Hell Itself

The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864

Chris Mackowski

• Publisher: Savas Beatie
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781611213157
• eBook ISBN: 9781611213164
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

A Civil War historian recounts the first battle between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—a bloody and horrifying conflict in the Wilderness of Virginia.
Known simply as the Wilderness, soldiers called the seventy square miles of dense Virginian forest one of the "waste places of nature" and "a region of gloom." Yet here, in the spring of 1864, the Civil War escalated to a new level of horror.
Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Federal armies, opened the Overland Campaign with a vow to never turn back. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, moved into the Wilderness to block Grant's advance. Thick underbrush made for difficult movement and low visibility. And these challenges were terrifyingly compounded by the outbreak of fires that burned casualties and left both sided blinded in a sea of smoke.
Driven by desperation, duty, confusion, and fire, soldiers on both sides marveled that anyone might make it out alive. "This, viewed as a battleground, was simply infernal," a Union soldier later said. Another called it "Hell itself."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Touring the Battlefield
• Foreword
• Ellwood: The Present as Prologue
• Chapter One: Ellwood
• Chapter Two: The Wilderness
• Chapter Three: Grant Takes Command
• Chapter Four: Lee Moves In
• Chapter Five: Quandary at Saunders Field
• Chapter Six: The Sprawl of Battle
• Chapter Seven: Homeplaces in the Swirl of War
• Chapter Eight: Crises Along the Plank Road
• Chapter Nine: A Heavy Pounding Match
• Chapter Ten: The Most Critical Moment
• Chapter Eleven: Horror in the Forest
• Chapter Twelve: Confederates Unleashed
• Chapter Thirteen: Gordon’s Flank Attack
• Chapter Fourteen: Grant Moves South
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: “Their Spencer Carbines Made the Dense Woods Ring” Federal Cavalry in the Battle of the Wildernesss
• Appendix B: “It’s Griffin, not Gregg”: Cracks in the Army of the Potomac’s High Command
• Appendix C: Where’s Burnside?
• Appendix D: Unfriendly Fire: The Wounding of James Longstreet
• Appendix E: The Wilderness as Wilderness, Then and Now
• Appendix F: Building a Battlefield: The CCC in the Wilderness
• Order of Battle
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author