On to Richmond!

Before the Wilderness, battlefield stalemate usually meant retreat by one side or the other and a return to the starting point, but on the night of May 7, 1864, as the woods still smoldered, Union General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant made stalemate there irrelevant by ordering the Union army forward, south toward Spotsylvania Court House and eventually Richmond rather than backward. As Union soldiers quietly left the earthworks, they recognized a turning point, and later that night, when Grant rode among them, they cheered not because he had won but because he refused to lose. For the Union army, eleven months of nonstop campaigning and ultimately victory lay ahead, and, as Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter recalled, wild cheers and triumphant shouts filled the forest as men waved hats, raised their arms, pressed close to their commander, and turned the night march into a triumphal procession for the new commander.

Lake Wilderness, Virginia · United States