What I would like to share with you today are some observations about the Battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse that really culminated the first week or so of fighting between Grant and Lee and its the battle that came to be known as the Battle of the Bloody Angle and what I would like to do with that is to use that as a way to look at Lee as a general in 1864. Lee in his finest hours and to look briefly at Grant in 1864 because I see Grant very different than most historians do and I will also talk about a common soldier. I spent some time having gone through loads of diaries and letters trying to find the most unlikely hero of the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse.

About 8 or 9 months ago we moved down to Charleston, South Carolina. There's a Preservation Society which is a historical society there and the lady that runs it is Mary Julia Royal. She gave me a stack of papers several months ago to look through because she knew that I wrote Confederate history, that's what they call it down there. I really don't write Confederate history, I'm impartial. I write for both sides. As a matter of fact, Gary Gallagher whenever he has a seminar he always asks me to talk about the Yankee generals. I tell him I don't mind doing that since I used to be a Federal Prosecutor. I prosecuted drug dealers and other scurvy types, I can talk about Union generals without any trouble and I will tonight.

Mary Julia gave me these papers and what I found in there was a gold mine. There was a man who sent letters home and there were documents and memoirs from other people who knew him. I had finally located the most unlikely hero of the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. A man who was never destined to be a hero but actually ended up being one. No one had ever heard about him before and I didn't have a chance to put him in my book on Spotsylvania Courthouse because I didn't find out about him until the book was already in page proofs. His name is Charlie Whilden.

Charlie was born in Charleston in 1824. It was a fairly well to do family. His dad was a newspaper editor, Joe Whilden. There were several children in the family and they were an old line southern family, they had relatives in the Revolutionary War. They came over not with the Mayflower but not long afterwards.

Charlie went to law school a mistake that several others here have made. He became a lawyer but Charleston in 1840 when he was practicing law was having an economic slump so he didn't do very well. He moved up to Columbia, South Carolina what they call the up country. He didn't do well there either. He decided he would move for some reason that no one's ever figured out to a place called Detroit, Michigan. He ended up on one of the lakes up there and started selling real estate, lost his shirt, and had to send back to borrow money from one of his brothers to bail him out. Here he was in total disgrace in his early thirties.

He decided that he had to have a legal way of making a living so he joined the army. He joined the army as a civilian employee. His luck continued to run the same course. They sent him out to Fort Levinworth, Kansas and at that time it was filled with drunken soldiers and Indians. Charlie wanted to get married and have a family but no one would have anything to do with him. There's some fascinating correspondence from a 50 year old dowager who apparently turned soured on him fairly quickly. I can't tell you why.

Charlie ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico destined for oblivion and then suddenly in April, 1861 the Yankees fired on Fort Sumter. Charlie Whilden heard about the Civil War several months after it occurred, something stirred in his breast and he decided to return to his home state and fight for the Confederacy. So, given his usual luck, he found it very difficult to get there over land so he caught some boats, ended up in Bermuda and had to then catch a boat from Bermuda back to Charleston, South Carolina. His luck continued to hold. It was a open boat and he got sun stroke and by the time he got to South Carolina he was having epileptic fits. He tried several times to get into the Confederate Army and there are several documented incidents where he was accepted then rejected and thrown out.

Finally, February of 1864 came around and lo and behold Charlie was accepted into the Confederate Army. Those of you who know anything about the history of the Civil War know that by 1864 you could be 14 years old, you could be 50 years old or you could have one leg so long as you move and shoot Yankees they would take you. They didn't care about anything else and Charlie Whilden they figured could stand up some of the time, and if they were lucky he wouldn't have an epileptic fit during one of the battles and so they took him.

Charlie's luck continued to hold because Charlie was accepted first into the Army of Northern Virginia, that's Robert E. Lee's army. That army was going to be doing some terrible fighting then as it turns out he was accepted into an army corps in the Army of Northern Virginia that's called the Third Corps under Ambrose Powell Hill, a fighting general. Not only did he go under Ambrose Powell Hill's Third Corps, he was taken into a brigade headed by Samuel McGowan, another crazy lawyer, politician from Lawrence, South Carolina. The problem with Sam McGowan was that whenever the fighting got really tough and they had to have the storm troopers, that's the brigade that Powell Hill would call on, and that's the one Charlie was going to end up into. But it gets worse than that because when Sam McGowan went into where the fighting was hottest and they needed to find a regiment that would really take care of things because no one else would, they always called on the 1st South Carolina. Guess what, Charlie Whilden was called into the 1st South Carolina, February, 1864 and shipped up to Richmond and from there up to the front below the Rapidan Rivers waiting for the Battle of the Wilderness.

