William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

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[418] skilful conceptions of that officer. Instead of falling back, on finding his flank turned, he took a strategic offensive, directed a rapid concentration of his forces to meet Grant, and aimed to shut Grant up in the Wilderness.

From Orange Courthouse, which was the centre of Lee's position, two parallel roads (the Orange and Fredericksburg plankroad and turnpike) run eastward and strike Grant's line of march at right angles. By directing his forces rapidly forward on these routes, Lee would fall upon the army on the march and compel battle in the Wilderness, where he hoped to lure his antagonist into tangled labyrinths of confusion and disaster. This region, well known to him, was to his antagonist pure terra incognita. In its thick chaperal, through which no artillery could play, Grant's masses would lose their force of impact, while the Confederate marksmen, with an almost Indian skill in woodcraft, could lie unseen in their gray array amid those dun woods and deal death to the assailants. Being apprised, therefore, on the morning of the 4th, that the Army of the Potomac had begun the passage of the Rapidan, he promptly directed his forces forward to meet it by the routes I have indicated. The mean distance of the corps from their camps to where they would strike the army was about twenty miles. Ewell's corps was thrown forward on the old turnpike, and Hill's on the plankroad. Thus, while the Army of the Potomac was, throughout the 4th, defiling to the south bank of the Rapidan, the Army of Northern Virginia, making a rapid change of front, hurried forward to meet its rival with a front of opposition before it should have time, by a march beyond the Wilderness, to lay hold of the Confederate communications with Richmond.¹ That night the van of the