James Wilson, at Spotsylvania Court House, Wondered “What If….”

On the morning of May 8, 1864, Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson drove his entire cavalry division down the Fredericksburg Road into Spotsylvania Court House. He met only token resistance from the 3rd Virginia Cavalry—part of William Wickham’s cavalry brigade—which Wilson quickly brushed aside. This put Wilson in the rear of the Confederate infantry position even then forming a mile and a half northwest of town along the Brock Road. The opening battle of Spotsylvania Court House was just unfolding across Spindle Field.

Wilson was in the perfect position to wreck havoc.

Wickham’s entire brigade coalesced in time to delay Wilson, which in turn bought time for two brigades of Confederate infantry to rush to the scene. “It was evident, therefore, that, unless promptly supported by Burnside or other infantry from the rear, I should have to give up the advantageous position I had so easily gained,” Wilson later wrote. He managed to hold on for two hours but, unsupported, he withdrew under orders from his superior, “Little Phil” Sheridan.

“Thus it will be observed that my division was the only part of Grant’s army that ever occupied Spottsylvania Court House till Lee had given up his lines in front of that place and withdrawn toward Richmond,” Wilson concluded.

Burnside, at the time Wilson wished for him in Spotsy, was still back in the Wilderness. He was far enough away that his IX Corps would arrive along the Fredericksburg Road until mid-morning on the next day, May 9.

For his entire life, Wilson wondered What If. . . .

[I]t has always been my conviction that had Burnside pushed promptly through the Wilderness to the left and front he might have joined me in time to make good the position I had gained. With such a union of cavalry and infantry in Lee’s right rear, there would have been nothing left for him but to fall back to a new position beyond the next river, or suffer an overwhelming defeat. The bloody battles which took place for the capture and defense of Spottsylvania Court House would have been avoided and many thousand lives would have been spared to continue operations under much more favorable circumstances. It was a great opportunity lost, but rapid infantry marching in those days was not in fashion. Upon this particular occasion, no one in authority seems to have given the slightest thought to the opportunity offered, nor to have had the slightest idea as to the value of celerity in such operations. The custom of out-marching and out-flanking the enemy had not yet made its appearance in that army, and even after it came it was of painfully slow and uncertain growth.[1]

Burnside had a notorious case of “the slows,” so it wasn’t just a matter of rapid marching being “not in fashion.” Burnside seemed constitutionally incapable of speed during the Overland Campaign.

It wasn’t just Burnside, though. Along the Brock Road, Federal artillerist Charles Wainwright had coincidentally complained about what he perceived to be a chronic lack of speed and urgency by anyone. “[B]oth Warren and Meade were not pushing matters as much as they ought, considering how important it was to reach Spotsylvania Court House before Lee,” he groused, adding:

Every officer was doubtless very tired and the night was very dark, but it is to me impossible to understand the perfect indifference with which officers allow their men to lag and break ranks for such little things. The fact of our march at night was enough to tell every man that we wanted to reach some place without Lee’s knowing it; and one would think that a desire for their own safety would spur them all up to do it, so as to avoid a fight.

He concluded: “I feel sure that had our column been properly pushed we might have got up. . . .”[2]

Also worth noting in Wilson’s “What If” lament: he complained that “no one in authority” seemed to care about alacrity. What he politely sidesteps in that accusation is the fact that the person in ultimate authority was his then-patron, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, general in chief of the army. By the time Wilson published his memoir in 1912, Grant had been dead in the ground for some twenty-seven years, but Wilson was shrewd enough to still give himself the wiggle room of culpable deniability: Wilson complains, but he doesn’t name names.

As it happened, Grant did care about fast movement, but he was still learning the reins of the Army of the Potomac, which proved slower and more cumbersome than Grant realized. It would take Grant weeks to learn this painful lessons, ordering quick marches to set up surprise attacks that could never materialize because the army moved too slowly. Whether one could call this slowness “in fashion” is arguable, but from Grant’s perspective, it certainly wasn’t desirable.

Burnside would arrive on the eastern front on May 9 and establish a firm hold, allowing Grant to shift his supply line to Fredericksburg—a huge operational advantage. On May 10, Burnside would launch an attack against the Confederate Third Corps and drive them to within a couple hundred yards of the village’s edge. Although he never made it into the village as Wilson did, Burnside came closer than any other Federal infantry commander.

But as the saying goes, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. While Wilson and his cavalry—and all their horseshoes—did better than that, it left Wilson wondering, for the rest of his life, what “almost” could’ve looked like if anyone else had done just as well.

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[1] James H. Wilson, Under the old flag; recollections of military operations in the war for the Union, the Spanish war, the Boxer rebellion (New York: D. Appleton, 1912), 394.

[2] Charles Wainwright, A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journal of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865, (New York: DaCapo, 1998), 356.