To understand this battle you only need two roads and the crossing between them. Both ran roughly east-west through the thicket, out toward Orange Court House in the west, where Lee was coming from, and toward Fredericksburg in the east. They ran about 2 miles (3 km) apart, with the dense woods filling the gap between. The northern one was the Orange Turnpike. The southern one was the Orange Plank Road (a “plank road” being just that, a road surfaced with wooden planks). And cutting across both of them, running north-south, was the Brock Road, the road the Union army needed if it wanted to keep marching south, toward a little place called Spotsylvania Court House. Where the Plank Road met the Brock Road was the single most important spot on the field. Hold that crossroads and your army stayed in one connected piece; lose it and Lee could split the Union force in two.

On the morning of May 5, the northern road went first. Down the Orange Turnpike came the corps of Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell (South), a corps being one of the big building-block chunks an army is divided into, ten or twenty thousand men under one general. (A corps splits into divisions, divisions into brigades, brigades into regiments, biggest to smallest; every unit named below is one of those nesting pieces.) Ewell ran straight into the V Corps of Major General Gouverneur K. Warren (North) near Saunders Field, one of the few open clearings in the whole tangle. Major General George G. Meade (North), who commanded the Army of the Potomac (the main Union army in Virginia) on the ground while Grant rode along setting the strategy, ordered an attack across that dreadful terrain. Ewell’s men, dug into hasty earthworks (dirt barricades thrown up fast), threw it back. Out in the brush the attack fell apart on its own: gaps tore open between regiments, whole companies lost any sense of which way was forward, and men squeezed off shots into their own comrades, never seeing them as anything but a shape in the leaves. The fighting see-sawed all day with nobody able to land a decisive blow.

Two miles south, the Plank Road told a similar story with higher stakes. Down it came the corps of Lieutenant General Ambrose Powell (“A.P.”) Hill (South), aiming for that all-important crossroads. Union cavalry (mounted scouts) spotted him coming, and the division of Brigadier General George W. Getty (North) raced to grab the Plank Road and Brock Road crossing before Hill could take it. Around 4:15 in the afternoon Getty attacked, with the big II Corps of Major General Winfield S. Hancock (North) arriving to pile in alongside him. What followed was brutal, close-range fighting in brush so thick the enemy was often just a muzzle flash a few feet away. It ran into the night with no decision. Brigadier General Alexander Hays (North) was killed here, shot mid-sentence while he was addressing the 63rd Pennsylvania, one of his own regiments.

When the firing finally guttered out on May 5, neither side had won anything you could point to. It had been a confused, bloody draw. But it had left A.P. Hill’s corps badly tangled, poorly placed and disorganized along the Plank Road, having fought all afternoon and never sorted itself out. That mess would matter at dawn.