Gordon's Flank Attack

Before sunset on May 6, 1864, Confederate Brig. Gen. John B. Gordon quietly assembled ten regiments near this position while Union Brig. Gen. T. Seymour had ordered his brigade and that of Brig. Gen. A. Shaler to make small fires and cook coffee before both men rode to Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick's 6th Corps headquarters near Spotswood Park. Gordon's gray-clad line then appeared suddenly, opened fire, and charged by Madison Cir., along Creekside Dr., and up to a mile down the Union line, killing or capturing most of Seymour's and Shaler's brigades and panicking much of Sedgwick's 6th Corps. When the three Union generals rode toward the fighting, Shaler was captured first by Lt. C.M. Compton of the 31st Georgia Infantry and men of his company near Nugget Dr.; soon afterward Compton was shot while capturing Seymour, and Sedgwick, rallying troops around the Culpeper Mine Road, narrowly escaped when a New York trooper shot a Confederate officer who had leveled a pistol at him. At sunset, the 10th Vermont Infantry checked the Confederate advance along a line from Creekside Dr. to the sixth tee box on the golf course, and according to its chaplain, that regiment and the 106th New York Infantry rose in front of Gordon's regiments and gave three cheers, causing the Confederates to halt their charge. By 8 P.M., in darkness so thick that Brig. Gen. R.D. Johnston said he had to be guided by noise, the battle spread down the Culpeper Mine Road and connecting paths to the Germanna Plank Road, now Route 3. Johnston's brigade of four North Carolina regiments lost contact with the Georgians; Johnston rode into a Pennsylvania regiment but escaped, then, realizing Union troops were reforming in force nearby, ordered his men back even though his officers reported that they had come in sight of the wagon trains on the Germanna Plank Road and would have charged them had they not been recalled as darkness set in. Gordon continued fighting past 10 P.M. while riding General Shaler's captured horse, which he said saved him from capture after he mistakenly rode into Sedgwick's corps by night. At midnight, Lt. Gen. U.S. Grant restored order and pulled his troops back from Lake of the Woods to a new trench line behind Eastover Parkway, and by about 3 A.M. on May 7, as survivors straggled back and others never returned, Col. H.C. Kirk wrote that the Battle of the Wilderness had ended for his command and the army.

Lake of the Woods, Virginia · United States