LABYRINTH OF DEATH

» The Wilderness of Spotsylvania was a forested region of Virginia’s Orange and Spotsylvania counties just west of Fredericksburg, about halfway between Washington, D.C., and Richmond. It remains notorious as a grueling battleground. From the spring of 1863 to the spring of 1864, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia conducted three campaigns, wholly or in part, within the Wilderness: Chancellorsville (April–May 1863); Mine Run (November–December 1863); and the Battle of the Wilderness (May 1864), the opening clash in Ulysses Grant’s Overland Campaign. The horrific casualties and miserable terrain at the Battle of the Wilderness left Union soldiers recounting the challenges of fighting in the region. Their lingering question, though, was why they had failed to defeat Robert E. Lee’s army. The attempt to answer this question led to the creation of a mythology that came to surround the Wilderness—a mythology that many later historians have uncritically parroted. In reality, as revealed in The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory, the Wilderness was a battlefield that indeed created very difficult combat conditions, but many of the claims of exceptionalism associated with it are unfounded, despite their wide-ranging influence in the annals of the Civil War.

Unlike many battlefields, the Wilderness has an appellation that carries specific negative connotations, indicating a forest empty of man and beyond his control. The name also sets it apart as a distinct region. Many Union and Confederate soldiers who entered the Wilderness in the spring of 1863 had no inkling that they had stepped into a place marked by a special name and physical characteristics. By the time of the 1864 Overland Campaign, however, the men in both armies were calling it “the Wilderness” and attributing certain features to this forested region. Over time, and especially during the postwar years, descriptions of the Wilderness became images of a malevolent landscape. First in the contemporary accounts of the 1864 battle and later in postwar writings, the Wilderness became increasingly associated with death and destruction. The remains of the 1863 Chancellorsville battleground, the high casualties, the destruction of vegetation, and the corpses, skeletons, and graves that littered the Wilderness combined to cast the region as a place where the shadow of death lingered. It also became connected with the