Skeleton Hunt: Burial of Union Dead in the Wilderness/Spotsylvania Court House

[Two Flints]

Hello SSS,

During my search for the gravesite of Francis O. Lombard, who several authors credit as being the first Union soldier to fire a Spencer during the Civil War, I was sent the following article written by Donald C. Pfanz, Staff Historian at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The title indicates the subject matter.  Hope you will find the time to read it.

Two Flints

The article "Skeleton Hunt":  The Burial of Union Dead in the Wilderness
and at Spotsylvania Court House  by  Donald C. Pfanz  appeared in Volume IV, 2005 issue of Fredericksburg: History and Biography.   


   The Civil War has the sanguinary distinction of being the bloodiest war in American history.  In four years of fighting, more than 600,000 American soldiers perished.  Of that number approximately 360,000—or 58 percent—belonged to the Union Army.  Responsibility for burying the Northern dead fell to the Quartermaster Corps.  Although it could do little while the war was in progress, the Quartermaster Department set about the grisly task with energy and determination once it ended.  It began its work at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, the opening battles of General Ulysses S. Grant's 1864 Overland Campaign.
   Captain James M. Moore led the Union burial effort.  Moore had enlisted as a private in the 19th Pennsylvania Infantry in 1861, but later he transferred to the Quartermaster Department, where he spent the last part of the war supervising the burial of Union soldiers who had died in hospitals in and around Washington, D.C.  On June 7, 1865, Inspector General James A. Hardie set Moore on a new task, directing him "to take charge of the duty of the burial of the Union soldiers, portions of whose remains, it is reported, are lying exposed on the fields of the engagements at Wilderness and Spotsylvania and that vicinity."  The two battlefields fell within the aegis of the army's Middle Military Division.  Before leaving, Moore reported to the Division's commander, Major General Winfield S. Hancock, and received further instructions. 
Hancock assigned Col. Charles P. Bird's First United States Veteran Volunteers to support Moore in this assignment.  Bird had been a captain in the Second Delaware Volunteers in 1864 and had served under Hancock at both the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House.  Now, as the newly minted commander of the 1st United States Veteran Volunteers, he commanded a hodgepodge of officers and men who had reenlisted in the army after having previously served in other regiments. 
The First Regiment shuffled onto a transport at Alexandria, Virginia, about June 9 and steamed down the Potomac River to Potomac Creek, arriving at a former Union supply depot known as Belle Plains.  Moore met the regiment there the next day led it on a twelve-mile march to Fredericksburg.  En route it passed through southern Stafford County, an area made desolate by the Army of the Potomac's lengthy winter encampment there two and one-half years earlier.  An officer in Bird's regiment, Second Lieutenant William F. Landon, likened the barren, sparsely populated region to a "desert"--a "Virginia Sahara."
   The First Regiment reached Fredericksburg late on the afternoon of June 10 and pitched its tents on the south side of the Rappahannock River.  Some wandered the streets of the shell-torn town; others walked across the plain leading to Marye's Heights, where Union arms had suffered defeat on December 13, 1862.  Unlike the Union soldiers who had perished in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House, most of those who had died at Fredericksburg had been buried immediately after the battle.  Landon had fought at Fredericksburg with the 14th Indiana Volunteers, and he took the opportunity to search the town for the graves of comrades who had fallen there.  He found but one:  Corporal John E. Hutchins of Company B, the "Old Post Guards."
   Landon and his comrades resumed their march the next morning, heading west along one of two roads:  the Orange Turnpike or the Orange Plank Road.  By noon, the First Regiment reached Chancellorsville, the site of another desperate battle.  The charred remains of the Chancellor house and the scattered remnants of blankets, knapsacks, and other equipment bore silent witness to the fierce struggle that had been waged there.  Passing on, the regiment reached the Wilderness Battlefield late that afternoon.  The soldiers bivouacked on the northern end of the battlefield at an abandoned goldmine-- possibly the Woodville Mine.  No sooner had they arrived than "a crowd of half-starved women and children" and a few men in Confederate uniform flooded into the camp, hoping to trade garden vegetables for food that the soldiers carried in their wagons.  "All the rations we could spare were freely given them," wrote Landon, but the demand far exceeded the supply and many went away hungry. 
   The First Regiment began collecting skeletons on June 12.  Starting at the northern end of the battlefield, the soldiers slowly worked their way south through "woods, thickets, fields, and swamps," searching for human remains.  After going a certain distance, they would halt, change direction, then move forward again,
marking the graves of those who had been properly interred and gathering up the remains of those who had not.  One out of every four men carried a sack to hold the bones.   Skeletons that lay in marshy ground had not fully decomposed.  Too offensive to handle, they had to be buried where they lay. 



