The Battle of the Wilderness was the first genuine working test of the assumption that, with the Gettysburg victory in July 1863, the tide of events in the Civil War truly had changed. The following March, President Lincoln had placed all Union forces under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who swiftly devised a master plan that called for nothing less than the total destruction of the Confederate armies. The scattershot and ill-organized campaigns of the weeks and months before—skirmishes here and there, towns and forts captured and recaptured—meant nothing in terms of coherent strategy:
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