General Grant devised no plan of complicated strategy for the problem before him, but proposed to solve it by plain, hard, persistent fighting.  He would endeavor to crush the army of Lee before it could reach Richmond or unite with the army of Johnston; or, failing in that, he would shut it up in that stronghold and reduce it by a siege.  With this in view, he instructed Meade at the very outset:  “Lee’s army will be your objective point.  Where Lee goes, there you will go, also.”  Everything being ready, on the night of May 4, Meade threw five bridges across the Rapidan, and before the following night the whole Union army, with its trains, was across the stream moving southward by the left flank, past the right flank of the Confederates.

Sudden as was the advance, it did not escape the vigilant observation of Lee, who instantly threw his force against the flanks of the Union columns, and for two days there raged in that difficult, broken, and tangled region known as the Wilderness, a furious battle of detachments along a line five miles in length.  Thickets, swamps, and ravines, rendered intelligent direction and concerted manoeuvering impossible, and furious and bloody as was the conflict, its results were indecisive.  No enemy appearing on the seventh, Grant boldly started to Spottsylvania Court House, only, however, to find the Confederates ahead of him; and on the eighth and ninth these turned their position, already strong by nature, into an impregnable intrenched camp.  Grant assaulted their works on the tenth, fiercely, but unsuccessfully.  There followed one day of inactivity, during which Grant wrote his report, only claiming that after six days of hard fighting and heavy losses “the result up to this time is much in our favor”; but expressing, in the phrase which immediately became celebrated, his firm resolution to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

On May 12, 1864, Grant ordered a yet more determined attack, in which, with fearful carnage on both sides, the Union forces finally stormed the earthworks which have become known as the “bloody angle.”  But finding that other and more formidable intrenchments still resisted his entrance to the Confederate camp, Grant once more moved by the left flank past his enemy toward Richmond.  Lee followed with equal swiftness along the interior lines.  Days passed in an intermitting, and about equally matched contest of strategy and fighting.  The difference was that Grant was always advancing and Lee always retiring.  On May 26, Grant reported to Washington: 

“Lee’s army is really whipped.  The prisoners we now take show it, and the action of his army shows it unmistakably.  A battle with them outside of intrenchments cannot be had.  Our men feel that they have gained the morale over the enemy, and attack him with confidence.  I may be mistaken, but I feel that our success over Lee’s army is already assured.”