What was the picture up there in Virginia that Charlie was getting dumped into? Well, its a fascinating picture. The bottom line is this, the nature of the Civil War had changed dramatically. It had changed dramatically mainly because Ulysses S. Grant. The war in the eastern theater and that was Virginia up until the Spring of 1864 had been pretty much a disaster for the North. There had been some victories won by both sides but the two armies, the Union Army and the Confederate Army were facing each other in central Virginia across a line that was not that far different from where they had been when the war began. There hadn't been much progress and there was a political election coming up, the election of November, 1864. It was critical for Lincoln that he get victories because if he didn't then the Peace Party or the Democrats, George McClellan was going to be running in that race, would have a fair chance of unseating him. The Confederates realized that also and they knew they had to win some victories or at least stop Lincoln's army so that they could get him out of power and have somebody in that they would have a better chance at negotiating a peace with.

So in any event, what Lincoln did was to turn to the western theater where there had been a virtually unbroken series of Union victories and selected to head all of the armies of the U.S., a gentlemen by the name of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was undoubtedly the hero of the western theater. He was the hero of Fort Donaldson. He had gobbled up a Confederate army at Vicksburg opening the Mississippi River to Union commerce. He had also knocked a Confederate army off of a mountain top at Chattanooga. This was a man who could fight. This was a man who could beat the Confederates and this was the man that Lincoln decided he was going to bring east to beat Robert E. Lee. When Grant came east he brought with him what I consider to be a three part program that was going to be a dramatic departure from everything that happened before and was going to dramatically effect what was going to happen to old Charlie Whilden.

The three part program looked something like this. In the past, Union armies east and west had moved independently, they hadn't been coordinated. Grant said they were like a bulky team, one would go and then the other would go and so the Confederates would have time to shift forces to one or the other and reinforce them and do all of their evil deeds. What Grant decided to do was to make sure that all armies east and west moved forward at the same time. There would be coordination across all armies across all fronts.

Secondly, the armies would no longer fight the way they did in the past. In the past, during those three years when they were skirmishing at Gettysburg and those places, you had a common pattern - the two armies would come together, they would shoot at each other for a couple of days and then they would come apart and they would sit around for four or fives months getting strong again, then they would go at it again for a few days like a couple of dogs, come apart and that would be the end of it. Grant realized that was no way to win a war. What he wanted to do was to start fighting on all fronts and fight without stopping until the Confederate armies were destroyed. There would be no resting this time. He would go at the Confederate armies day after day until they couldn't fight anymore.

The third thing he realized and put into practice was the idea that it didn't make sense to try to go after capturing territory, as the armies had done before. If you capture land, you might have to leave it, those are very temporary victories. What you had to do to win the war was to destroy the Confederate army. So the third prong of Grant's program was not to worry about geographical goals but your main goal is going to be to destroy those armies. So here's the man that the likes of had not yet been seen in this war. A man who was ready fight across all of the fronts, fight unremittingly every day and go after Confederate armies until they were destroyed. A good idea, Charlie Whilden was going to be meat in that grinder.

Who was it that would be opposing Grant on the other side. Robert E. Lee, and his army of Northern Virginia, probably the most famous Confederate force of the war. Unlike his counterpart in the west that lost virtually every battle it fought, Lee generally won all of his battles. Sometimes he'd lose a higher proportion of his soldiers than the enemy would but generally he came away at least with a tactical victory of some kind or another. That gave him a great psychological edge. Lee was going to face a whole new set of problems fighting Grant. Basically he was going to have to change two big things about how he did business.

First, Lee was going to face an army at least double the size of his. Grant pulled together an army of about 120,000. Lee was going to have about 60,000 and the Federals were going to come at him from several different sides with even more armies. So Lee was going to be very heavily outnumbered and he was going to be fighting with real problems in personnel, real problems in supply, and real problems in all of the things that you need to fight a war. Lee liked to fight aggressively, he was very offensive. He liked to go after the enemy and liked to launch spectacular flanking attacks. This time he was meant to do something different. He could no longer fight the kind of aggressive, offensive warfare that he fought in the past simply because he didn't have the men to do it and he was up against opponent who was bringing too much against him to do it on this occasion.

The second thing that Lee liked to do was to handle his own commanders by giving them a great deal of discretion. He liked to set the big goals for his army and then let his generals carry out his program. That had worked well in the past when he had people like Stonewall Jackson, the lemon sucker or he had people like James Longstreet but Jackson had been killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville about a year before and Longstreet was to get shot during the second day of his campaign against Grant so Lee was going to loose those commanders that he was used to giving great discretion to. So he was left basically with three people that he had very little faith in. He had three army corps.