   Although required to bury only the Union dead, Moore and Bird took it upon themselves to inter Confederates that they found too, a task that nearly doubled their workload.  Soldiers whose graves could be identified received a simple headboard.  Such was the case of John W. Patterson, colonel of the 102nd Pennsylvania Volunteers, who had died on May 5, 1864.  Patterson's men had committed his body to the ground and marked his grave with whatever wood happened to be available at the time.  When Bird's men found Patterson's grave, more than a year later, they replaced the rough headboard with a tablet of their own.  Patterson's family later recovered his body and took the tablet home with them as a relic of his death.  Today it is the only artifact of its type in existence. 
   Patterson was more fortunate than most.  Few soldiers had been buried, and fewer still had boards identifying their graves.  "It was impossible to identify any of the bodies found unburied," insisted Bird, "they having been exposed [for] more than a year all traces of identification having been destroyed...."
   In three days of hunting, the First Regiment collected thousands of bones and "a huge pile of grinning, ghastly skulls."  To hold the remains, the soldiers constructed a cemetery south of the Orange Turnpike, near the western edge of Saunders Field.  The graveyard was sixty feet square and enclosed by a whitewashed fence made of horizontal planking.  On one of the fence posts workers nailed a board identifying the graveyard as "Wilderness National Cemetery No. 1."   
   The First Regiment buried the dead in mass graves.  Landon recalled placing ten skulls in each coffin and filling the rest of the container with bones.  Once full, soldiers screwed lids onto the wooden boxes and a "Corporal's Guard" lowered them into the ground, its occupants "unknown, but not unhonored nor unsung."  By Landon's count, his regiment buried 35 coffins in this fashion, totaling 350 interments.  However, his figure may be high.  Bird reported burying 180 men in Wilderness National Cemetery  No. 1, while Moore—perhaps erroneously—set the figure at just 108.     
   The men of the First Regiment arranged the graves in neat, orderly rows.  Over each one they erected a white wooden tablet with black lettering that read:

