One hundred and fifty years ago today, a significant battle at Cold Harbor, Virginia, began. In what turned out to be Ulysses S. Grant's worst miscalculation of the Civil War, 7,000 Union soldiers died in the first hour of fighting outside of Richmond — against a newly refortified Southern army commanded by General Robert E. Lee.
Days after the battle, Grant sent a message to Lee asking for a truce, to enable both armies to collect their wounded and dead. Lee answered saying that he had no one to retrieve — forcing Grant to amend his message, with the request to pick up the wounded alone. Lee agreed, but by the time that Union forces reached many of them, they had died from exposure and neglect.
The slaughter of the Civil War is incomprehensible today. It makes you wonder how the United States of 1864 would have borne the casualties of conflicts like Cold Harbor if there had been reporters beaming in on social media from the battlefield.
We were thinking about the Cold Harbor anniversary today, while we were digesting the right wing's continued brouhaha over the rescue of Bowe Bergdahl. Sgt. Bergdahl was the last American prisoner held in Afghanistan, and the US government has been working to free him — and briefing Congress about it — for the last three years. Whatever the circumstances of Bergdahl's original capture, the moral of the story is that American forces never want to leave a man behind. Like General Grant at Cold Harbor, asking General Lee for that truce.
A century and a half later, President Obama has retrieved our wounded. Does it really matter to Republicans that instead of a scruffy, white, whisky-loving general from Galena, Illinois, it's a black President doing it this time? Apparently it does. We cats HISS.
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