I mentioned Ambrose Powell Hill who headed the Third Corps. Hill was very aggressive but often he was so aggressive that he got himself into a lot of trouble and often when Lee needed him he would get sick. He had this mysterious illness and there are various speculations as to what it was. Powell Hill being from Culpepper, Virginia, those boys from Culpepper are real ladies men. It is well known about Powell Hill's propensity to chase women. It is said that the disease that had caused him this recurring problem was a prostate infection caused by gonorrhea. That is probably so because that's documented from his time at West Point. It is also known that he used to date a lady named Miss Marcy who later became the wife of General George McClellan. He also dated a young lady named Emily Chase she was a well healed lady from Baltimore and Emily married a gentlemen named Gouvenor Warren who was the Union Chief Engineer who founded the importance of Little Round Top and became a national celebrity and then was put in charge of an army corps. The first time Warren met Hill on the battlefield was at the Battle of Bristol Station when Warren administered a bad hiding to Powell Hill and actually surprised him hiding behind some railway and drove him back. After that battle, Warren sent a note across the lines to Powell Hill and there's a copy of it in the archives. It's one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. It said "Hill I have whipped your Corps and married your old sweetheart". That's the kind of man that Lee had to rely upon to do a lot of his dirty work. There a lot of questions about Powell Hill.

He had in charge of his Second Corps a gentlemen named Richard Stoddard Ewell. I think Ewell lost a leg in an earlier battle but he had come back to replace Stonewall Jackson. He also had lady problems. He had been a bachelor most of his life but he did have a childhood sweetheart named Lucinda. Lucinda had jolted him and then married a guy named Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown died and after Ewell got shot, Lucinca came and nursed him back to health and they resumed their earlier love affair and she married him. He didn't know how to handle being married, he used to introduce her to everybody as my wife Mrs. Brown. His aides in the Second Corps claim that she was leading him around by the nose and that the entire Confederate Second Corps was being run by this foolish old man who was madly in love. He showed some real problems in taking discretionary orders of the kind that Lee liked to tell. Ewell was not the kind of commander that Lee could really rely upon either.

His other commander James Longstreet whom he did rely upon was shot early in this campaign. He brought in a replacement, a South Carolinian named Robert Anderson, but Anderson was very untried. So what Lee was faced with to fight this juggernaut of the Union Army is a command structure that is unlike any that he's had to deal with before. Generals that he is not free to delegate responsibility to and what you are going to see is Lee at Spotsylvania Courthouse having to micro-manage his army. He does it masterfully, in a way that brings to my mind what he did at the Battle of Antietam.

Grant, Lee and Charlie Whilden sitting in the army waiting to see what's going to happen. Let's get the story going. Those are the characters and the setting. On May 4, Grant started his campaign against Lee. There's a river that runs across central Virginia called Rapidan River. Grant's forces were above the river, the Army of the Potomac under General Meade augmented by the Union 9th Corps under General Burnside. Lee is below that River on the south side of it with his forces waiting for Grant to do something because he knows he can't take the offensive because there are too many Yankees up there and there are Yankees all around him.

Grant has normally been thought of in the past as a general who likes to attack head long without doing any planning. He would throw his men at the enemy and didn't really care how many people he got killed. I disagree very strongly with that analysis and I think you'll see why in just a minute. Grant invisioned starting the campaign with a maneuver. He wasn't going to attack Lee head on across the Rapidan River. Instead he planned to maneuver around Lee's flank and then swing in toward Lee below the River. His belief was that this would force Lee to evacuate those strong entrenchments and swing around to meet him and then he could fight Lee in open ground away from entrenchments and beat him. Well, it was a good idea but it fell apart for a variety of reasons most of which had to do with Grant and the Army of the Potomac. Grant's cavalry failed to do what it was supposed to do. It didn't screen Lee's advance, it didn't tell Grant where Lee was and it didn't hide Grant's army from Lee. Also, the Federals stopped before they should of and spent the night in this horrible place in Virginia called the Wilderness of Spotslyvania, an area that had been used for iron mining in the past. It had been cut down, it was all thick second growth, switch and chickpa. The cavalry was useless, the infantry men couldn't see more than a few feet on either side of them. A very bad place to fight a battle and a very good place for a small army to fight. When Lee realized that Grant had stopped in the Wilderness and was sitting there, Lee moved quickly. Lee came up with a plan that was probably the most daring plan he'd ever had in his life. What he decided to do was a desperate gamble, the kind of thing that if it works everybody says your a genius and if it failed they would say you're a damn fool for even trying it. That's the kind the thing that Lee liked to do and here's what he decided to do.

