Spotsylvania! (ACW 1864)

One of my favourite American Civil War battles to wargame is The Wilderness. This is one which I had thought would be just a slog in the thickets but, because of the low troop density and the grid of trails through the woods, turned out to be a fantastically exciting game of manoeuvre.

The sequel to The Wilderness is Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lee just manages to get a few troops across Grant's road to Richmond, both sides bring up reinforcements, the US tries to get through or round the Confederates and the Confederates try to stop them. I wrote a scenario for this months ago but hadn't had a chance to play it until this week. The battle is in similar country to the Wilderness but took on a different character. The Confederates hastily constructed extended earthworks, which the Union tried to breach through repeated assaults at various points over several days before Grant accepted that he had been thwarted.

The terrain is a patchwork of fields in the woods, cris-crossed by streams and by roads. This would be quite tricky to set up in haste on a club night. Fortunately one of the team has an artistic wife who took up the challenge of creating a painted battlemat.

 

 Debbie's beautiful work

The game turned out to be rather one-sided. The US players had not appreciated that the Confederates have the option of bringing troops on near Todd's Tavern, so they got bushwhacked from their rear by Hampton's cavalry who maimed one US unit.  The other half of Warren's corps wandered out in the open in front of the Laurel Hill position and paid a heavy price. The US never really recovered from these early setbacks.

They then tried to shift troops southwards to turn the rebels' right flank. They debated whether to invoke an early Night Interval to do this. They decided against, but in retrospect that might have been wise and given them a better chance of threatening the Confederate position. However, deadly rebel dice at both ends of the battlefield neutered a couple of major US units and effectively decided the game.

At the operational level the scenario worked OK. It produced a reasonably historical race to the south with some bloody fighting round Laurel Hill. But as one US player complained, it was very difficult for the US to mount the assaults which were such a feature of the battle. I may have hamstrung the US forces too much with passivity, fragility etc. Splitting the large US units into more but smaller ones may also help to give them more staying power. Rebel deployments and arrivals need some more tightly defined constraints.

As the scenario needs and deserves replaying, and as the gorgeous battlemat makes it easy to set up, we'll revisit this battle once or twice next month.