A Vast Hospital

After the December 13, 1862 battle, Fredericksburg suffered another form of horror as thousands of wounded Union soldiers crowded the city. For several days Clara Barton, the future founder of the American Red Cross, tended patients in the shell-torn Presbyterian Church across the street. In May 1864, ambulances again clogged the city’s streets, and virtually every public building became a hospital filled with wounded soldiers from the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. Most of the wounded soldiers brought to Fredericksburg survived, but hundreds died in the hospitals there during May and June 1864. Private Fred Kronenberger of the 2d New Jersey wrote to his parents on May 17, 1864, that he was lying with a wound in his right leg below the knee, that he was in good spirits, and that the doctors said his wound was not dangerous, but he died in a Fredericksburg hospital five days later. By today’s standards, conditions were gruesome and mortality rates were high.

Fredericksburg, Virginia · United States