There were two roads below the Rapidan River that ran from where Lee was to where Grant was. The uppermost road was called the Orange Turnpike and below that was the Orange Plank Road. What Lee decided to do was to take part of Ewell's corps and send it out the Turnpike right into Grant and take a part of Hill's corps and sent it out to Plank Road into Grant and have those two small forces pin Grant in place for at least a day so that his maneuverable element James Longstreet's 1st Corps could swing below that whole mess and come up in the rear of the Federals and beat them up and blast them right back across the Rapidan River the same way he had done to Joe Hooker a year before. A pretty daring plan and the problem with it was this. Those two prongs of Lee's army that were going to be pinioning Grant in the Wilderness were going to be separated by three or four miles of dense wilderness and there would be no way for Lee to reinforce them. If Grant figured out what was going on and turned on either part of Lee's army, he could wipe it out. He would have 120,000 men against 15,000 or 20,000 men. Lee was dividing his army right in the face of the enemy, right next to them and courting disaster. He perceived he had to score a victory and this was the only way to do it given all of the circumstances and that's exactly what he did.

As a matter of fact, that morning as Hill started out one road and Ewell started out the other to pin Grant in place. Those two prongs of the Confederate army moved out and basically Lee's plan happened as well as it could have possibly been done. On the turnpike, Ewell pinioned Grant in place and down on the Plank Road Powell Hill's boys locked General Hancock and parts of the 6th Corps in place and held them just like Lee wanted to do. The problem was this, down there on the Plank Road, Hill had at his disposal only one Confederate Division, Henry Heth's boys. They were so overwhelmed that he had to get reinforcements. They called back for a division under Cadamus Wilcox. Wilcox came down with one of his best units, Sam McGowan's South Carolinians. So the South Carolinians on the first day of the Battle of the Wilderness, the first day of this campaign, went right down to the Plank Road, decided to see if they could retrieve a virtually impossible situation. Charlie Whilden was there. Two of the units within that brigade were sent below the Plank. They tried to push their way through under brush and they were blasted back by tremendous musketry. Hancock's men had cannons that were firing right down Plank Road, the Confederate's couldn't join their forces together on either side of it. Some of the more daring Carolina boys would run across the road have all the cannons fire and then everybody else would run across the road and they managed to get everybody up on the north side of the Plank Road and by dint of bravery and tremendous fighting hold Hancock back until nighttime came.

That night Lee decided Longstreet would be up in time that he wouldn't have to reform the troops that he had entrenched facing Grant. He had Longstreet come up. Longstreet got there late the next morning. Grant focused all of his energy down on that Plank Road where Charlie and his friends were and he drove them back. We have a picture on the morning of May 6th of that brave South Carolina brigade, Sam McGowan's boys, running as fast as they could to the rear to get away from Grant's men who were coming after them. Robert E. Lee was in the rear and he was in a field called Widow Tapp Field and he was next to Lieutenant Colonel Pogue's cannons and he sees all of his men come running back and he said something that was going to sting Charlie and his friends very badly and was going to explain a lot of what happened a few days later at the Battle of the Bloody Angle. Lee said something very nasty. He looked over and he saw all of these South Carolina boys running back and he saw Sam McGowan's head bobbing up and down through there and he called out "General McGowan what is this brave brigade of yours doing running like a flock of geese". A bad thing to say, particularly to armed men. Sam McGowan called back "General Lee, these men are not whipped, they need but a place to reform and they will fight as well as ever." Longstreet came up in time to save the day and by the end of the day the Battle of the Wilderness with Lee holding in strong position on high ground and Grant finding himself basically still in the Wilderness in Spotsylvania. Well, Charlie and his men had something to think about. They basically acted like cowards in front of their revered leader.

Grant decided that he was not going to continue the Battle of the Wilderness. He decided instead to resort to maneuver exactly as he had started this campaign. So what he did was to disengage from Lee the very next morning and try to swing his army that evening down toward a little hamlet called Spotsylvania Courthouse that would put him between Lee and Richmond. He thought that would force Lee to leave the Wilderness and come down and fight Grant on better ground. Things went wrong with the Army of the Potomac, the movement didn't happen as cleanly as it should have, Lee's cavalry under his nephew Fitzhugh Lee held the Federals back, his new 1st Corps, Longstreet having been shot, Richard H. Anderson, managed to get ahead of Grant and by the time Grant's men got near Spotsylvania Courthouse they found themselves facing the Confederate Army again. Things didn't work out so well. Lee had out maneuvered Grant.

There are two things that took place that will get us to what I'm really going to talk about which is The Battle of the Bloody Angle. The Confederate position at Spotsylvania Courthouse was made out of earthworks. Up to this point in the Civil War generally troops had fought standing up across open ground. In the Wilderness, Lee's men had started to dig ditches, stacked the dirt in front of the ditches, laid logs in front of it scattering various obstacles in front of their trenches to hold the attacking force in place. This really started to blossom during this campaign. The Union soldiers almost immediately started to do it also and as far as I can tell it sprung from the minds of the common soldier. There was no order being given by Lee or his corps commanders to do this kind of thing. When they built these earth works in front of Spotsylvania Courthouse to hold Grant back, they were masterpieces. The Confederates at that point figured you could dig a trench and leave the ground as a shelf so that when you're loading you can step down in it and you wouldn't be shot. These were fearsome things. They were so fearsome that it would take a defender and give them two, three, four, five times the power they'd have before. Once the enemy started to charge, Grant's men came at you they would get entangled in all of these abatis, entanglements and stacks and things and the Confederates would just sit there from behind their earthworks and shoot at them. It was very hard to hit a Confederate behind his earthworks. These were tough earthworks to bust and no one had really dealt with these in the field before to any extent.

