Aftermath

At 2 a.m. on May 13, 1864, General Lee declared a new line of works a half mile behind this position ready, and the Confederate troops in the trenches here quietly withdrew, having bought the Confederacy what it most needed that day: time. But every minute had come at a fearful cost, and it is likely that as many as 17,000 men fell killed or wounded in the fighting at the Muleshoe Salient, the longest sustained combat of the Civil War. In the works abandoned by the Confederates, piles of dead literally lay in the compartments, two, three, and four deep, tangled together with bodies and limbs intertwined, their black and bloated faces upturned to the sky in all manner of positions, already polluting the atmosphere with a horrible stench. Lieutenant Harvey B. Wells of the 84th Pennsylvania Volunteers wrote that it was such a picture of war, horrid war, as few people, even those who make a business of war, are permitted to witness. Captain Louis F. Waters of the 99th Pennsylvania Infantry was one of hundreds of Union soldiers to die at the Bloody Angle, and in June 1865 a burial party interred many of the Union dead at Spotsylvania Court House, including soldiers killed in front of the Bloody Angle.

Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia · United States