Following the devastating Confederate losses at Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee's army needed to make a hasty retreat into Virginia. With as many as 15,000 wounded, there were not enough wagon's to carry the most disabled. In order to prevent the total loss of his army, Lee chose to leave around 6,000 of his men in the hands of the Union Army.
One of the nurses who cared for Confederate soldiers wrote, "There are no words in the English language to express the suffering I witnessed today " Few records exist of what happened to those men. Very few of them ever made it back to their families in the South. Horrible infection, amputation without anesthesia, imprisonment and ultimately death was the fate of most.
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