Secondly, Lee in constructing this fortified line, made a military error and he made it on purpose he understood what he was doing. If you have a earthwork in more or less a straight line it's very defensivable, but if you have a big bulge in it you can have a problem. Lee had a big bulge in his earthworks it was what they militarily call a salient a big point that stuck out for about a half mile and it was shaped like a mule shoe and the soldiers called it the mule shoe.

He feared that if he let the Federals control that high ground they would be able to shoot artillery into his line that he set up. So, he decided to take a chance and put that mule shoe there but he realized it could only be held if he had artillery in place, a very strong stand of artillery and then he thought he could hold that mule shoe. The next three or four days evolved a series of assaults by Grant in attempts to break through these Confederate earthworks. He tried going around them that didn't work. He tried sending a pack ginsem but that didn't work. He tried attacking discrete parts of the Confederate line but that didn't work and he tried attacking them all at once with huge attacks across the front and that didn't work. That occupied the first half of that book of mine on Spotsylvania Courthouse.

Grant did take some inspiration from one attack that he launched in this whole series of attacks. In the evening of May 10th after a couple of days trying to batter these earthworks, a charge was made by a gentlemen named Colonel Emory Upton he took twelve regiments, massed them fairly tightly, brought them to the edge of the field near the Confederate earthworks and then charged them quickly across the field. He did not have his men stop to load which was a disastrous thing that everyone had been doing. They'd get shot while they were loading of course. Instead he had them run clean across the field without pausing to load, without stopping, without stopping to pick up wounded men and those that made it there were to jump up on the works and spread out in both directions and basically open a huge breach in the line. The idea then was that another force would come in as a back up and exploit that breach and then he would have split Lee's line in half and he could deal with each part piecemeal. It was a good idea. It failed mainly because the backup force that was supposed to be there wasn't there for a variety of reasons. Grant saw the wisdom of this idea and his force that went in under Upton did manage to break the Confederate line and actually open up a breach that was pretty wide. If the attacking or backup force had been there, he could have exploited that breach and done what he wanted.

So Grant decided he would take some help from there and he decided this. What if he pulled together an attacking force that was not going to be twelve regiments but a whole Union Army Corps. He would take his 2nd Corps under Winfield Scott Hancock, his best corps commander, and this was his largest corps about 20,000 men, and he would send it against the Confederate line just like he did with Emory Upton. He would use for backup not a division as he had thought about before but instead he would use his entire army as the backup. He would send in his 6th Corps, 5th Corps, and his 9th Corps to exploit that breach and he would send Hancock's 2nd Corps that attacking force not against any part of Lee's line but to the tip of that mule shoot because that's where he judged he would have his best chance. He would send them forward under cover of darkness just before the sun came up so the Confederates wouldn't have any time to prepare using the element of surprise. Grant came up with this idea and I think it was a damn good idea.

Unfortunately, something went wrong with his plan as they always seem to do with Grant that's why he's called the butcher. In any event this is Grant's plan. He was also aided by the elements of the late afternoon, early evening of May 11th as he was getting his troops into place to this surprise attack it started to rain. The thunder roared, the rain poured down and the sound of all that and the confusion of it in large part made the marching hard for the Union soldiers but it also hid a lot of what they were doing from the Confederates. So it helped the element of surprise, and Grant was being aided by the elements for at least one time in his campaign. Usually they messed him up but this time they seemed to be helping him.

Grant was also helped by Robert E. Lee because Robert E. Lee made one of the biggest mistakes of his military career. He got fragmentary intelligence about what Grant was doing and he concluded that Grant was not getting ready to attack but rather preparing to retreat. Lee decided that he had whipped Grant and Grant was getting ready to pull up his tents and go back to Fredericksburg and run back across the Rapidan River. Well, Lee decided being very aggressive that since Grant was going to be retreating he wanted to be able to chase Grant quickly and there was one thing that would hold him from moving quickly after Grant. That was those damn cannons up in that mule shoe or salient because that artillery in order to get back to roads that they could move on would have to move through some heavy woods. He couldn't chase Grant if he had to sit around waiting for cannons. So, what Lee decided to do was as Grant's men were moving around to assault the tip of that mule shoe, Lee decided he would get the cannons out of there. So during the evening of May 11, all of those 2nd Corps guns were pulled out except for a few units on the left side of that big mule shoe.

