Meeting My Daughter in Petersburg

     Anyone who read my March 28 post No Wonder I'm Broke! knows that we've been doing some spring cleaning at our house. My main job has been to pack up all my daughter's old stuff from the basement and clear it out.

     I consulted her about it by phone and email. I was authorized to throw some of it away. Then I loaded up the car with the rest of it -- about 8,000 pounds of books and boxes, shoes and shirts, papers and other paraphernalia -- and set off down I95 to bring it to her.

This fortification was overrun by Union forces

     My daughter lives in North Carolina, and we arranged to meet in Petersburg, Va., to make the dropoff. We both have also recently developed an interest in the Civil War, inspired by an online course by Yale University Professor David Blight called History 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845 - 1877. If you've got 20-some hours to devote to learning about the Civil War, I highly recommend the lecture. Blight captures the excitement, the sweep and the significance of history, and he even inspired me to go on to read a couple of books including Uncle Tom's Cabin which somehow I'd never read in school.

     I had never been to a Civil War site, and neither had my daughter. She was coming with her boyfriend, and we were staying overnight, but first we decided to meet at the national park in Petersburg and spend the afternoon immersing ourselves in Civil War history.

     In 1864, Lee was retreating through Virginia as Grant tried to encircle his forces and cut them off from the rest of the Confederacy. The two armies fought the Battle of the Wilderness, then they clashed in Spotsylvania and again in Cold Harbor. Each battle was bloody, both sides losing thousands of men, but each time Lee's dwindling forces fought off the Union attack.

The entrance to the tunnel

     The Union army arrived at Petersburg and might have taken the city if it had not hesitated in the face of lightly-manned fortifications. Then, after weeks of stalemate, some mining engineers from Pennsylvania came up with the idea of digging a tunnel under enemy lines, then blowing up tons of dynamite to create a hole in rebel defenses.

     The explosion was set off on July 30, 1864, and blew a crater hundreds of feet wide. Union forces rushed into the breach, but the Confederates regrouped. They slaughtered hundreds of Union soldiers and re-established their lines.

     That set the stage for the siege of Petersburg, as Grant slowly strangled the enemy, until the Union finally took Petersburg on April 2, and then chased Lee to Appomattox where he surrendered on April 9, 1865.

Grant's headquarters

     My daughter, her boyfriend and I spent the afternoon roaming over the battle site, then we drove out to see Grant's headquarters on the James River. Later, we found a barbecue restaurant in the city of Petersburg, now suffering not from the aftermath of the Civil War but from the aftermath of industrial decline. Petersburg has a small historic downtown amidst its urban decay ... and at least one very good barbecue place.

     And then came the denouement to my trip. In the hotel parking lot, we unloaded my car, set the stuff out on the pavement, and then repacked all the boxes, bags, loose books and stuffed animals into her car. We stayed overnight. And then in the morning we waved goodbye -- my daughter to her new house in Raleigh, NC., and me back to B, and our now-less-crowded home in New York.