Battle of the Wilderness • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The two armies that faced off in the Battle of the Wilderness may have felt a sense of deja vu. Almost exactly a year after the Battle of Chancellorsville and just a few miles to the west, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Federal Army of the Potomac faced each other in the same gloomy woods. The similarities between the battles even included the comparative strengths of the two forces.
A year’s hard fighting had left the veterans of Chancellorsville buried on fields from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. Even so, the armies were slightly stronger in 1864 than in 1863 – the South by four thousand men, the North by five thousand. But the organizations of both armies had seen major changes.
The Army of Northern Virginia (see organization)
Lee’s army had added a third corps, a result of the loss of Lieutenant General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson to a mortal wound in the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lee had decide that none of the potential replacements could properly direct the old Second Corps. It had been split into two, led by former division commanders Richard Ewell and A.P. Hill. There were questions about their performance at Gettysburg and afterward, but there were no obvious better options and it was hoped that they had grown into their commands over the winter.
Stuart’s Cavalry Division had also grown in organization, expanded to a corps of three divisions after Gettysburg. But the reality was that even though Stuart commanded more divisions at the Wilderness then he had at Gettysburg, he commanded less regiments and battalions. The gradual grinding down of the Confederate cavalry was well underway, both as ever-increasing numbers of Yankee horsemen began to be felt and as the number of Confederate cavalry mounts declined due to attrition and lack of fodder.
The grinding down was felt in the infantry as well. The Confederacy did a much better job of maintaining the strength of its regiments. Unlike the Federals, they rebuilt and recruited into their existing regiments rather than always creating new. This allowed the new men to learn from the veterans. Even so, they were seeing a decline in their manpower as Confederate resources began to dry up.
Army of the Potomac (see organization)
The Army of the Potomac had seen the greater changes since Chancellowsville. The first was its commander: Major General George Gordon Meade had replaced Joseph Hooker three days before the Battle of Gettysburg. Meade had gone on to win a decisive victory there, the first for the star-crossed Army of the Potomac. And athough there were complaints about his decisions, when Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to command of all U.S. armies and decided he would accompany the Army of the Potomac in the field, he took a long look and decided Meade should remain in command.
Meade’s army had consolidated its seven infantry corps. When Burnside took command of the army in November of 1862 he understood that the number of corps was too large for one commander to properly control. But his solution of adding another layer of “Grand Divisions” added even more complexity and was abandoned when Joseph Hooker took over in January of 1863. Meade appointed temporary “Wing Commanders” at Gettysburg but Reynolds was killed and Slocum reverted to command of his corps in the course of the battle.
When Longstreet’s Confederate First Corps was sent to the Western Theater in September to reinforce Braxton Bragg, the Union Eleventh and Twelfth Corps were sent to restore the odds. Longstreet would eventually return east in time to take part in the fighting in the Wilderness, but the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps were permanently gone, leaving only five Union Corps in the east. In March of 1864 the Union First and Third Corps, badly depleted at Gettysburg, were consolidated with the three remaining corps. Then it became clear that Longstreet would be bringing his corps back from West, which would result in both armies having three corps. It was decided to bring Ambrose Burnside’s Union Ninth Corps back to the east to maintain a Union superiority in strength, although by this time Union corps were much stronger than Confederate.
The command situation with the Ninth Corps became a problem. Burnside was senior to Meade, and by rights should have takeen command of the Army of the Potomac. But Burnside had already commanded the army in the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg and no one, Burnside included, wanted to see him in command of the army again. The legal fiction was therefore created where his command, which would not arrive on the field until the battle had started, would report directly to Grant, although all administrative functions would go through Army of Potomac Headquarters. By the end of May Burnside volunteered to forego his seniority to serve under Meade, and the Ninth Corps became fully part of the Army of the Potomac.
The remaining Union corps were larger in total strength but many of the regiments smaller. The veteran regiments had been ground down in two years of battles, and many of the new, rookie regiments had suffered severly in their initial baptisms of fire. In order to maintain a reasonable combat strength some Union brigades were forced to group eight or nine badly depleted regiments together rather than the four or five that had been the norm in 1863. Field command was also badly depleted. Far too many divisions were commanded by brigadiers and brigades commanded by colonels. Too many regiments were commanded by lieutenant colonels, majors or even captains. The result was often a lack of efficiency that sometimes bordered on ineffectiveness.