War’s Grisly Toll

Library of Congress

Confederate soldiers killed in the fighting at Spotsylvania, Virginia, in May 1864 are laid out for burial.

“War!… I often think that in the future, when human character shall have deepened, there will be a better way of settling affairs than this of plunging into a perfect maelstrom of horror.”

—Union surgeon John Gardner Perry, in a letter home after the recently ended Overland Campaign, June 27, 1864

“There were a great many unburied skeletons, presenting a very ghastly appearance. There were forty-nine skulls in one little ditch; the bodies were torn to pieces and scattered about, having been taken from their shallow graves by hogs or other animals. A hand or a foot might be seen protruding from the earth, here and there, to mark the last resting place of the patriotic victims of this horrible war.”

—John Camden West, 4th Texas Infantry, on his recent march over the site of the August 1862 Battle of Cedar Mountain, in a letter to an acquaintance, June 23, 1863

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War

Sketch of dead Civil War soldiers in a field.

“We have literally walked on dead men all night, and now while camp fires are casting their flickering rays over the battle field, the scene looks horrible, hundreds of ghastly corpse mangled and torn…. I can sit here by my little glimmering light and count a score of Federals … dead and dying….”

—W.W. Heartsill, 2nd Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifles, on a scene during the Battle of Chickamauga, in his diary, September 19, 1863

“Around the crater we see a large body of Union soldiers, lying as though in line of battle waiting for the command to move forward, and we suppose they are…. [O]n going to the spot, what is our horror to find that they are all Union dead!… They all lay on their faces, calmly … sleeping; while the battle rages all around….”

—James H. Clark, 115th New York Infantry, recalling a scene during the Battle of the Crater, in a postwar account

Ted Karle

Oliver Wilcox Norton

“All over the field were scattered black and bloated corpses of men and dead horses…. I was galloping along the road when … my horse sprang to one side, and looking to see what started him, I saw the bodies of thirteen rebels lying in the mud with the pitiless rain beating on their ghastly faces. That would have been a horror at home; there it was only a glimpse of what might be seen.”

—Oliver Wilcox Norton (above), 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry, on riding over the Gettys-burg battlefield two days after the fighting had ended, in a letter home, July 17, 1863