Overland Campaign

The Overland Campaign, also called Grant's Overland Campaign, the Virginia Campaign or the Wilderness Campaign, was a series of battles fought in Virginia in May and June 1864, near the end of the American Civil War. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of the Union armies, directed the Army of the Potomac under Major General George G. Meade, together with other forces, against General Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The campaign moved from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna River and Cold Harbor. Unlike earlier Union commanders in the eastern theater, Grant did not retreat after a costly first clash but kept shifting southeast to place his army between Lee and Richmond. Union losses were severe, and some see the campaign as inconclusive taken alone, while others judge it a strategic Union victory because it inflicted proportionately heavier losses on Lee and forced him into the siege of Richmond and Petersburg. It also included two long cavalry raids led by Philip Sheridan, in which the Confederate cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart was mortally wounded.