During the night the Union's 2nd Corps prepared for its assault about 4:00 Hancock wets the window of the Brown house, it was his headquarters and it was still raining. He asks General Barlow if it was a good time to go forward and Barlow suggested that it wasn't quite time yet it was still too dark the men couldn't see what they were doing. At 4:30 Hancock gave the nod and orders went out to 20,000 soldiers to march that half mile across the land up against the point of this mule shoe, an area the Federals had never attacked before, an area that was not that well known to them. So this huge force of Union soldiers, a force almost double the size of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, a massive charge, swelled up from the Union works and started going across those fields. Several of them went through some swamp area, some woods but they all finally came out on a ridge and there were some Confederate pickets there. At first they thought that this was the real Confederate line, and that it would be easy to run through it but it turned out they were just pickets. There ahead of those soldiers a few hundred yards away was a swell that dropped down and came up the other side running across the lip of the far ridge was this ugly run of red dirt. That was where the Confederate main entrenchments were.

Just at that point the very first elements of Lee's guns started to come back because during the night Ewell had finally figured out what was going on and orders had been sent back to bring those guns back up "it looks like we might be attacked afterall". Just as Grant's soldiers started to run down across that swell toward the head of that salient, the Lee cannons started to roll up and apparently one cannon shot was fired, Hancock's soldiers decided it was better to keep going straight forward then to run back. That huge mass of men rolled down into swell, up the other side and they started clawing through that abatis, all of those entanglements. There are fantastic stories of men climbing over the tops of those barbed bushes, climbing underneath them, and clawing their way. The Confederates were now lining the front of their earthworks, standing up there with their muskets aiming down ready to fire into this mass of men. The Stonewall brigade which was up near the front of that area, aimed down at that mass of swirling blue coats, fired, percussion caps went off but the powder was left. The muskets didn't fire. General Jim Walker of Stonewall's unit, left a fantastic account of sitting there on top of the earthworks, watching the Federals climb over those entanglements and sweep up in front of the earthworks, helpless to stop them because his guns were not firing off.

In a nutshell, within minutes Grant had taken the whole head of the salient, the 2nd Corps had broken through, Confederates were being swooped up everywhere. Ewell's entire front of his corps, Ed Johnson's division, was destroyed. Confederate generals were getting scooped out and captured. It was a tremendous Union victory. Lee reacted very quickly. Lee wasn't asleep at the switch. He realized what was happening as soon as he heard the noise up front and he started sending in his units piecemeal to try to seal that big breach that was now yawning in his lines. He sent General John B. Gordon, that powerful commander from Georgia, who at that time headed a division over toward the right hand side of the salient and Gordon managed to pull some troops together and sent them forward. Because Grant's men had become so mixed up in that area from breaking through the earthworks, from their charge, and from scooping up prisoners, a small number of Confederates were able to push them back on that part of the line.

But there was a whole western part of these earthworks that needed attention because Federals were storming through. So Lee in a spectacular feat of generalship started to pull brigades from different parts of his line to plug that gap. First he reached over to the left part of his forces, and had them come running up near the McCool house where they had to turn and then try to charge and plug the first breach in that left part of that big mule shoe. Webster formed his men and they charged ahead. Webster was shot and his brigade took horrible losses. By this time, Grant had had cannons rolled up and there was Federal artillery dropping down in that area. Thousands upon thousands of muskets were firing at the same time. Men who were there described it as like having bees buzzing around your head. It was a terrible place to be because the rain was pouring down and it was still in a foggy glow of morning. Ramseur's men now minus a commander, Brian Grimes of the 4th North Carolina, took charge of the brigade at that time. They pushed their way up to those earthworks and managed to block the first part of the broken part of those earthworks in the salient. Lee then called for his next brigade and that was the brigade from the 3rd Corps, Ambrose Powell Hill's Corps. It was headed by General Abner Perrin who happened to be a South Carolinian. Perrin saw the problem right away. He was a very ambitious man. He was a brigadier general and he announced by the end of the day he would either be a dead brigadier general or a live major general because he expected to win this thing. He sent his men forward and he was killed within minutes but they managed by dint of courage taking tremendous losses to put themselves next to the North Carolinians recapturing another portion of those broken earthworks.

