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U This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Until May 12th, 1864, there was a large oak tree in a rolling meadow just outside Spotsylvania Courthouse in Virginia. That morning twelve hundred entrenched Confederates awaited the assault. of 5,000 Union troops. here to tell another story about objects in American history.
is our own Ashley Lubinsky. Take it away, Ashley. Inside the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, among artifacts that define the many costs of war, there is an object that does not necessarily read as a military object at all. It's a fragment of a tree. It's this rough, splintered section of oak that stands only a few feet high.
And when you look at this object, the wood is shredded and it's torn apart in irregular patterns, and there are these deep cavities that kind of puncture its side. And the reason it looks like this is because of something that you can see a little bit deeper, which is that it's embedded with conically shaped bullets, which were called mignet balls. They were developed in the 19th century. It's basically what soldiers were using by the time of the American Civil War. And these bullets were lodged into this stump.
back in 1864. And it's known as the Spotsylvania stump. And that is because a century earlier during the American Revolution, the traditional shape of the projectile was round, it was a round musket ball. But in the 19th century, you start to see the development of conically shaped projectiles. They're originally developed in France.
They're called beignet balls. But in the U.S., there is a designer at Harper's Ferry that modifies that. His name is James Burton. He's a part of a long legacy of designers throughout American firearms history. And the reason that that's significant, well, there's many reasons why that's significant.
The first being that a conically shaped projectile allows you to have a rifled gun on the battlefield more so than you had during the Revolution. Earlier warfare, rifles were more of a sniper gun. It wasn't your standard infantry gun. But by the Civil War, the conically shaped projectile allowed for a rifled musket, which created a much more accurate firearm, which would show how battlefield tactics would change throughout the war. But then the other side, the more gruesome side of it, was the injuries that it caused to soldiers.
And that was. Shattering of bone.
So during the revolution, which is, you know, a century earlier, a round musketball would have more of a chance of a clean break, which would sometimes allow for doctors on the battlefield to set. The injuries rather than have to amputate. But during the Civil War, there's a much higher rate of amputation because of what a conically shaped projectile will do to bone. And while that's a horrible thing to think about, if you look at the Spotsylvania stump, you can see just that evisceration, that damage that can be caused by a conically shaped projectile, just in the sheer jagged nature of how the stump was cut down. By 1864, the American Civil War had entered a new phase.
Union General Ulysses S. Grant initiated what became known as the Overland Campaign, which was a sustained series of engagements against Confederate. General Robert E. Lee in Virginia. And unlike other campaigns, Grant's approach really emphasized continuous pressure.
So engaging Lee's army repeatedly, even after having heavy losses on both sides, rather than withdrawing to regroup, which was the standard at the beginning of the war. And the result was a series of battles marked by really high casualties and increasingly entrenched positions. And many people actually attribute these types of battles to early examples of trench warfare, which was a shift from the kind of rank and file. Form that soldiers were using earlier in the war. And trench warfare is often most associated with World War I, but the kind of origins of it are.
seen even in the United States in the mid-19th century. One of the battles during this Overland campaign with Ulysses S. Grant was the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, which was fought in May of 1864. After the costly Battle of the Wilderness, both armies moved southeast and they entrenched themselves along defensive lines near Spotsylvania. And among these kind of entrenched defensive lines, there was a protruding section of a Confederate line that was known as the Mule Shoe, which was essentially a four mile long defensive line that would become the focal point of Union attacks during the battle.
On May twelfth, Union forces launched a massive assault on this position, breaking through part of the Confederate line and initiating what became one of the most intense close quarters engagements of the entire war. This location is called the Bloody Angle, and during this breakthrough in the line, soldiers fought for around 20 hours in continuous combat. And the conditions, in and of themselves, deteriorated rapidly. Rain was falling basically the entire time, and when you think about that with a style of trench warfare, you now have trenches where the soldiers are filled with mud, and visibility is relatively non-existent. But the firing did not stop, and thousands of rounds were discharged at close range, often by soldiers standing only yards apart.
And it was within this concentrated zone of fire that the oak tree once stood. The same volume of rifle musket fire that killed and wounded thousands of men that day also struck the tree. and shot after shot tore into its trunk, gradually weakening it, until something during that prolonged engagement it fell, cut down not by axes, but by bullets alone. And when the fighting ended, only a portion of the trunk, which was about 22 inches high, remained standing. Uh After this Horrific battle.
The stump kind of became an immediate point of recognition, almost something that memorialized the tragedies that happened there. And soldiers remembered it, and visitors often sought it out because it represented something that statistics and written accounts would struggle to convey. In the years after the war, the stump was removed from the battlefield and eventually entered into different institutional collections.
So first it was at the U.S. Army's Ordnance Museum and then it was later transferred to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 1888 where it stands today. And there are some things that kind of are different about the Civil War, or at least our understanding of the memory of it, that do occur. For example, battlefield photography became a major point of remembrance. But so is this stump.
When you go to a museum, or when you work in a museum, like I do, you. Always kind of walk this fine line, especially in military history, of glamorizing or and/or sterilizing the violence of the war.
So, you see a lot of old museum exhibits where you see uniforms or the guns, and they're kind of divorced from that human component. Curators weigh a lot when they're deciding if they use something that actually shows the result of that violence: a bloody uniform from someone who'd been struck down. And now, some museums are able to utilize that and interpret that, but that is a really difficult pill for people to swallow. It's really difficult for visitors to. Be faced with something like that.
And so, this stump is just a really rare artifact where you can come and really see what devastation, what violence, what tragedy looked like during the Civil War without that kind of glorification or glamorization of violence that you'd get if you displayed something that was. more human.
Okay. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Ashley Lebensky. She's the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms. And she's also contributing to this recurring series, Objects in American History.
And what a story the Spotsylvania stump tells. I mean, to imagine the kind of warfare where that many bullets were exchanged, that it took down an oak tree. The story of the Sposylvania stump, part of our Objects in American history series here. and our American stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans.
It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's getreal about skincancer.com. Yeah. You've watched racing.
Now get behind the wheel. At Kaizen Autosport Racing School at VIR, professional race drivers teach you how to drive faster, safer, and with more confidence on one of America's legendary racetracks. Never driven on track? We'll get you started. Already experienced, we'll take you to the next level.
Ready to race? Earn your competition license and learn real wheel-to-wheel racecraft. Stop watching, start driving. Go to racevir.com. That's racevir.com.
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