The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 8: Soldier Life and Secret Service.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

In this sparsely settled region, but lately so populous, the dead occupants still outnumbered the living. The woods bordering the Orange Plank Road were thickly strewn with the mouldering bodies of Hancock's men who had furiously assailed Hill and Longstreet on that line. Here gallant old Webb, for whom ‘taps’ have sounded, led his staunch brigade against Gregg's Texans and Low's Alabamans, almost up to the works, and the trefoil badges—the ‘clover-leaves’ on the cap-fronts of the fallen covered the ground on the edge of the Widow Tapp's field where Lee attempted to lead the Texans' charge, and the men refused to go forward until he consented to go back. Cattle were quietly browsing the herbage in a little grass glade at this point, their pasture the aftermath of the grim harvest reaped there on that May morning long ago.

To-day scarcely a trace remains of all that. In the intervening years beneficent Nature has been silently but unremittingly at work effacing the marks of man's devastation of her domain. The bark has closed over the bullet-scars on the trees, so that diligent search is required to detect them now; a new growth has sprung up to replace that leveled by the musketry; goodly trees, even, are standing upon the diminished earthworks. The others have long since rotted into mold. The traveler might easily pass along that quaint road, so hotly contested, with never a suspicion of what befell there—‘grim visaged war has smoothed his wrinkled front,’ indeed.

The war is definitely over. In its time it ravaged our fair land almost beyond recognition, put our young manhood to the uttermost proof, and left in its track many deeper and more poignant wounds than those in the Wilderness woods, but it ended at last. And time has been closing over the scars ever since and new growth springing into life all the while. Who was right; who was wrong?—the God above us ‘who doth all things aright’ alone knows surely.