Spotsylvania Campaign
May 12, 1864. About 6 a.m. Wright's VI Corps advancing to support Hancock's attack occupied the area in front of the Confederate works on the west face of the Salient. Here at a slight bend in the line, the area ever after known as the Bloody Angle, occurred the most savage, long-sustained hand-to-hand combat of the War. The opposing troops fired muzzle-to-muzzle and bayoneted and clubbed one another across the logs of the parapet. Musket fire slashed the springtime greenery and toppled trees, one an oak almost two feet in diameter. Rain poured down and the dead piled up in the mud. Before daylight on the 13th the exhausted Confederates withdrew to a better line.
Marker can be reached from Grant Drive, on the left when traveling east.
Courtesy hmdb.org
