The battle ebbed and flowed on May 6th. The day began poorly for Lee and the Confederacy. The Union II Corps under General Hancock advanced west up the Orange Plank Road from the Brock Road intersection at first light pushing back A.P. Hill’s tired and disorganized line more than a mile to the Tapp Field. Here Poague’s artillery played a key role in delaying the Union advance north of the Plank Road but without Confederate troops south of the road the battle appeared lost. At that moment Longstreet’s Corp arrived to stem the tide. Deploying his troops south of the road, a frontal assault combined with a flanking manuever directed against the Union left along an abandoned railroad bed pushed the Federals in disarray back to where they started from in the morning. The battle for the key intersection hung in the balance. Could Hancock somehow reorganize his lines behind breastworks there before Longstreet pushed the attack with fresh troops.
Longstreet, on the verge of winning the battle, was already on the way to the intersection riding at the front of Micah Jenkins brigade, his men in their brand new almost black colored uniforms, moved east down the Plank Road for the intersection. However, one of the four Confederate flanking brigades under William Mahomes, which were the furthest to the right, got separated from the other three brigades when they veered to avoid a forest fire. The Virginians had to cross to the other side of the Orange Plank Road and turn left to realign parallel to the road. As they were moving south back toward the road they could see a column heading east in dark uniforms, who they mistook for retreating Federals, and fired on them. One shot struck General Jenkins in the head killing him (Lieutenant Alfred Doby and Marcus Baum were also killed). Another seriously wounded Longstreet in the neck and shoulder forcing his urgent removal from the battlefield. At this crucial moment the Confederates were now without their commanding field officer. Command would fall to Major General Charles Field who now had to realign and reorganize his troops. The resulting several hours delay gave Major General Hancock and his men several hours to further prepare his three lines of earthworks and reorganize his units in time for the next assault, which the Federals repulsed. As darkness fell once again the day’s action ended in a stalemate with the Union in possession of the intersection.
Longstreet’s wounding is interpreted at stop #8 below.
The wounding of Longstreet was the key event in the Battle of the Wilderness. It would be the second time in a little over a year that a Corps commander in the Army of Northern Virginia was felled by friendly fire. Stonewall Jackson was shot only a few miles away on May 2nd the year before and would die 8 days later of pneumonia. The void left by Longstreet’s loss would have a profound impact not only on this day’s battle but also those to come at Spotsylvania Courthouse and the North Anna River.
Longstreet was helped down from his horse and in his own words “At the moment that Jenkins fell I received a severe shock from a minie ball passing through my throat and right shoulder. The blow lifted me from the saddle, and my right arm dropped to my side, but I settled back to my seat, and started to ride on, when in a minute the flow of blood admonished me that my work for the day was done. As I turned to ride back, members of the staff, seeing me about to fall, dismounted and lifted me to the ground.” A contemporaneous account published in the Mobile Daily Advertiser & Register written by its war correspondent (Peter Alexander) on May 28th, less than three weeks after the shooting, provided the most detailed description of the wound that we have (included in full in the sources at the end). It stated “General Longstreet was shot in the neck. The ball struck him in front on the right side of the larynx, passing under the skin, carrying away a part of the spine of the scapula, and coming out behind the right shoulder. The wound is severe, but is not considered mortal, the only danger apprehended being from secondary hemmorrage. Should he survive ten or twelve days and the carotid artery artery not become involved, it is the opinion of Dr. Cullen, his medical director, that he will be able to return to the field in a few weeks. He has lost the temporary use of his right arm, what surgeons call the cervical plexus of nerves being injured. He was carried to the rear this morning and was doing remarkably well when he left.” Dr. John Cullen never wrote about the incident.
General Longstreet was transported back to the field hospital near Parker’s Store by ambulance. From there again in Longstreet’s words “From the Wilderness I was taken to the Meadow Farm home of my friend Erasmus Taylor, and carefully nursed by his charming wife until put on board of a train for Lynchburg and taken to my good kinswoman, Mrs. Caroline Garland, who had lost her only son and child, General Samuel Garland, killed two years before at South Mountain. From her hospitable home, when strong enough for a ride in the fresh air, I was taken to the home of a cherished friend, Colonel John D. Alexander, at Campbell Court-House. But a raiding party rode through the village early one morning, which suggested a change, and I was taken to my kinsfolk, the Sibleys, at Augusta, Georgia, and after a time to other good friends, the Harts and Daniels, at and near Union Point, on the Georgia Railroad.”
Based on the information from the primary sources below we can conclude a few things about his wound. The blood frothing from his mouth implies a wound to either the trachea or the lung. The trachea seems more likely. His voice remained hoarse and low even after he recovered from the wound implying involvement of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. The loss of the use to his right arm indicates damage to the cervical plexus. Based on this information Drs. Steckler and Blachley postulated the path of the bullet shown in a figure below based on head and neck anatomy. The pdf of the paper is in the sources.
The authors also postulate, after a trip to the battlefield, that the bullet likely entered in the back and exited in the front of the neck. The opposite of what was thought at the time. They also felt that the fact that several people describe Longstreet as being lifted up in the saddle suggested that the bullet had an upward trajectory which further supported their theory. So like the authors and many others I further examined the site as well. The 14th VA managed to cross the Orange Plank Road without being detected by the Federals at the Brock Road intersection or the Confederates further up the road suggesting they crossed in a depression or swale in the road. So I went to see for myself the location of the swale that others have found. The movie below shows the swale.
Having found the swale I next went into the woods north of the swale to examine the view of the road from there. I crossed the street and entered the woods on the Federal Line Trail. The ground on the north side of the road is lower than the road.
Looking up from the path toward the road. You can see a car on the road in the upper center through the woods. I walked into the woods and headed east toward the intersection and the perspective of the road didn’t change.
Longstreet would have been on a horse, and he was a tall man placing his upper torso probably at least 8 feet above the roadbed. I can see why the authors of the paper would have felt that the wound that was higher off the ground (the neck) was the exit wound. The sources below contain accounts of the incident.
Sources
Mobile Daily Advertiser & Register War Correspondent’s Reports link from Civil War Talk Website. Originally published May 28, 1864.
Reminicences of the Campaign of 1864 in Virginia by William F Perry Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 7, No. 2, 1879 from Archives.com
Reminiscences of Confederate Service, 1861-1865: by Francis W. Dawson- written 1882.
The Haskell Memoirs The Personal Narrative of a Confederate Officer by John Cheves Haskell- written almost four decades after the war
From Manassas to Appomattox by James Longstreet- published in 1895.
Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer by G. Moxley Sorrel- published in 1905.
The Cervical Wound of General James Longstreet by Steckler R.M. and Blachley J.D. Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg Volume 126: 353-359, 2000. To download click on the word Longstreet.
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