There’s just something about two people in a fistfight that’s irresistible to watch. We can’t look away. There’s something about the sound of a sliding barstool, the rising tide of voices shouting, and the sudden rush of action in one spot that is just pure entertainment.
Related: A War of 1812 veteran saw the Battle of Gettysburg from his porch, then joined it
On a battlefield, however, there’s a lot of fighting going on. And some of that might be hand-to-hand. It’s happened a lot thorughout military history. There just shouldn’t be any reason for two entire armies to stop and watch two of their soldiers in a fistfight in the middle of a war.
That’s why it’s surprising that it actually happened. And all the onlookers were Americans—because it happened during the Civil War.
In May 1864, Union and Confederate armies clashed in a dense wooded area known as “The Wilderness,” which is today not exactly wilderness, but it’s also not exactly densely poulated. It’s not as if this was the first taste of combat for any of these soldiers on either side of the battle. The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac had been famously going at it since the middle of 1861. Three years later, they were still at it.
But now it was the endgame. The Union was advancing all across the country and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had just launched the Overland Campaign, an operation with the goal of destroying the Army of Northern Virginia. The Wilderness near Spotsylvania was the first battle of that campaign. Over the course of three days, more than 120,000 Yankees fought some 65,000 rebels to an ultimately inconclusive result. Both sides took tens of thousands of killed and wounded, and the Union’s Army of the Potomac pushed further into Virginia.
Before anyone knew the outcome of the battle, however, one small skirmish captured everyone’s attention on both sides, Union and Confederate.
In the middle of the Battle of the Wilderness, between the two armies’ centers, was a clearing called Saunders Field. Since it was the only real clearing in the area between two opposing armies, it was full of artillery shells and the holes made by those shells, along with the remains of bullets. Just tons of and tons of bullets.
As the two sides clashed near a gully in the field, a Union soldier hid there to avoid being captured by the enemy. Then a Confederate soldier threw himself into the gully to avoid the hail of Union bullets coming toward him (which, given the size of those bullets, we can understand why). They were the only two in the gully and somehow didn’t even see one another.
Until they did see one another. And then they started “bantering” at one another.
Eventually, the two had had enough of one another and decided to take it outside… of the gully. They stepped onto the road (part of the battlefield for the Battle of the Wilderness) for a good ol’ fashioned “fist and skull fight.” It was mutually agreed that whoever won would take the other as a prisoner.
The two men were halfway between both sides of the battle, in full view of everyone in each opposing army. And the men in each of those armies stopped fighting the entire Civil War to watch their fistfight. A number of other soldiers even ran up out of their ranks to get a better view of the fight.
Did I mention the Civil War stopped to watch this fistfight?
The account, written by a cavalryman of the Virginia Infantry, doesn’t mention how long the fight lasted, only that “Johnny [Reb] soon had the Yank down.” The Union soldier, true to his word, surrendered. They both returned to the gully, fighting resumed, and the man was taken back to Confederate lines.
In the end, he might have lost the fight but he turned out to be one of the lucky ones. The Union Army took more than 16,000 casualties over the course of the three day battle.
