The Union’s Bloody Miscue at Spotsylvania’s Muleshoe
By Curtis D. Crockett

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Just after 6 o’clock, early in the evening of May 10, 1864, near Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, a Union officer waved a handkerchief; the Northern guns fell silent, and Colonel Emory Upton, the only officer on horseback, rode to the front of his troops. Twelve Union regiments, some 5,000 men whom Upton declared the best in the army, stood in four ranks, three regiments to a line, with bayonets fixed atop their muskets. Only the muskets of the front three regiments—men from Upton’s own 2nd Brigade —were primed for firing. Upton had given strict instructions that the men not stop for anything—not to fire, not to reload, not to help their wounded —until they breached the Muleshoe, a bulge in the arc of Rebel works around Laurel Hill.

An aloof –some said arrogant —24-year-old combat veteran who had been wounded at First Manassas, commanded artillery in the Seven Days and Antietam battles and led troops at Fredericksburg, Colonel Upton had come to the attention of General Ulysses S. Grant six months earlier when the young tactician captured a Confederate bridgehead at Rappahannock Station. Abandoning the standard attack—a line of men charging in a wave—he condensed his troops into a human battering ram, a tight column of men surging at lightning speed with one aim: to breach the enemy’s entrenchments. If it had worked at Rappahannock Station, it would work here. Upton was sure of it.

Grant needed something to work at this juncture. Exactly two months had passed since the hero of the Western theater arrived in the East to assume the post of commanding general of all the Union armies. He’d found himself in an awkward command situation with General George Meade, technically still commander of the Army of the Potomac; he had discovered General Lee to be a more tenacious foe than he’d imagined, and he was making little if any progress toward ending the war in Virginia. With the Confederates now engaging his troops in ferocious trench warfare and casualty figures escalating on both sides, Grant was looking for a quick, efficient battle and a clean win. Upton’s tactic, he thought, might deliver that.

Decades later, historians and military experts would debate whether Upton’s human battering ram was a bad idea in search of a good one or simply a tactic ahead of its time, one that required more advanced communications technologies to ensure coordination among forces. But on the chaotic afternoon of May 10, 1864, facing the Confederates’ seemingly impenetrable fortification, General Grant figured he had nothing to lose in trying. How could he possibly have guessed that Upton’s plan for a swift, limited-loss encounter would devolve into one of the most primal battles of the entire Civil War.

Preparations for Upton’s assault began early in the afternoon of May 10. Lieutenant Ranald S. Mackenzie of the U.S. Corps of Engineers reconnoitered the field and recommended a site to Upton where his troops could mass undetected in the woods. From there, Upton spied the Confederate position and the engineering marvel that was the Rebels’ entrenchment—a single organic structure of interlocking parts. Head log traverses packed with soil zigzagged the terrain taking advantage of natural features and providing the men with cover from enfilading fire. Abatis were laid in front of the works to slow enemy infantrymen and make them easy pickings for riflemen behind the logs.

Soon the Union’s attacking force began to gather at Mackenzie’s site: three regiments from Upton’s Brigade—the 5th Maine, the 121st New York and the 96th Pennsylvania; the 43rd and 77th New York regiments from Colonel Daniel Bidwell’s brigade; and the 2nd, 5th and 6th Vermont regiments from Colonel Lewis Grant’s brigade. Lieutenant Colonel Martin McMahon, chief of staff to General John Sedgwick, who had been killed only the day before, chose nine additional regiments for the attack from several other brigades, including the 6th Maine, the 49th and 119th Pennsylvania and the 5th Wisconsin of Brig. Gen. Henry Eustis’ brigade. Their orders were simple and direct: race straight toward the Georgia Brigade of Brig. Gen. George Doles midway down the western face of the Muleshoe.

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