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Battle of Cold Harbor: Descriptive
Battle of Cold Harbor: May 31 - June 12, 1864
In the Overland Campaign of 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant
with the Army of the Potomac battled General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia for six weeks across central
Virginia. At the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna and Totopotomoy Creek, Lee repeatedly stalled, but failed to stop, Grant's southward progress toward Richmond.
The next logical military objective for Grant was the crossroads styled by locals Old Cold Harbor.
MAY 31,1864
After sparring along the Totopotomoy northeast of Richmond, Grant ordered Major General Philip Sheridan's cavalry to move
south and capture the crossroads at Old Cold Harbor. Arriving near the intersection, the Union force ran into Major General
Fitzhugh Lee's Confederate horsemen.
A sharp contest ensued, soon joined by Confederate infantry under Brigadier General Thomas Clingman of Major General Robert Hoke's division. After a short battle, Union cavalry drove the Confederates beyond the crossroads.
The Rebels then started digging new positions a half mile to the southwest.
JUNE 1
Lee desired to retake Old Cold Harbor and sent Major General Joseph Kershaw's troops to join Hoke in a morning assault. The effort was short and uncoordinated. Hoke failed to press the attack and
Sheridan's troopers, armed with Spencer repeating carbines, easily repulsed the assault.
Grant, encouraged by this success, ordered up reinforcements and planned his own attack for later the same day. If the
Union frontal assault broke through the Confederate defenses, it would place the Union army between Lee and Richmond. After
a hot and dusty night march, Major General Horatio Wright's VI Corps arrived and relieved Sheridan's cavalry, but Grant had
to delay the attack Major General William Smith's XVIII Corps, Army of the James, marching in the wrong direction under out-of-date
orders, had to retrace its route and arrived late in the afternoon.
The Union attack finally began at 5 p.m. Finding a fifty yard gap between Hoke's and Kershaw's divisions, Wright's veterans
poured through, capturing part of the Confederate lines. A southern counterattack however, sealed off the break and ended
the day's fighting. Confederate infantry strengthened their lines that night and waited for the battle to begin next morning.
On June 1, 1862, "A tall and uncommonly fine looking officer in the front rank of the enemy's column, looking me directly
in the face, took off his cap and cheered his men with words I could not catch." General Clingman referring to Colonel Elisha S. Kellogg of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery during the Battle of Cold Harbor (Kellogg
was about ten paces directly in front of Clingman. And within moments of exclaiming those words, Kellogg received two bullets
to the head and immediately fell dead)
JUNE 2
Disappointed by the failed attack Grant planned another advance for 5 a.m. on June 2. He ordered Major General Winfield
Hancock's II Corps to march to the left of the VI Corps. Exhausted by a brutal night march over narrow, dusty roads, the II
Corps did not arrive until 6:30 a.m. Grant postponed the attack until 5 p.m. Later that day, he approved a postponement until
4:30 a.m. of June 3 because of the spent condition of Hancock's men.
The Union delays gave Lee precious hours, time he used to strengthen his defenses. The Confederates had built simple trenches
by daybreak of June 2. Under Lee's personal supervision, these works were expanded and strengthened throughout the day. By
nightfall the Confederates occupied an interlocking series of trenches with overlapping fields of fire. Reinforcements under
Major General John Breckinridge and Lieutenant General Ambrose Hill arrived and fortified the Confederate right. Lee was ready.
JUNE 3
At 4:30 on the morning of June 3 almost 50,000 Federal troops in the II, VI and XVIII Corps launched a massive assault.
The Confederate position, now well entrenched, proved too strong for the Union troops. In less than an hour, thousands of
Federal soldiers lay dead and dying between the lines. Pinned down by a tremendous volume of Confederate infantry and artillery
fire, Grant's men could neither advance nor retreat. With cups, plates, and bayonets, they dug makeshift trenches. Later,
when darkness fell, these trenches were joined and improved.
