re: On this day 160 years ago, the most savage battle of the Civil War was waged in Virginia

A note on the battle

My home town is near Spotsylvania and in the 1950s you could still go to the battlefields and see what remained of trees from the battle. The trees were both big and dead. They were dead where rifle shots had been so heavy that the rounds acted as saw blades and cut though the trunks. It must have been an old growth forest to have that much dense hardwood to have survived without rotting to the ground over a century.