Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864

A Civil War historian recounts the first battle between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—a bloody and horrifying conflict in the Wilderness of Virginia.

Known simply as the Wilderness, soldiers called the seventy square miles of dense Virginian forest one of the "waste places of nature" and "a region of gloom." Yet here, in the spring of 1864, the Civil War escalated to a new level of horror.

Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Federal armies, opened the Overland Campaign with a vow to neve...