North Anna: The Trap That Couldn't Be Sprung
Virginia
In late May of eighteen sixty-four, Robert E. Lee laid one of the most elegant traps of the entire Civil War. He had the ground, he had the men, he had the plan. The only thing he lacked was a healthy body. That absence may have changed the course of the war.
The Battle of North Anna was fought from May twenty-third to May twenty-sixth as part of Ulysses Grant's Overland Campaign, the relentless spring offensive that was grinding the Confederate army toward Richmond. After the bloody standoff at Spotsylvania Court House, both armies raced south to the North Anna River. Lee arrived first and chose his defensive position with extraordinary care.
His engineers designed what military historians call an inverted V, sometimes called a hog-snout line. The V's apex sat directly on the river at Ox Ford, the only defensible crossing point in the area. The flanks of the V extended back from the river on both sides. The effect was geometrical cunning: any Union force that crossed the North Anna would be split into three separate segments by the shape of the Confederate line. Each segment would be unable to reinforce the others. Lee, occupying the interior of the V, could shift troops along shorter interior lines and destroy Grant's army one piece at a time.
Grant crossed. His army was divided exactly as Lee had calculated. The trap was set.
And then Lee became gravely ill. The exact nature of his illness is debated, likely a severe gastrointestinal episode, but its effect is not. He could not leave his tent to command. None of his corps commanders, with Stonewall Jackson a year dead and James Longstreet recently wounded at the Wilderness, possessed the initiative to execute the attack without direct orders. Lee reportedly raged from his cot: strike them, he said, but no one moved with sufficient force.
Grant escaped south without the catastrophic defeat that a healthy Lee might have inflicted. Civil War historians consider North Anna the single clearest example of Lee's illness directly altering the course of a battle.