Lee then called Nat Harris' Mississippi boys and had them repeat that same route. They ran up and plugged another sector of that broken line. Here's what the situation looked like at this point. The rain was coming down, Grant was now deciding to react because he saw that the real place of this battle was going to have to be fought within this sector of earthworks, only a few hundred yards wide that Lee was trying to plug. That is where Grant decided to put all of his energy so he called on his entire 6th Corps. A force of soldiers nearly 20,000 to rush right for that point so he would have undisputable fire power. Grant started to roll up cannons and they rolled up a section of artillery right up next to those earthworks on the Union side and that section started to open and blast huge holes in it killing anybody behind the earthworks which they hoped would be Confederates. The Confederates in those works were facing a terrible problem. The part of the line that Ramseur and Perrin and Harris had retaken slopes slightly down hill and then that line rises uphill a little bit and then makes a bend. That angle was known to the soldiers as the west angle and later on they would come to call it the Bloody Angle. Whoever held that angle, held the key to this whole part of the line because the angle was higher than the ground below it. So Ramseur's, Harris' and Perrin's men were getting fired down upon by Federals getting that angle. It was a horrible situation to be in and if you go to that site today you will be able to appreciate exactly what I'm talking about. Whoever held that angle, held the key to this battle.

Well, Lee at this point with overwhelming numbers of Federals pouring in decided that it was time to seal that breach. Something had to be done to take the point of that angle. Who did Robert E. Lee turn to? Sam McGowan and the South Carolina boys. They were sleeping back up on the right hand side of that salient. It had been a long campaign, they were exhausted and they were lying back there because they weren't in the threatened part of the line when a courier came running back on a lathered horse. They were needed at the front. There are some spectacular accounts of that march of the South Carolina boys from back where they were up toward the front. The bullets were whizzing, the artillery shells were dropping in, they formed and then started to run up toward the area right adjacent to that angle so that they could capture that stretch of Confederate line that would give Lee victory.

Sam McGowan was shot. He took the fifth wound that he had during the war. He survived that wound and he was immediately replaced by Colonel Joseph N. Brown of the 14th South Carolina. Brown took control of the brigade. They managed to push themselves up to where Nat Harris' Mississippians were and get intermingled with some of them and reaching a few more yards up to right toward that peak of the angle.

Now the Federal forces were really massing out there. The 6th Corps was there and this was the heat of the battle. It was a nasty place. The soldiers now were starting to stack up on the Confederate side in the trenches, two, three, sometimes four or five and even six men deep according to some accounts - dead on top of wounded. People crawling out from underneath stacks of dead men. Soldiers would jump up on top of these earthworks and fire down on the soldiers on the other side down below them. They would be handing rifles up. This was turning into pandemonium. This was the end of civilized warfare. It was hand to hand slaughter. There are accounts of a Confederate color bearer up in one of the North Carolina regiments being pulled over the earthworks by his hair by a Federal that reached over. Men were stabbing with bayonets. One Confederate Colonel stood there and was bayoneting Federals over his shoulder or least he claimed to be in his later memoirs and having his men behind him catch him. But it was a nasty and horrible scene, men out there to kill each other, the rain going, the thunder roaring.

Here are all of Lee's boys, four brigades that he set up, stuffed down in this area infiltrated by Federals up on that point. Well, Joseph Newton Brown decided that that point had to be taken. He needed most of his brigade to hold the line here but he had to send his best men in to take the point of the Bloody Angle. Who did he decide to send in? The 1st South Carolina. Word went out to the 1st South Carolina in that mess that was going on at the Angle to take the very point of the Angle and hold it so that the rest of the Confederate line could form free from that plunging fire. Well, Camelius McCleary who was the head of the 1st South Carolina because the colonel was shot very early on in this whole action. He was succeeded by Lieutenant Colonel Shooter. Shooter stood up to give the order and he got shot and his brother next to him got killed at that same time. The whole family wiped out. It was a travesty that was happening but the order had gone out and the 1st South Carolina turned and started toward the Angle. Some of them were running along the crest of those earthworks, others sweeping down the trench behind it.

Well, the color bearer of the 1st South Carolina got shot right away and with most Confederate regiments they usually had two color bearers and this one certainly did. One that would carry the Confederate battle flag and one that would carry the state flag. In this case it was the blue flag with white palm tree on it of South Carolina. Well, the bearer carrying the Confederate flag got shot and he went down dead and the flag fell in the mud and then something happened to Charlie Whilden. Charlie looked at the flag and then he looked over to a gentlemen who is known as Lieutenant Anderson. Anderson was from Company K of the 1st South Carolina and he was the person who was responsible for selecting the color bearer. He always selected them from Company K because that was the practice and Charlie wasn't from Company K. Somehow Charlie's eyes and Lieutenant Anderson's eyes met and Charlie nodded toward the flag and Lieutenant Anderson nodded back. Charlie Whilden the forty year old loser and epileptic from Charleston, South Carolina did the first brave thing in his life. He bent down and picked up the Confederate flag and started running just like Forrest Gump. Well, the rest of the 1st South Carolina started running behind him and Charlie went running and screaming. A bullet snapped the Confederate flag staff in half, the flag fell to the mud again and Charlie reached down, picked up that Confederate flag, wrapped around his body and kept running toward the point of the angle. The rest of the regiment followed. Charlie was shot through the shoulder and short distance short of the angle but the rest of the regiment came punching through, seized the head of the Bloody Angle and a stretch of earthworks several yards on the other side of it. South Carolina planted its flag there, Mississippians came up and the flag of the 16th Mississippi was planted there and that point of the angle and the rest of those earthworks were held for the rest of the battle by those Confederates.

