Visitors still come to Civil War battlefields to ask why our great-great-grandfathers killed one another there, and whether we can resolve the stubborn differences they left behind. But the battlefields are more than memorials. They are also green, open spaces – natural reserves surrounded by rapidly expanding suburbs.
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
Historical parallels are always there for the thoughtful. Consider a key turning point for each of two former US presidents.
Union General Ulysses S. Grant crossed the Rapidan River in Virginia on 4 May 1864 – 157 years ago this very week – to commence the Overland Campaign in order to engage and destroy Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in a series of bloody battles that ended on 12 June when the siege of Petersburg began.
With the stakes equally high for the country, Donald Trump crossed his own Rapidan to commence his version of the Overland Campaign when he started down that escalator on 15 June 2015 and declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. This past Monday, that campaign continued with the latest battle as he labeled the 2020 election “The Big Lie.”