JUNE 4-12
The great attack at Cold Harbor was over. Hundreds of wounded Federal soldiers remained on the battlefield for four days
as Grant and Lee negotiated a cease-fire. Few survived the ordeal.
From June 4 to June 12 both armies fortified their positions and settled into siege warfare. The days were filled with
minor attacks, artillery duels and sniping. With the Union defeat at Cold Harbor, Grant changed his overall strategy and abandoned
further direct moves against Richmond. On the night of June 12 Union forces withdrew and marched south towards the James River.
During the two week period along the Totopotomoy and at Cold Harbor, the Federal army lost 12,000 killed, wounded, missing
and captured while the Confederates suffered almost 4,000 casualties.
Grant's next target was Petersburg and the railroads that provided needed supplies to the Confederate army. Cold Harbor
proved to be Lee's last major field victory and changed the course of the war from one of maneuver to one of entrenchment.
Sources: National Park Service; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; Richmond National Battlefield
Park; Rhea, Gordon C., Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee May 26th-June 3, 1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2002; Fox, William F., Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, Albany Publishing, 1889.
Recommended
Reading: Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864. Review From Library
Journal: On June 3, 1864, the Union Second, Sixth,
and Eighteenth Corps assaulted Confederate breastworks at Cold Harbor outside Richmond,
VA. The resulting bloodbath amounted to U.S. Grant's worst defeat and "Bobby"
Lee's final great victory. In his latest book, native Virginian and Baltimore Sun correspondent
Furgurson (Chancellorsville, 1863) vividly retells the well-known story of how the friction between Grant and his insecure
direct subordinate, George Meade, poisoned the Army of the Potomac's whole chain of command.
Continued below…
By contrast,
he depicts Lee as a commander beset by poor health and impossible logistical problems who brilliantly deployed his meager
forces and soundly thrashed his overconfident adversary, thereby saving the rebel capital and extending an unwinnable war
by nearly a year. The book is rich in word pictures and engaging anecdotes. Furgurson considers the wounded that were left
to suffer with the dead between the lines while Lee and Grant quibble over protocols of recovery; the disastrous affect of
poor maps and impassable terrain on the Federal assault; and Grant's immediate need to bring Lincoln a battlefield victory
before the 1864 presidential election. Furgurson's contribution is his evocative retelling of a great American military tragedy.
Recommended
Reading: Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26-June 3, 1864, by Gordon C. Rhea (Hardcover). Description: In his gripping volume
on the spring 1864 Overland campaign--which pitted Ulysses S. Grant against Robert E. Lee for the first time in the Civil
War--Gordon Rhea vividly re-creates the battles and maneuvers from the North Anna stalemate through the Cold
Harbor offensive. Rhea's tenacious research elicits stunning new facts from the records of a phase oddly ignored
or mythologized by historians. The Cold Harbor of these pages differs sharply from the Cold Harbor
of popular lore. We see Grant, in one of his most brilliant moves, pull his army across the North Anna River
and steal a march on Lee. In response, Lee sets up a strong defensive line along Totopotomoy Creek, and the battles spark
across woods and fields northeast of Richmond. Continued below…
Their back
to the Chickahominy River and on their last legs,
the rebel troops defiantly face an army-wide assault ordered by Grant that extends over three hellish days. Rhea gives a surprising
new interpretation of the famous battle that left seven thousand Union casualties and only fifteen hundred Confederate dead
or wounded. Here, Grant is not a callous butcher, and Lee does not wage a perfect fight. Every imaginable primary source has
been exhausted to unravel the strategies, mistakes, gambles, and problems with subordinates that preoccupied two exquisitely
matched minds. In COLD HARBOR,
Rhea separates fact from fiction in a charged, evocative narrative. He leaves readers under a moonless sky, Grant pondering
the eastward course of the James River fifteen miles south of the encamped armies. About
the Author: Gordon Rhea is the author of three previous books, a winner of the Fletcher Pratt Literary Award, a frequent lecturer
throughout the country on military history, and a practicing attorney.
