Once Anderson held Laurel Hill, the Confederates did what the war had slowly taught both armies to do: they dug. Over May 8 and 9 Lee’s men threw up roughly four miles (6 km) of works (the soldiers’ word for field fortifications, dirt and logs piled into a defensive rampart that a charging man has to cross in the open while the defenders shoot from cover). By 1864 a Civil War army could turn a stretch of farmland into a fortress in a few hours, and a frontal assault on a finished line had become close to suicide. Grant was about to relearn that lesson several times in two weeks.

Major General Gouverneur K. Warren (North) and his V Corps had drawn Laurel Hill, and Warren spent the battle hurling his men at it. The first assault on May 8 was thrown back with heavy loss; Major General John Sedgwick (North) brought up his VI Corps to help and failed too. Warren would attack Laurel Hill again and again over the coming days, and it never fell. It became the part of the line that simply could not be cracked from the front, no matter how many times the order came down.

Sedgwick was one of the most loved men in the army, and his soldiers called him "Uncle John." On the morning of May 9 he rode out to site some artillery near the front, where Confederate sharpshooters with long-range rifles were sniping at anything that moved, the bullets buzzing in from perhaps a thousand yards off. His men kept flinching and ducking. Sedgwick, amused and a little exasperated, chided them for it. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance, he told them.

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

Major General John Sedgwick

A moment later a sharpshooter’s bullet struck him below the left eye. His chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Martin McMahon (North), was standing right there and caught him as he fell. Sedgwick never regained consciousness. A popular legend holds that the bullet cut him off mid-sentence, that he never finished the word "elephant." It is a good story and it is not true; the elephant line was simply among the last things he said, and he spoke after it. Major General Horatio Wright (North) took over the VI Corps. The army had lost one of its most beloved commanders to a single rifle shot, in a quiet moment, almost as an afterthought of the day.

The lines were now set, and they ran along a stretch of ground that was about to become one of the most notorious places in American history. Nobody knew it yet, because the trouble was baked into the shape of the dirt itself.