After the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5-7, 1864, the Army of the Potomac tried to slip by General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Lee, however, was just able to block the Federals’ flank move, and both armies faced each other from trench lines in the vicinity of Spotsylvania Court House. An eager, bright young Union officer came up with a plan to break the impasse.
Warfare suited Colonel Emory Upton. He embraced it with an evangelist’s fervency and a scientist’s objectivity. A native New Yorker, Upton was 24 years old in the spring of 1864 and three years out of the U.S. Military Academy. He had drilled recruits, had been appointed colonel of the 121st New York Infantry after the Battle of Antietam, and now served as a brigade commander in the 6th Corps. A fellow officer wrote that Upton had “an ardent love for the profession of arms.”
Upton also possessed, in the estimation of Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson, “a patriotic sleepless ambition” and “the resolve to acquire military fame.” Under his tutelage, the 121st New York became so proficient in drill and discipline that it acquired the nickname “Upton’s Regulars.” An unbending abolitionist and “despiser” of “all treason,” he could be, however, arrogant and self-important. There could be no denying what Wilson stated about Upton: “His courage was both physical and moral, and therefore of the highest type. In the hour of battle he was as intrepid a man as ever drew a saber.”
It was this intense, enterprising colonel who had approached his division commander, Brig. Gen. David A. Russell, with a plan of attack on the afternoon of May 9. Upton had been at the forefront of a swift assault on an enemy bridgehead at Rappahannock Station, Va., on November 7, 1863. Upton’s troops had overrun the Confederate works, using only their bayonets, not stopping during the advance to fire, which was standard tactical practice. His units had charged on a narrow front as they had at Fredericksburg the previous May during the Chancellorsville Campaign.
When he met with Russell, Upton proposed a similar tactical formation, with the regiments stacked in four lines, advancing rapidly without firing shots until they reached the enemy’s works. Once they breached the entrenchments, the troops in the first line would fan out left and right, widening the breakthrough. The second line would deepen the penetration, while the third and fourth lines came up in support. Russell took Upton to Sixth Corps headquarters, where he presented the plan to Brig. Gen. Horatio G. Wright, who had succeeded the mortally wounded John Sedgwick.
Wright endorsed Upton’s scheme and later discussed it with Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. George G. Meade. Both commanders approved, but neither general possessed adequate intelligence on the nature and strength of the enemy’s defenses and the disposition of Confederate units. Although the tactical formation differed from linear alignments, it remained a blind, frontal assault. Nevertheless, they authorized Wright to select a dozen regiments for the attack force and to assign a division to be ready to exploit a breakthrough. In turn, Wright assigned Russell to overall command of the operation. The attack force would advance from the Union center toward the opposing Rebel earthworks or a section of the salient.
Wright met with Upton on the morning of May 10, informing the colonel that 12 regiments from the 6th Corps had been assigned to his command. Earlier, Grant had shifted Brig. Gen. Gershom Mott’s 2nd Corps
