Ten minutes with General Grant, June 2, 186.
As the
General-in-Chief of all the
Federal armies sits smoking with his back to the smaller tree, two extraordinary things are happening:
Grant is arriving at the tremendous decision to “fight it out” that cost him ten thousand men the next morning; and the enterprising photographer with the
Union army has climbed upstairs in the little roadside meeting house (Bethesda Church, on the way to Cold Harbor), and is photographing the scene again and again.
The result is a veritable “moving picture” series of
Grant in the field — an opportunity without a parallel to witness the acting of history itself.
The informal consultation which the pictures reveal was as near a council of war as
Grant ever came.
