General Lee’s plans were already formed in anticipation of this or any other movement of the Army of the Potomac. He needed to learn only which line of march of the several that were open to him General Grant would adopt. Now he knew, and instantly his orders were given to carry out plans previously and completely wrought out in his mind. Grant’s movement by the lower fords indicated clearly what his plan of campaign was to be. He had under his orders a veteran army of one hundred and thirty thousand men, of whom rather more than one hundred thousand were ready for actual battle. Lee had a total of a little less than sixty thousand men—forty-five thousand of whom, perhaps, he could put upon the firing-line, with which to oppose the Federal advance. Grant’s plan was to push forward rapidly through the Wilderness before Lee could strike a blow, turn his adversary’s right, and plant his greatly superior army near Gordonsville, in Lee’s rear, and between him and Richmond. If he could have accomplished that purpose, the surrender or destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia would have been a matter only of a few days, or perhaps a few hours. For if cut off in this fashion from all its sources of supply, and with no other army anywhere to come to its relief, the already half-starving Virginia force would have had no resource except to hurl itself upon Grant’s double numbers and shatter itself to fragments in a vain effort to break through impregnable lines. It would have had no possible route of retreat open to it, no conceivable road of escape, no second line of defence to fall back upon. But General Grant was dealing with the greatest master of strategy of modern times. Grant’s plan of campaign was flawless, but Robert E. Lee stood in the way. Lee instantly moved forward to interfere with his adversary’s march toward Gordonsville, by assailing him in flank. At the same time he threatened his advance corps on their front, in such fashion as to compel Grant to recall them and accept battle amid the tangled underbrush of the Wilderness. This Wilderness is, perhaps, the very wildest tract of land that lies anywhere east of the Mississippi. It skirts the southern bank of the Rapidan for fifteen miles, extending inland from that stream for about ten miles. Originally it was densely timbered, but in colonial days, and a little later, the timber was cut away to supply fuel for the iron-furnaces that once abounded there, but that were afterward abandoned. As the region does not at all tempt to agriculture, the abandonment of the iron mines left it a veritable wilderness. Its surface became covered with densely growing scrub trees, interlaced with a tangle of vines and imbedded, as it were, in an undergrowth of a density inconceivable to men who have not acquainted themselves with the lavish luxuriance of Southern vegetation.