Existing comment:
Aftermath:
Two days of fighting left behind a breathtaking panorama of destruction. Acres of trees riddled. Unburied dead amidst the woods. The forest floor charred by fires. The scars would remain for years.
The quickening pace of war in 1864 meant the armies spent little time attending to the human wreckage they left behind. In the Wilderness, hundreds of bodies remained unburied. Bullets left the forest ripped and shattered.
In 1865, Union burial parties interred the dead they could find, including Confederates. In the years that followed, most of the Union dead were fathered up and reinterred in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery. The reburial of Confederate dead was less systematic, but many were reinterred in Fredericksburg. Undoubtedly, many from both sides still remain on the field.
"Just a little to the rear of where our line was formed, where the bullets swept close to the ground, every bush and twig was cut and splintered by the leaden balls. The woods was a dense thicket of small trees about the size of hop poles, and ... along the whole length of the line I doubt if a single tree could have been found that had not been pierced several times with bullets, and all were hit about breast high. Had the rebels fired a little lower, they would have annihilated the whole line; they nearly did it as it was."
-- Private Wilbur Fisk, 2nd Vermont Infantry |