My day to drive today so I elected to explore some Civil War battlefields west of Fredricksburg, VA. There were not less than two U.S. Grant campaigns through this area and those that occurred in 1863 were pretty substantial failures for the miserable Union soldiers as some 36,000 were either wounded or killed at the battlefields (Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania) during Grant’s first pass through the area. General Lee lost some 24,000 soldiers giving the South a 3:2 advantage in the killing. Unfortunately for Lee, Grant could call up replacements and Lee could not. This problem ultimately spelled doom to the South. Lee started with over 100,000 men in the Army of Northern Virginia but ended up surrendering in 1865 with only 13,000 survivors.
The area is absolutely beautiful. It must have horrified the Virginia soldiers to watch this part of the state torn apart by no quarter battles with artillery fire, tons of blood and tremendous reductions in the number of men left at the end of the war. At Spotsylvania, the armies fought in heavily wooded terrain which caught fire during the battle, incinerating all the wounded and dead. A truly bleak period in American history. I’m glad I was not there.