entire Confederate division, including Maj. Gen. Edward "Allegheny" Johnson, Brig. Gen. George "Maryland" Steuart, and what was left of Stonewall Jackson's old brigade.
Robert E. Lee thought the war might end that morning.
Instead, John B. Gordon's reserves slammed into the Union flank in a counterattack so desperate that Lee rode personally toward the front, until his own men grabbed his bridle and shouted "Lee to the rear!"
What followed was something nobody had ever seen.
For the next twenty hours, in driving rain, the two armies fought at a section of trenches called the Mule Shoe and did not stop firing. Men climbed onto the parapet to shoot down into the trench, were shot themselves, and fell into a pile of bodies stacked three and four deep.
Musket barrels overheated and burst. Rifles became clubs. Bayonets pinned men to the mud. Trench water turned red and rose so high that wounded men drowned in it.
The fire was so relentless that a 22-inch oak tree behind the Confederate line was cut clean through by minié balls alone. It toppled onto the men still fighting beneath it.
The stump sits in the Smithsonian to this day.
Around 3 AM, the Confederates fell back to a new line. Roughly 17,000 men lay killed, wounded, or captured.
One Union officer wrote afterward: "I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania."
He's probably still right.
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