UNKNOWN
U.S.
SOLDIERS

KILLED MAY, 1864

Like those they erected elsewhere on the battlefield, the tablets were approximately ten inches wide and one and one-half inches thick.    They extended three feet above the ground and had gently rounded tops. 
   Having finished the job along the Orange Turnpike, Colonel Bird moved to the southern end of the battlefield.  His men pitched their "dog tents" in a large field just east of where the Brock Road intersected the Orange Plank Road.  After settling into their new camp, they fanned out to look for additional graves.  As before, the regiment erected neat tablets over the graves of every Union soldier that it found, known or unknown, and collected in sacks the remains of Union soldiers that had not been buried.    The burial party interred Confederate soldiers too, but it only marked the graves of Southerners it could identify. 
   The First Regiment buried the Union skeletons that it found in a cemetery situated south of the Orange Plank Road, less than one half mile west of the Brock Road intersection.   A whitewashed sign nailed to a tree identified the site.  The graveyard stood just in outside a line of Confederate earthworks, where Union carnage had been the greatest.  Wilderness National Cemetery No. 2, as it was called, was 90 feet square--50 percent larger than the graveyard constructed earlier along the Orange Turnpike.  The soldiers enclosed the grounds with a white picket fence, different in appearance from the board fence they had erected around Wilderness National Cemetery No. 1.   In contrast to that cemetery, which was constructed in a clearing, Wilderness National Cemetery No. 2 stood in the woods.  Inside its enclosure grew no fewer than 45 small oak trees.     
   As they did at Wilderness National Cemetery No. 1, members of the burial party disagreed on just how many men they had buried along the Plank Road.  Captain Moore tabulated the number of soldiers there at 534, Colonel Bird thought they had buried 535, while Lieutenant Landon set the tally at 650.  "The bones of these men were gathered from the ground where they fell," Moore explained, "having never been interred; and by exposure to the weather for more than a year all traces of their identity were entirely obliterated."  Although most men buried in the cemetery had no recognizable identity, there were at least five exceptions:  Captain Seth F. Johnson, 44th New York Volunteers; Sergeant Isaiah L. Gordon, 20th Maine Volunteers; Private John Flanaghan, 9th Massachusetts Volunteers; Private John Hull, 149th Pennsylvania Volunteers; and Private William C. Rogers, 5th Michigan Volunteers.  Unlike their unknown comrades, who were packed ten to a coffin, each identified soldier received his own plot. 
   Rain temporarily brought work at the cemetery to a halt.  Undeterred by the weather, Landon went hunting for huckleberries in the swamps west of the Brock Road.  He found bushes growing "as high as a man's head" and loaded with fruit.  But as the lieutenant plucked berries from the branches, he stumbled upon a more gruesome harvest:  the skeleton of a rebel soldier who had been shot through the head.  Unlike other human skeletons that he had found, this one had not yet been plundered.  Landon picked up the skull and shook it.  The fatal bullet still rattled inside.  But Landon was more interested in the man's gold teeth.  With a callousness wrought by four years of war, Landon removed the gold from the deceased man's jaw and then proceeded to plunder him of every item that he had owned, down to his pocket comb.  Before leaving, Landon "chucked" his victim's bones into a sinkhole and scraped a little dirt over them.  He then mounted the man's skull on a stick in order to mark the grave for anyone who might come looking for it.
   A mile west of the Brock Road intersection stood the Carpenter farm, the headquarters of the Second Corps' medical department during the battle.  Bird's men found four cemeteries there, one for each for the corps' four division hospitals.   Soldiers who had died at the hospitals were "thickly planted" about the place, their graves marked by crude headboards fashioned from cracker boxes and other rough materials.  A man named Akers occupied the farm.  "This man Akers owns, or rather there are on his plantation about twenty negroes, mostly wenches and brats, with perhaps three rheumatic 'uncles,'" Landon informed a friend.  "He has a son at home who was a lieutenant in the rebel army.  Six acres in wheat and six in corn is all the crop they have to depend on for winter food—two worn-out horses and two cows compose their 'stock.'" 
   The First Regiment completed its work on the Orange Plank Road after a few days and headed for Spotsylvania Court House.  It followed the Brock Road—the same route used by much of Grant's army in 1864.  On the way it passed Todd's Tavern, a ramshackle frame building that had been the site of some minor fighting in the campaign.  The remains of eight soldiers lay within sight of the road.  Bird and his men hastily committed the skeletons to the soil and continued on their way.   
   A little farther on, the First Regiment came to the home of Katharine Couse.  During the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House the building had served as a Union field hospital, and for Landon its sight brought back vivid and unpleasant memories.  "I well remembered the rows of wounded soldiers I had seen stretched out here as we bivouacked on the same spot but little over one year ago, and listening all the night long to the deep groans of the wounded and dying heroes and shrieks and curses of those undergoing the torture of the probe or keen blade of the amputating knife.  Many a poor fellow's bones rest here under the shade of the oak and pine," he wrote a friend, "and few with boards to mark the spot." 
   Across the road from the Couse house stood "Liberty Hill," the farm of Captain John C. Brown, a War of 1812 veteran.  Here the Second Corps had gathered its strength before assaulting the Muleshoe Salient on May 12, 1864--an attack that led to the most savage day of fighting in American history.  Among the casualties on that bloody day was Landon's old commander, Colonel John Coons of the 14th Indiana Volunteers.  Landon found Coons's grave after a three-hour search.  Bending over, Landon pried open the coffin.  Although the body had begun to molder, he recognized the colonel by his uniform, hair, and beard.  A rough headboard over the grave confirmed the identity.  With the help of another soldier, Landon transferred the Coons's remains to a new coffin and buried it in the garden, beneath a small apple tree.  He erected a headboard over that and other 14th Indiana graves that he found so that family members could later find the remains.
   The First Regiment established its Spotsylvania camp in rear of the Confederate works, at a point on the battlefield where the carnage had been particularly severe.  Landon remembered the site as the "Death Angle," although it has come down to history as the "Bloody Angle."  Either name is appropriate, for it had been a site of indescribable horror.  For 22 hours Union and Confederate soldiers had struggled there, often in hand-to-hand combat, the torn and mangled bodies of the dead piling up two, three, even four feet deep around the works.  After the fighting had subsided, Union soldiers tossed the dead into the trench and kicked dirt from the adjacent parapet down upon them. 
   Moore and Bird found few men to bury at Spotsylvania.  The Army of the Potomac had buried many of the dead at the time of the battle, and Joseph Sanford had taken care of the rest.  Sanford owned the Spotsylvania Court House hotel and was the village's most prominent citizen.  In May 1865 he had made arrangements with General William T. Sherman, whose army was passing through the area en route to the Grand Review, to bury the remains of Union soldiers that still littered the ground.  The innkeeper tackled the job with energy.  By the time Moore and his party reached the battlefield just one month later, they found fewer than 200 skeletons unburied.  Following its earlier precedent of mass burials, the First Regiment parceled the bones into 18 coffins.  Moore intended to create a cemetery for these skeletons, as he had done in the Wilderness, but the summer heat rendered the remains so putrid that Bird's men could not bear to handle them.   Bowing to necessity, Moore ordered the men to bury the corpses where they lay.
   The men of the First Regiment were not alone in looking for graves.  Upon reaching Spotsylvania, they met a Northern woman who had been at the battlefield for three days searching for her dead son.  On its final day at Spotsylvania, the burial party found the young man's remains and consigned them to his mother's keeping.
   Bird's men completed their task on June 24.  They had been in the field for just over two weeks.  Before leaving the Bloody Angle, a soldier nailed to a tree a board containing a stanza from Theodore O'Hara's poem, "Bivouac of the Dead." In ornate script, it read:

