Spotsylvania Court House was a Civil War engagement fought in Virginia, 1864. The outcome was inconclusive.
After the Wilderness, Grant's and Meade's advance on Richmond by the left flank was stalled at Spotsylvania Court House on May 8. This two-week battle was a series of combats along the Spotsylvania front. The Union attack against the Bloody Angle at dawn, May 12-13, captured nearly a division of Lee's army and came near to cutting the Confederate army in half. Confederate counterattacks plugged the gap, and fighting continued unabated for nearly 20 hours in what may well have been the most ferociously sustained combat of the Civil War. On May 19, a Confederate attempt to turn the Union right flank at Harris Farm was beaten back with severe casualties. Union generals Sedgwick (VI Corps commander) and Rice were killed. Confederate generals Johnson and Steuart were captured, Daniel and Perrin mortally wounded. On May 21, Grant disengaged and continued his advance on Richmond.
Grant, holding the rank of lieutenant general, and Maj. Gen. George G. Meade fought this engagement as the second major clash of their 1864 Overland Campaign during the American Civil War. It is known as the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, or simply Spotsylvania (the older spelling "Spottsylvania" also appears in nineteenth-century accounts). After the costly but indecisive struggle at the Wilderness, Grant pulled his forces away from Lee's Confederate army and pushed southeast, hoping to draw Lee into combat on terms more advantageous to the Union side. Portions of Lee's command reached the vital crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, ahead of Grant's men and immediately began digging in. Sporadic combat continued from May 8 to May 21, 1864, as Grant tested numerous strategies for breaking through the Confederate defenses. The outcome remained tactically unsettled, yet each side claimed success afterward. Confederate forces pointed to their successful defense of the works as proof of victory, while Union leadership argued that the offensive's continuation, combined with irreplaceable Confederate losses, constituted a triumph. Casualties on both sides approached 32,000, making this the deadliest engagement of the entire campaign.
The fighting began on May 8, when Union generals Gouverneur K. Warren and John Sedgwick tried and failed to push Confederate forces under Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson off Laurel Hill, a position blocking the road to the courthouse. Sedgwick would be killed by a sharpshooter the following day. Two days later, on May 10, Grant ordered assaults along the entire Confederate earthwork line, which had grown to more than four miles in length and included a bulging position called the Mule Shoe. Union forces again could not break through at Laurel Hill, but Col. Emory Upton's inventive attack against the Mule Shoe hinted at a more effective approach.
Building on Upton's tactics, Grant expanded the concept on May 12, sending the 15,000 soldiers of Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock's corps against the Mule Shoe. Hancock broke through at first, but Confederate defenders regrouped and drove his men back. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright's forces battled along the salient's western face, a sector that earned the name "Bloody Angle" for nearly a full day of brutal, close-quarters combat, among the fiercest witnessed during the war. Efforts by Warren and Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside to support these attacks elsewhere on the field did not succeed.
Seeking once more to force Lee into a disadvantageous fight, Grant shifted his lines and ordered Hancock to make one more assault on May 18, but it gained no ground. The next day, May 19, Confederate Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell conducted a reconnaissance in force at Harris farm that proved both costly and fruitless. Finally, on May 21, Grant broke contact with Lee's army and moved southeast once again, seeking to turn the Confederate right flank as the Overland Campaign pressed forward toward the Battle of North Anna.
Grant left the Western Theater in March 1864 when he was called up, elevated to lieutenant general, and placed in charge of every Union army. Rather than lead in the field himself under a separate banner, he set up his headquarters alongside the Army of the Potomac, though Maj. Gen. George G. Meade continued to hold actual command of that force. Command of the bulk of the western armies fell to Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Working together, Grant and President Abraham Lincoln crafted a plan meant to hit the Confederacy simultaneously on several fronts, targeting Lee outside Richmond, Virginia, along with operations in the Shenandoah Valley, West Virginia, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama. Never before had Union forces attempted such a synchronized push across multiple theaters at once.
