Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania formed the bloodiest landscape in North America, where the Civil War brought a bombarded, bloodied, and looted city, ruined farms, thousands of refugees driven into the countryside, more than 85,000 wounded men, and 15,000 killed, most now in unknown graves. The fading scars of battle, the homes of bygone families, and granite tributes to those who fought still mark these lands, revealing the trials of a community and nation at war in a tragic struggle that freed four million Americans and reunited the nation. At Wilderness, Union and Confederate soldiers fought for two days in the woods west of Fredericksburg, and James Horace Lacy's house, Ellwood, served as headquarters during the battle. At Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee won 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 ended in hand-to-hand fighting at the Bloody Angle, and at Chatham, a colonial plantation that hosted both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War brought use as a Union headquarters and hospital.

Virginia · United States