On Fame's eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread
And glory guards with solemn round
The Bivouac of the Dead

In the course of the expedition, the First Regiment had buried nearly 1,500 skeletons, erected headboards over the graves of 785 known soldiers, and marked as unknown the graves of many more.  "Our 'Skeleton Hunt' has ended," wrote Landon, "the heroes of the fierce and bloody battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania, who offered up their lives in defense of their country's honor and her flag in those terrible conflicts, are now, at last, reposing in peace beneath the 'sacred soil' of the Old Dominion."
   Despite Landon's rosy assessment, the expedition had not been a complete success.  Moore himself admitted as much.  "Hundreds of graves on these battle fields are without any marks whatever to distinguish them," he informed General Hancock, "and so covered with foliage, that the visitor will be unable to find the last resting places of those who have fallen, until the rains and snows of winter wash from the surface the light covering of earth, and expose their remains."  Bird took a more positive view of the matter  "...It may be that a few were passed over," he admitted, "but from the extensive growth of weeds and underbrush, it was impossible to discover them."
   In coming months it become evident just how many skeletons the burial party had missed.  Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman visited Spotsylvania Battlefield in April 1866, while the trees were still in bud, and was shocked at the number of bones he found still scattered across the ground.  "Not only are the remains not collected in a common cemetery," he noted critically, "but many marked graves have been overlooked. Only the scattered dead are marked and of those probably only a portion."  Writer John T. Trowbridge had found a similar state of affairs in the Wilderness when he visited there in September 1865.  Stepping into the woods, Trowbridge had found the skeletons of two soldiers lying side by side—the first of many such discoveries that he would make.  "It must have been that these bodies, and others we found afterwards, were overlooked by the party sent to construct the cemeteries," he mused.  "It was shameful negligence, to say the least."     
   Moore and Bird submitted reports of their expedition to General Hancock
upon their return to Washington, D.C.   To his report, Moore appended a list of 722 names of soldiers whose graves he had marked. Curiously, the list included at least a dozen Confederate soldiers.    The War Department later published portions of Moore's list in prominent newspapers throughout the North so as to give family members an opportunity to retrieve the remains.    The bones of Colonel Patterson, Colonel Coons, and many others were recovered in this manner. 
   Unfortunately Moore's list was fraught with errors.  A survey of just thirteen names reveals no fewer than ten mistakes.  While many of the errors were minor in nature, others were not.  For instance, Moore recorded the interment of the 14th Indiana's Thomas Gibson as "T. Gillison."  Likewise, James Gallegher of the 8th Ohio appeared as Joseph Gallough of the 4th Ohio, and Anthony Magrum of the 8th Ohio became A. Magerham of the 7th Virginia.  Given the frequency and flagrancy of such mistakes, it is remarkable that so many skeletons were claimed.
   The work done by Moore, Bird, and the men of the First Regiment remained intact for only a year.  Confronted with the task of interring more than 15,000 Union soldiers in the Fredericksburg area, the War Department in 1866 decided to consolidate the graves of Union soldiers into a single cemetery located on Marye's Heights.  Over the next two years burial parties scoured the Fredericksburg region, bringing in wagonload after wagonload of human remains.   Among them were the skeletons of soldiers buried by the First Regiment in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House. 
   Today all traces of Wilderness National Cemetery No. 1 are gone, as are the individual plots of those once buried on Spotsylvania Battlefield.  Only at Wilderness National Cemetery No. 2 can one still find evidence of Captain Moore's expedition.  There, amongst the decaying leaves, visitors can still see shallow depressions in the earth, whose regular alignment identifies them as former graves—haunting reminders of the great "Skeleton Hunt" of 1865. 

The National Park Service will soon be placing an interpretive marker at the site of Wilderness National Cemetery No. 2, at which time it will become an auxiliary stop on the Wilderness Battlefield tour. 

[mtmarfield]

   Greetings

  What grisly tokens... A hellish event that War must've been. 2nd Lt. James T. Marfield of the 114th OVI Co.B, was hastily buried at 'Chickasaw Bayou', and later reinterred at a Federal Cemetery. I'd like to learn more about him; I know only fragments.
   What a mass of humanity. Thanks for your contribution.

              Be Well, All

                                  M.T.Marfield
                                      6-16-06