Ordeal of the Wounded

After the May 3, 1863, fighting at Chancellorsville, Confederates gathered 500 wounded Union soldiers and brought them to Fairview, where for more than a week the helpless men lay in the yard around the house with little medical care, exposed to wind and rain and lying in the mud as wounds festered, infections spread, insects drawn by nearby piles of corpses bit them, and dozens died while many others prayed for death. A team of Union surgeons arrived at Fairview on May 5 and, using the door of the house as an operating table, began treating wounded arms and limbs, often by amputation at an average of four per hour, but although they worked for a week many patients still received no attention. On May 12, Union ambulances arrived under a flag of truce to carry the survivors to hospitals north of the Rappahannock; there was no food, no nursing, and no medicine to dull their pain, most were crowded together without tent cover and with very little in the way of blankets, and all were so weak they could scarcely move hand or foot.

Lake Wilderness, Virginia · United States