Battle of Spotsylvania • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
‘The Awful Arithmetic’ display is in the Spotsylvania Battlefield Exhibit Shelter at Stop 1 on the Auto Tour. It is on the South Wall under the heading, “No Turning Back.”
From the display:
The Awful Arithmetic
If considered as one engagement, the fighting at Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House constitutes the bloodiest single battle in American history. Some 36,000 Union soldiers and 24,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, captured, or missing during the period of May 5 to May 21, 1864 — a staggering 30 percent of those engaged.
The tremendous loss of life outraged many in the North, some of whom labeled Grant a butcher. But the general understood his arithmetic. He could replace his losses, Lee could not. In time he would grind the Confederate army down to a point where it could no longer resist. Grant had engaged Lee in a war of attrition — a war the South could not win.
“…In the long run, we ought to succeed, because it is in our power more promptly to fill the gaps in men and material which this constant fighting produces.”
General George G. Meade, USA
From the caption to the background photo:
Confederate Soldiers, killed in the May 19 fighting near the Alsop House, lie in rows awaiting burial.
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