The battle had just started by the way - The Battle of the Bloody Angle. This is now somewhere around 8:30-9:00 in the morning and the battle was to rage all that day, all the next night until 3:00 the next morning. And for the those next almost 20 hours, those two armies tried to annihilate themselves back and forth on this point of a few hundred yards wide that formed that part of the salient. Grant not only put in his 2nd Corps, 6th Corps he pulled in two divisions out of the 5th Corps and punched them in there. Federals were lined up 40-50 deep firing all at the same time. This pandemonium went on and on. Bodies were stacked up on both sides, and men who fought at Antietam which was supposed to have been the bloodiest single day of the war say that the carnage there didn't hold a candle to what they saw at Antietam. Men were being shot in a small space and there dead men stacked on dead men. You could walk all the way from the Confederate earthworks back to the far woods on blue uniforms and in the Confederate line you could start shoveling Confederates and they would be five or six deep dead. Men fell asleep during this fighting and they would wake up, find their cartridges and start shooting again that's how fierce this battle was.

Lee realized that line had to be held and so he built a reserve line behind it and once that reserve line was done then the angle could be evacuated and he would have a straight line and he would not have a weak salient in it. That was finally done by about 3:00 in the morning. He called back those exhausted men who had been there for some 20-23 hours to come back and they did. The Federals didn't pursue because they were as tired as Lee's men were and the Battle of Bloody Angle was over.

What do I make of all this? It says a lot about Grant. Grant had a very good idea about how to break through Lee's line but as many of his other ideas it was wanting in the execution. He didn't have a force nearby to exploit the breach that he finally made, the same problem he had a few days before. He failed to deploy his men well and probably the worse thing that he did was that he had nobody at the front to coordinate the various units as they came in. Grant stayed back about a mile to the rear. He would get messages from the front and he would get messages from telegraphs from different Corps Headquarters then he would send his orders out but often they would bear no relationship to the changed situation 15-20 minutes later when the orders got down there. If he would have had somebody at the front with authority to coordinate these various troops the result might have been very different. As it was, he found himself in the exactly the same place he had been throughout this series of engagements facing Lee and Lee now had an even stronger line.

Lee comes across looking very bad and very good. He of course was mistaken in withdrawing his artillery. He completely misread Grant but once the battle opened he used his troops very well. He sent in his best units to the most endangered parts and he pulled them from parts of his lines that he realized were faced by either weak Federal forces or by weak Federal commanders such as General Burnside. Lee fought an extremely good defensive battle. The fact that he was able to prevent Grant from breaching his line and destroying his army prolonged the Civil War for better or for worse for another ten months. It also totally gutted Lee's offensive capacity. His fight in the Wilderness was his last attempt to make a major offensive against the Federals. By the time the Bloody Angle was done, Lee had suffered such attrition in officers and in men that the very idea of an offensive attack was out of the question. You don't see Lee going on the offensive anymore in the war except for some minor offensives and of course Fort Steadmen is the major one that he did do later but there was really no hope that that would succeed.

Well, what about Charlie Whilden? Charlie was not killed. He managed to be taken from the field by the Confederates and ended up in the hospital in Richmond, Virginia. He was nursed back to health and went back to Charleston, South Carolina. He was finished with the war. Charlie's experience in the Civil War lasted about six days but it was six days that probably involved more fighting than most veterans had ever seen.

After the war, there's not a lot known about Charlie. One day in November of 1867, Charlie had left his house and it was a rainy day and he had an epileptic fit and fell face down in a street in Charleston, South Carolina and drowned in a rain puddle. That was the end of Charlie Whilden, the hero of the Battle of the Bloody Angle.

The flag that Charlie had wrapped around him, he did bring back to South Carolina. That flag was preserved by his family and its now in a Confederate Museum in Columbia, South Carolina. It's the 1st South Carolina Battle Flag carried by that regiment. Charlie has been pretty much unknown. The papers that Ms. Royal had that she shared with me had never been published and I wished I had seen them before I finished my book on Spotsylvania Courthouse. I wouldn't changed any of the big pictures or what I had say about anybody but I think it makes a nice touch and really exemplifies how sometimes it's that little man or little soldier that makes such a huge difference in these battles. It's not just the generals, sometimes it's the little men out there too.