Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park

Four battles in eighteen months, 100,000 casualties total, and ground that changed hands so many times the living stopped counting the dead. Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park preserves the fields where Burnside's pontoons arrived too late, where Lee split his forces to send Stonewall Jackson through the woods at Chancellorsville, where Grant fought his first engagement against Lee in forest so dense that artillery advantage meant nothing, and where rain-soaked gunpowder forced men into hand-to-hand fighting at a crossroads neither side could afford to lose.

The park encompasses four major Civil War battlefields: Fredericksburg, where Union forces under Ambrose Burnside suffered catastrophic losses in December 1862 assaulting Confederate positions on Marye's Heights; Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson was shot and mortally wounded by friendly fire in May 1863; the Wilderness, where Grant and Lee first met in combat in terrain too dense for coherent command; and Spotsylvania Court House, where the armies fought for two weeks over a fortified salient known as the Mule Shoe. The battles were fought between December 1862 and May 1864 — eighteen months during which the ground between Washington and Richmond became the most contested real estate on the continent.

Spotsylvania County was established in 1721, named in Latin for Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood. The Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers form its northern boundary; Fredericksburg, which developed at the fall line where larger vessels could no longer navigate the Rappahannock, sits just across the county line. The city was named in 1728 for Frederick, Prince of Wales. During the Civil War, some 10,000 African-American slaves left area plantations and city households to cross the Rappahannock, reaching Union lines and gaining freedom — an exodus commemorated by historical markers on both sides of the river.

The park is a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It spans across Spotsylvania County and the City of Fredericksburg, with trails, historic structures, and interpretive exhibits at each battlefield site.