Recommended
Reading: Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor,
May-June 1864, by Noah Andre Trudeau.
Description: "Nobody has brought together in one volume so many eyewitness accounts from both
sides."-Civil War History Winner of the Fletcher Pratt Award. In this authoritative chronicle of the great 1864 Overland Campaign
in Virginia, Noah Andre Trudeau vividly re-creates the brutal forty days that marked the beginning of the end of the Civil
War. In riveting detail Trudeau traces the carnage from the initial battles in Virginia's
Wilderness to the gruesome hand-to-hand combat at Spotsylvania's "Bloody Angle," to the ingenious trap laid by Lee at the
North Anna River,
to the killing ground of Cold Harbor. Through fascinating eyewitness accounts, he relates
the human stories behind this epic saga. Continued below…
Common soldiers
struggle to find the words to describe the agony of their comrades, incredible tales of individual valor, their own mortality.
Also recounting their experiences are the women who nursed these soldiers and black troops who were getting their first taste
of battle. The raw vitality of battle sketches by Edwin Forbes and Alfred R. Waud complement the words of the participants.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "Bloody Roads South is a powerful and eloquent narrative of the costliest, most violent campaign of the
Civil War. Grant vs. Lee in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and at Cold Harbor has never been told better."-Stephen W. Sears, author of The Landscape Turned
Red. About the Author: Noah Andre Trudeau is an executive producer for cultural programs at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. He is the author of
Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865 and The Last Citadel: Petersburg,
Virginia, June 1864-April 1865.
Recommended
Reading:
Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign (Civil War America)
(Hardcover) (The University of North
Carolina Press) (September 5, 2007). Description: In the study
of field fortifications in the Civil War that began with Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War, Hess turns to the
1864 Overland campaign to cover battles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. Continued below...
Drawing on
meticulous research in primary sources and careful examination of trench remnants at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna,
Cold Harbor, and Bermuda Hundred, Hess describes Union and Confederate earthworks and how Grant and Lee used them in this new era of field
entrenchments.
Recommended
Reading: Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns,
1861-1864 (Civil War America) (Hardcover). Description: The eastern
campaigns of the Civil War involved the widespread use of field fortifications, from Big Bethel and the Peninsula to Chancellorsville,
Gettysburg, Charleston, and
Mine Run. While many of these fortifications were meant to last only as long as the battle, Earl J. Hess argues that their
history is deeply significant. The Civil War saw more use of fieldworks than did any previous conflict in Western history.
Hess studies the use of fortifications by tracing the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac
and the Army of Northern Virginia from April 1861 to April 1864. He considers the role of field fortifications in the defense
of cities, river crossings, and railroads and in numerous battles. Blending technical aspects of construction with operational
history, Hess demonstrates the crucial role these earthworks played in the success or failure of field armies. He also argues
that the development of trench warfare in 1864 resulted from the shock of battle and the continued presence of the enemy within
striking distance, not simply from the use of the rifle-musket, as historians have previously asserted. Continued below...
Based on fieldwork
at 300 battle sites and extensive research in official reports, letters, diaries, and archaeological studies, this book should
become an indispensable reference for Civil War historians.
Recommended
Reading: The Battlefield of Cold Harbor, Hanover County, Virginia, 1864 (Map). Review: The site of Robert
E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia's last Civil War Victory is one of astonishment, battlefield courage, and horrific
carnage… This work includes the most complete, accurate and detailed maps of the battle of Cold
Harbor ever published. Watercolor and colored pencil map showing farms, mills, entrenchments, watercourses, woods,
fields and residences are all meticulously detailed and scaled to perfection. The reverse side includes an account of Union
mapping at Cold Harbor; full color reproduction of the Army of the Potomac’s Overland Campaign theater map; and photographs
of two prominent Union topographical engineers, W. H. Paine and W.A. Roebling. A welcome addition to every Civil War buff’s
library as well as the individual that appreciates detailed topographical maps. FIVE STARS.
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