previous next
[61]

Lee in the Wilderness.

From the point of view of the military student Lee's consummate feats of generalship were performed in the gloom of the Wilderness. On this ground he presented an always unbroken front against which Grant dashed his battalions in vain. Never were Lee's lines here broken; the assailants must always shift their ground to seek a fresh opportunity for assault. At this spot on the battlefield of the Wilderness the opposing forces lay within twenty-four feet of each other all night. The soldiers, too, had learned by this 1864 campaign to carry out orders with judgment of their own. The rank and file grew to be excellent connoisseurs of the merits of a position. ‘If they only save a finger it will do some good,’ was General Longstreet's reply, when his engineer officers complained that their work on Marye's Hill was being spoiled by being built higher by the gunners of the Washington artillery—who had to fight behind them. For this reason the significance of the lines as shown in many war maps is often very puzzling to the students of to-day, who have never seen the actual field of operations and have no other guide. Much of the ground disputed by the contending forces in our Civil War was quite unlike the popular conception of a battlefield, derived from descriptions of European campaigns, or from portrayals of the same, usually fanciful. For at this variety of warfare, Lee was a master, as well as on the rolling open plains of the Virginia farm. The portrait of Lee opposite was taken during the campaign preceding this test of the Wilderness. The reproduction here is directly from the photograph—taken at Lee's first sitting in war-time, and his only one ‘in the field.’ Reproductions of this picture painted, engraved, and lithographed were widely circulated after the war. The likeness was much impaired.

Where Lee stood supreme—the Wilderness in 1864

Lee in the field the best known portrait


 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Europe (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Robert E. Lee (8)
James Longstreet (1)
Ulysses Simpson Grant (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1864 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: