Mine Run

Fought in Orange County, Virginia, from November 27 to December 2, 1863, the clash at Mine Run is also remembered under the names Payne's Farm and New Hope Church, and is sometimes called the Mine Run campaign. The engagement pitted the Union Army of the Potomac against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, with Union forces seeking but failing to achieve a decisive victory. Plagued by delays and false starts, the campaign produced relatively few casualties, and its conclusion brought fighting in the Eastern Theater to a close for that year.

Background

Following the clash at Gettysburg that July, Lee withdrew his forces southward across the Potomac and back into Virginia. Criticism fell heavily on Meade, the Union commander, for not chasing down and crushing Lee's army when he had the chance. Looking ahead to autumn, Meade began drawing up plans for renewed offensive action in Virginia. His initial effort produced only a string of indecisive skirmishes and troop movements through October and November, an episode remembered as the Bristoe campaign.

By late November, Meade sought to slip his forces quietly through the Wilderness of Spotsylvania and fall upon the southern flank of the Confederate army positioned below the Rapidan River. Based on the intelligence available to him, Meade believed Lee commanded a force only half the size of his own Army of the Potomac, though the true numbers stood at 48,000 Confederates against Meade's 81,000. He understood that Lee's troops were divided by Clark's Mountain into two separate wings, one anchored near Mine Run and the other at Liberty Mills, with more than thirty miles separating them. Meade's scheme called for crossing the Rapidan at locations beyond the reach of Stuart's cavalry screen, crushing the exposed right flank held by Ewell's Second Corps, and then turning to deal with Hill's Third Corps and the rest of Lee's forces.

This time, Meade departed from the approach Hooker had used earlier that year during the Chancellorsville campaign on nearly identical terrain. Rather than relying on diversionary tactics, he committed his whole army to a single swift blow. The march began on November 25 and started promisingly, with fog blanketing Clark's Mountain and concealing the Union advance from Confederate observers. Trouble arose, however, when French's III Corps became bogged down while attempting to ford the river at Jacob's Ford. This delay created severe congestion as the corps shifted its artillery toward Germanna Ford, a crossing point where other Union units were simultaneously trying to pass over the river.

Battle

Meade's chance to move quickly had slipped away, and his anger at French did nothing to change that. The delay gave Lee an opening to respond. He directed Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early, temporarily leading Ewell's Second Corps, to push east along the Orange Turnpike toward Locust Grove, where his troops soon exchanged fire with Union forces pressing forward. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Edward "Allegheny" Johnson's division, moving down the Raccoon Ford Road to link up with Early, ran into the leading elements of Gen. French's III Corps amid the dense woods bordering the Widow Morris Road. Rather than continue his march, Johnson wheeled his division around and launched what amounted to a rash two-pronged attack against an enemy he could barely see and whose numbers he did not know. His 5,500 soldiers struck at a combined Union force of 32,000 drawn from French's and John Sedgwick's VI Corps. The clash began around 3:45 to 4:00 in the afternoon. On the Confederate left, Steuart's brigade quickly slipped from his control and the assault collapsed, while the center, held by the Stonewall Brigade, and the right, under Stafford and Jones, stalled almost as fast. Even so, the pressure was enough to check the Union advance until darkness fell, at which point Johnson withdrew his men on his own initiative, joining the rest of the army as it pulled back west of Mine Run Creek. The fighting itself lasted under two and a half hours but proved costly. Johnson's division suffered close to 550 casualties, roughly a tenth of its men, while French's corps lost about 950 in total. Brief as it was, the engagement at Payne's Farm carried real weight. Johnson's strike forced French's corps onto the defensive, slowed its progress, and in doing so preserved Lee's army from disaster. Had Johnson managed to secure the Widow Morris Road before French and Sedgwick arrived, or had his division simply been swept aside, the 32,000 Union troops might have swung around Lee's left and struck deep into his rear.

Once night fell, Lee pulled his forces back to fortified lines along Mine Run. The following day, Union troops advanced to face the Confederate position directly. Meade's plan called for a heavy artillery barrage, followed by an assault from Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren's II Corps in the south, with Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick's VI Corps joining from the north an hour afterward. For his part, Lee intended to strike on December 2, aiming to exploit a weakness on the Union's left flank that Maj. Gen. Wade Hampton's cavalry had spotted the day before. The bombardment opened as scheduled, but the anticipated assault never came. Meade decided the Confederate defenses were too formidable to risk an attack, a decision Warren is often credited with influencing, and he ordered a withdrawal during the night of December 1 into December 2, bringing the autumn campaign to a close. Lee, for his part, was left frustrated to discover that the enemy he had prepared to strike was no longer there.