Originally aired on August 28, 1998 - In part 209 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the worst battle of the Civil War.
#209 – The Worst Battle
After every Civil War engagement was a second battle just as frightening and often more costly. It concerned the human degree left when the guns grew silent. It was the struggle for life by thousands of wounded soldiers. The May, 1864, Battle of the Wilderness was a tragic but typical illustration. For two full days the armies of Lee and Grant struggled mightily in the woods west of Fredericksburg. When the fighting ended and the two armies shifted elsewhere for another confrontation, left behind in the wilderness were some twelve thousand injured soldiers.
After three years of unchecked bloodshed medical personnel and facilities were still inadequate to handle the number of maimed soldiers. The degree and depth of suffering remained the same. A few quotations from the Union side tell a story of frustration, disbelief and despair. On the second night at the Wilderness, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine watched the collecting of the wounded. “Injured men,” he said, “created a wale far and deep and wide. In the smoke filled air ghost-like ambulances moved over the battleground pausing here and there to gather up their precious freight. Medics with lanterns continually bent over a brave calm face to see if it were of the living or the dead. The wounded were packed in the spring-less wagons for the jostling fifteen mile ride to Fredericksburg.”
That once proud city had become what one observer called, “a great charnel house”. Incapacitated men were dumped anywhere there was space. One surgeon commented that, “the soldiers had been wounded in every conceivable way – men with mutilated bodies, with shattered limbs, and broken heads, men enduring their injuries with heroic patience, and men giving way to violent grief, men stoically indifferent, and men bravely rejoicing that it was only a leg that they would lose.”
A New York infantryman noted; “thousands of maimed soldiers filled the dwelling houses, peopled the dingy tobacco warehouses, and in many instances lay along the sidewalks where they clutched at the dresses of the passing nurses and in the deliriums of fever and pain begged for succor.” One of those nurses declared that, “many of the injured Federals were sinking for want of care. Others had been allowed to cry all night for water.” According to another witness, “thousands of men stretched upon the floors of churches, deserted houses, stores and shops with nothing underneath them except their tattered and blood-stiffened garments, with amputated stumps and ugly flesh wounds which had not been dressed for four or five days. Severed arms and legs only half buried lay in piles and grew larger with each passing hour.”
For most among the host of medical problems in Fredericksburg was that of numbers. More than seven thousand wounded soldiers were brought there after the Wilderness. To attend to them were forty physicians. It took twenty-four hours just to get an injured man from an ambulance wagon to a line awaiting the surgeon’s examination. One of those surgeons was Doctor William Sowing of Vermont. At one point Sowing told a friend, “I am very tired. I have amputated one hundred limbs today.” Assuming that Sowing toiled for sixteen hours that day he thus was performing an amputation every ten minutes without interruption. That is astounding.
The aftermath of the fighting in the Wilderness was the rule, not the exception. It was the Civil War at its worst because it was human suffering at its deepest. Several writers then and since have proposed the same benediction for those hundreds of thousands of wounded men North and South. “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.”
