Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania formed the bloodiest landscape in North America, vividly reflecting the Civil War’s tragic cost in a bombarded, bloodied, and looted city, ruined farms, and thousands of refugees forced into the countryside. More than 85,000 men were wounded and 15,000 killed, most now in unknown graves. The fading scars of battle, the home places of bygone families, and granite tributes to those who fought still mark these lands, revealing the trials of a community and nation at war, a virtuous tragedy that freed four million Americans and reunited a nation. At Wilderness, Union and Confederate soldiers grappled for two days in the woods west of Fredericksburg, and James Horace Lacy’s house, Ellwood, served as a headquarters. At Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee won a victory against great odds but lost his subordinate Stonewall Jackson, who, after being mortally wounded there, was taken to a Caroline County plantation and died eight days later, saying, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” At Spotsylvania, two weeks of gruesome combat culminated in hand-to-hand fighting at the Bloody Angle, and at Fredericksburg, Confederate defenders behind a stone wall repelled repeated Union assaults at the Sunken Road.

Chatham Heights, Virginia · United States