Battle of Spotsylvania • Tour the Battlefield • Monuments & Markers • The Armies
The ‘Aftermath’ wayside marker is along the walking trail at Stop 3 on the Auto Tour.
The marker looks over Confederate trenches at the Mule Shoe
Aftermath
At 2 a.m. on May 13, 1864, General Lee declared a new line of works a half mile behind you ready, and the Confederate troops in the trenches here quietly withdrew. They had bought the Confederacy what it most needed that day: time. But every minute had come at a fearful cost. It’s likely that as many as 17,000 men fell killed or wounded in the fighting at the Muleshoe Salient. It was the longest sustained combat of the Civil War.
“Piles of the dead” is often used as a figure of speech, but in the works abandoned by the rebels piles of dead literally and without exaggeration were lying in the compartments…. Two, three and four deep, tangled-up with each other, bodies and limbs intertwined, actual heaps of dead, their black and bloated faces upturned to the sky, in all manner of positions and decomposition already polluting the atmosphere with a horrible stench. It was such a picture of war, horrid war, as few people, even those who make a business of war, are permitted to witness. It would take the pen of a Victor Hugo to faithfully describe such a scene of death and carnage, such a hideous and appalling holocaust of human life.
Lieutenant Harvey B. Wells,
84th Pennsylvania Volunteers
From the caption to the background photo:
In June 1865, a burial party interred many of the Union dead at Spotsylvania Court House. These graves belong to soldiers killed in front of the Bloody Angle.
From the caption to the inset photo on the right:
Captain Louis F. Waters of the 99th Pennsylvania Infantry was one of hundreds of Union soldiers to die at the Bloody Angle.
(go to the main Tour Stop 3 page)
(go to the main Battle of Spotsylvania Auto Tour page)