Richmond itself was not what Grant was after. His true aim lay in dismantling Lee's army entirely. Lincoln had pushed for this approach for a long time, understanding that the Confederate capital would inevitably collapse once its main defending force was gone. Grant's instructions to Meade were blunt: follow Lee no matter where he went. He held out hope for a swift and conclusive engagement, yet he remained willing to grind the war down through sheer attrition. Losses on both sides threatened to be severe, but the Union's superior resources meant it could replace fallen men and lost material far more easily than the Confederacy could.
The fighting began on May 5, when Confederate troops under Gen. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Army of Northern Virginia, struck Grant's forces just after they had crossed the Rapidan into the tangled woods known as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania. Lee's roughly 60,000 men faced Grant's 100,000, yet they fought with tremendous resolve, aided by thick underbrush that favored the defenders. Two days of combat left nearly 29,000 casualties in its wake, but neither side gained a decisive advantage.
Lee had checked Grant's advance without driving him back, just as Grant had failed to break Lee's army. In the past, Union commanders facing this same stalemate would have pulled back north across the Rappahannock. Grant chose differently. He directed Meade to swing around Lee's right and push southeast toward the vital road junction at Spotsylvania Court House, calculating that placing his army between Lee and Richmond might draw the Confederates into fighting again, this time on terrain more favorable to the Union.
Grant instructed Meade to send his army marching through the night of May 7 into May 8, using two separate roads to reach Spotsylvania Court House, a crossroads ten miles southeast of their position, with at least one corps arriving by morning. The plan called for Warren and his V Corps to travel the Brock Road, with Hancock's II Corps following behind. Meanwhile Sedgwick's VI Corps would push toward Chancellorsville along the Orange Plank Road before pivoting south, trailed by Burnside's IX Corps.
To prepare the way, Meade first sent Sheridan's Cavalry Corps ahead to clear the Brock Road, but the horsemen quickly ran into trouble. Colonel J. Irvin Gregg's brigade, part of David Gregg's division, found itself halted at Corbin's Bridge along the Catharpin Road by Confederate riders serving under Wade Hampton and Rooney Lee. Gregg's troopers fell back to open ground west of Todd's Tavern, threw up hasty defensive works, and fought off several Confederate assaults there.
Farther along, Wesley Merritt's division ran into Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry, which had thrown up barricades along the Brock Road roughly a mile south of Todd's Tavern. Fierce combat broke out as afternoon wore on, and once darkness fell Sheridan chose not to press forward, instead having his men camp for the night at Todd's Tavern. Union foot soldiers set out around 8 p.m., though their march quickly became snarled in congestion. Arriving at Todd's Tavern past midnight, Meade found Sheridan's cavalrymen asleep and, furious at the sight, demanded they get back to clearing the road immediately.
On the Confederate side, Lee remained uncertain what Grant intended. Scouting reports indicated the bridging equipment at Germanna Ford had already been taken away, meaning Grant had no plans to retreat as earlier Union commanders had done. This left two possibilities: the Federal army might swing east toward Fredericksburg, or continue south. Either way, control of the Spotsylvania Court House intersection would prove critical, prompting Lee to direct his chief of artillery, Brigadier General William N. Pendleton, to cut a road southward through the Wilderness woods to link up with the Catharpin Road. Lee also ordered Major General Richard H. Anderson, who had taken over the First Corps after Lieutenant General James Longstreet fell wounded on May 6, to advance his men along this new route. Although Lee gave no particular urgency to the order, Anderson's soldiers, eager to escape the smoke of burning woods and the smell of the dead littering the Wilderness battlefield, set off on their own around 10 p.m.
The clash near the Harris farm pushed back Grant's plan to send Hancock's corps forward, meaning the men did not set out southward until the night of May 20 into the 21st. Lee refused to take the bait of striking at Hancock, instead marching along a route that ran parallel to the North Anna River. Grant kept probing at Lee as the Overland Campaign wore on, repeatedly running into entrenched positions that halted his efforts, and each time he shifted around Lee's flank toward Richmond. Fighting flared again at North Anna and later at Cold Harbor, and afterward Grant pushed his forces across the James River to strike Petersburg. What followed was nine months of the two armies locked in place during the siege there.
This page covers Spotsylvania Court House. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
The account on this page is written by Aubrey Research from cited sources. Wikipedia is cited as a reference; its text is not reproduced.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.