Virginia Vignettes

The Wilderness was a tightly forested area nearly 12 miles wide by 6 miles long and located south of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, ten miles west of Fredericksburg in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. During the Civil War, two major battles were fought there: Chancellorsville in May 1863, where Stonewall Jackson famously outflanked Union forces under Joseph Hooker, and the Wilderness in May 1864, where Ulysses S. Grant initiated the Overland Campaign. The topography of the Wilderness – dense woods and thick undergrowth broken up by a number of small clearings – made the maneuvering of large armies particularly difficult and the experience of fighting claustrophobic. At both battles, burst shells ignited the woods, burning wounded soldiers. At Chancellorsville, the brush made it difficult to see the distance of even a few paces, and as a result firing lines were uneven, disorganized, and confused, all of which tended to cause panic. “Men who fought in the Wilderness,” the historian Stephen W. Sears has written, “would remember it with fear and hatred – a dark, eerie, impenetrable maze.” Jackson was killed in the battle by a volley from his own men. A year later, Confederate general James Longstreet was wounded there, also by friendly fire.

Further Reading:

Stephen Cushman, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (1999)

Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville (1996)

This Vignette Provided By

Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia