A veteran of the Western Theater at Spotsylvania

For 1st Lt. Cyrus Marion Roberts, the first words he wrote in his May 16 entry mirror what other battlefield visitors will be feeling this summer: “Weather hot.”[1] Roberts’ visit to Spotsylvania, however, was not one of leisure. He was passing through.

Roberts, an Ohio native, had been a soldier for over three years. He enlisted in October 1861 and experienced his first taste of combat at Fort Donelson. Afterward, he was promoted to work in the Signal Corps and later served on staff under Maj. Gen. Francis P. Blair Jr. As a soldier and staff officer in the Western Theater, Roberts was present during the campaigns at Vicksburg and in the Carolinas. By May 1865, he and the rest of the army were marching toward Washington, D.C., to participate in the Grand Review.

While marching north, Roberts wrote down the sights of what, at one point, were the Eastern Theater. He toured the field fortifications at Petersburg and the ruins and cemeteries of the former Confederate capital of Richmond. Roberts’s most detailed account of these battlefield tours comes from his May 16 entry when he and his Pioneer comrades arrived at Spotsylvania Court House. Although the battle had been fought a year prior, much of the landscape had remained unchanged since then. As detailed in the diary, Roberts and others were given an unofficial tour of the area by an “old Gentleman keeping the house of entertainment.”[2]

Their escort took them to the Mule Shoe Salient to observe where most of the fiercest combat had occurred. What Roberts witnessed was a mangled environment, more famously known as the Bloody Angle. In his diary, he wrote that “graves were here visible where the men were not totally covered – and bones would protrude – often a head with gaping jaws, feet hands & c.”[3] According to Roberts’s count, about sixty-seven Union soldiers were visibly sprouting from the ground, but he acknowledged that his count could be incorrect. He added that hundreds more skeletal remains were visible and unburied, an unfortunate consequence of the Overland Campaign’s cycle of constant moving, digging, and fighting.

Nearby, Roberts also wrote of his encounter with what would later be known to Civil War readers as the Spotsylvania Stump. His amazed reaction that the nearly 21-inch oak tree was “entirely cut in two by minie balls alone” mirrored others who would visit the stump.[4] Nearby in the salient, Roberts also discovered a ditch that may once have been used as a rifle pit, now serving as an uneven mass grave. To Roberts, the environmental destruction of Spotsylvania Court House a year after the fighting, coupled with bodies strewn across the battlefield, was a physical reminder of the scars war left behind. This left Roberts in a rage as he wrote that all of these fellow soldiers who had fought were now “entirely uncared for.”[5]

As I analyzed this diary entry, I noticed that some of the same things that historian Pete Carmichael interpreted, such as “the battered condition of the landscape conveyed the fury of combat” and “the indignities inflicted against the Union dead demanded immediate redress by the U.S. military.”[6] For Roberts’s own military service, as written in his diary, he depicted troop movements and general marching maneuvers of combat. His experiences at Vicksburg showed the plans for conducting sieges against the Confederates, while his time in the Carolinas Campaign centered around foraging the Lowcountry’s farmland. The detailed account of mass graves and the violated topography meant something to Roberts, arguably more than what was already written before this entry. Soldiers would not write this down if it did not have a profound mental impact on them.

One of the last sentences in the diary offered another interpretation. As Roberts examined the rifle pit full of Union bodies, he noticed that “one end of the ditch extended into a field now ploughed and planted in corn- which has just sprouted up.”[7] This observation by Roberts highlights the war’s impact on civilians caught up in the conflict. Families in the crossfire either ran for cover or, in most cases, evacuated their homes in advance. After the fighting, those same families had to find ways around the carnage to begin a new normal, even if that meant cultivating crops yards away from decaying soldiers. It would take time for the bodies to be moved to new national cemeteries or shipped back home to their loved ones.

The image of crops growing near the spot where thousands had died provided an anecdote for the aftermath of the war. With bodies still scattered across Virginia and other parts of the nation, the rebuilding of the country was going to be in large part thanks to those who gave their lives in fields similar to the one Roberts observed. His description of what was left in the wake of a gruesome campaign a year prior made him frustrated with the cost of the war, as well as how long it took the government to reinter those still holding the line officially. But what was also written was the awe of destructive battles waged for hours on end, just for those who lived there to pick up where they left off.

[1] Cryus Roberts, “Volume 3: 8 May to 20 May 1865,” 78ohio (blog), March 15, 2013, https://78ohio.org/volume-3-8-may-to-20-may-1865/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies, The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 295.

[7] Roberts, “Volume 3.”