Sobering Stopover

     We didn't make as many stops as usual on the way home from Charleston, SC, and they were quicker too, so we were a little ahead of schedule. As we traveled up I 295 around Richmond, I saw the Cold Harbor Civil War battle site was just off the highway. I suggested to B: Maybe we could stop for an hour.

     I don't know why -- I had no ancestors who were in the Civil War -- but I find Civil War history fascinating. Not just interesting in a general sort of way, but fascinating in the original sense of the word that suggests arousing interest through terror, like the way we are fascinated by the sight of a snake.

     I've taken an online course about the Civil War, and a Civil War class at our local Center for Learning in Retirement. I am not a scholar, but I've read several books on the period (although I was too intimidated to read the thousand-page-plus Grant by Ron Chernow -- which is why I'm no scholar.)

     Anyway, few years ago I visited the Petersburg, VA, battlefield site, with my daughter. We saw remnants of the Confederate defenses against the Union siege of 1864, along with the underground tunnel used by Federal forces to blow a hole in Confederate lines -- a move that backfired when Union forces got trapped in the crater left by the explosion.

     Last year B and I spent a day at Gettysburg. We got a tour of the battlefield, and heard about Little Roundtop and Big Roundtop, and looked out over the field where Picket's men charged the Union lines, costing the Confederates over 2000 casualties in less than an hour.

The Cold Harbor Killing Field today

     The fighting at Cold Harbor was part of Grant's Overland Campaign of 1864, as he pushed back the rebels in the Battle of the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, on the way to Petersburg and then Richmond.

   B and I arrived at the site and walked the one-mile loop around the battlefield, surveying the remnants of trenches, rifle pits, and an open area called the Killing Field where on June 3, 1864 advancing Federal troops were cut down by entrenched Confederate soldiers. From May 31 to June 12, nearly 18,000 men were killed, wounded or captured.

     Of course, as we all know, a year later, on April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederates to General Grant, at Appomattox Courthouse, marking the end of the Civil War. The Union was saved. And some 4 million slaves won an uncertain freedom.

     The cost was an estimated 620,000 people killed in the military, with almost a million more wounded, captured or missing. And who knows how many civilians lost their lives or livelihoods because of the war, or how many survivors suffered what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder -- damaged people who went unrecognized and uncared for.

Looking over the field from a trench

   When people today talk about how divided we are, how we don't tolerate fellow citizens who have different values, different lives, different views, I think to myself -- they are being myopic. We've seen plenty of division in American history, starting with the Revolution and including not just the Civil War and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, but the Gilded Age and violent worker strikes, the 1950s and McCarthyism, the 1960s and Vietnam, and on and on. 

    It's an American tradition to speak our minds, get into arguments, divide ourselves by sex, race, class, ethnicity, region and religion. But hopefully our identity as Americans will overcome all that -- at least to the extent that we will never become so divided that we end up at a place like Cold Harbor again.