In May 1864, after two days of fighting in the burning thickets of the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac expected the usual order to fall back toward Washington. Instead, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant marched it south. This episode follows the eight-week Overland Campaign between Grant and Robert E. Lee, starting with Grant’s plan to advance five Union armies on the same day, including Sherman in Georgia, Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley and Butler on the James River, and his directive that wherever Lee goes, the army would go also.

The campaign moved from the Wilderness to a race for Spotsylvania Court House, where Colonel Emory Upton’s dense, capped-rifle column briefly broke the Confederate line and Grant’s May 12 assault on the Mule Shoe Salient produced the Bloody Angle. Philip Sheridan’s cavalry raid killed J.E.B. Stuart at Yellow Tavern but left Grant without scouts, and he walked into Lee’s inverted V at the North Anna River just as Lee fell ill. After the failed June 3 assault at Cold Harbor, Grant slipped his army across the James toward Petersburg, forcing Lee into the siege he feared most.

• Texas troops refused to advance in the Wilderness until Lee, riding Traveller forward to lead the charge, went to the rear.
• At the Bloody Angle, rain ruined gunpowder, men fought with clubbed muskets and bayonets, and musket fire cut down oak trees nearly two feet thick.
• At North Anna, with Longstreet wounded, Stuart dead, A.P. Hill sick and Ewell broken down, no one ordered the attack while Lee lay bedridden.
• After Cold Harbor, neither commander wanted to request a truce, and most of the wounded between the lines died before one was arranged.
• Union engineers built a 2,200-foot pontoon bridge over the James in about seven hours, carrying over 100,000 men and 5,000 wagons.