Longstreet found out that his old friend Ulysses S. Grant had been appointed General-in-Chief of the Union Army, with headquarters in the field alongside the Army of the Potomac. Longstreet told his fellow officers that "he will fight us every day and every hour until the end of the war." Longstreet helped save the Confederate Army from defeat in his first battle back with Lee's army, the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864. After Grant moved south of the Rapidan River in an attempt to take Richmond, Lee intended to delay battle in order to give Longstreet's 14,000 men time to arrive on the field. Grant disrupted these plans by attacking him on May 5, and the fighting was inconclusive. The following morning at 5 am, Hancock led two divisions in a ferocious attack on A.P. Hill's corps, driving the men back two miles. Just as this was happening, Longstreet's men arrived on the field. They took advantage of an old roadbed built for an out-of-use railroad to creep through a densely wooded area unnoticed before launching a powerful flanking attack. Longstreet's men moved forward along the Orange Plank Road against the II Corps and in two hours nearly drove it from the field. Once again he developed innovative tactics to deal with difficult terrain, ordering the advance of six brigades by heavy skirmish lines, which allowed his men to deliver a continuous fire into the enemy, while proving to be elusive targets themselves. Historian Edward Steere attributed much of the success of the Army to "the display of tactical genius by Longstreet which more than redressed his disparity in numerical strength". After the war, Hancock said to Longstreet of this flanking maneuver: "You rolled me up like a wet blanket."