June 5, 1864---The Battle of Cold Harbor (Day Six); The Battle of Piedmont

JUNE 5, 1864:             

The Battle of Cold Harbor  (Day Six):         

When the casualty figures from Cold Harbor come in, there is a public outcry in the North.

It grows even louder when stories of the failed assault begin reaching the public’s ears. In the aftermath of Cold Harbor, the Peace Democrat and Copperhead factions are revivified. 

It is a dangerous time for the Lincoln Administration. The Presidential election is only 20 weeks away, and it appears that the still-popular and ever bloviating General George Brinton McClellan (retired) will be the Democratic candidate for President along with Peace Democrat “Gentleman George” H. Pendleton, a Congressman from Ohio who opposes the war. The two Georges run as “Peace Candidates” not Democrats. They formally eschew the Democratic platform, and base their public appeal on favoring a quick end to the war. 

There are calls to remove Grant from command, even some to reappoint McClellan as General-in-Chief. When Lincoln ignores these calls, the public’s anger toward General Grant is transferred on to President Lincoln, and his popularity plummets. The coming summer will see it sink ever further.

One of Grant’s most vociferous critics is Mary Todd Lincoln. The First Lady makes no secret of her disdain for “that butcher,” and some of her comments reach the papers. Mrs. Lincoln’s antipathy toward Grant will have tragic consequences at the war’s end. 

The Northern papers seize angrily, the Southern gleefully, upon the idea of Grant as a butcher. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the papers (both North and South) speculate that Grant was inebriated at Cold Harbor --- however, there is no objective evidence of this.  When Lincoln is pressed to relieve Grant, he answers simply, even to his wife, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” 

Stories of Grant’s drinking are a dime a dozen, and may be worth just that much:

After his graduation from West Point in 1843, Grant was assigned to a series of armory and garrison posts. At one time, he was one of only 50 Captains in the U.S. Army. The Mexican War gave a boost to his career; he was one of the officers engaged at the Battle of Chapultepec, which won the war for the United States. But after the war, things returned to normal as the army was again stripped to its bare-bones minimum.

Grant married Julia Dent in 1848, and they had four children. In the 1840s, the Army was neither glamorous nor an effective way to support a growing family. Grant actually had to run a small business on the side to supplement his army pay.

In 1854, he was assigned to a frontier post in then- very remote Humboldt, California. When he took up his duty station at the isolated outpost, Grant decided to leave Julia and the children safely back in the East.

Grant was unhappy in Humboldt. He was bored with his do-nothing duty. His commanding officer was a martinet. He desperately missed his wife and family. And so he took solace in the bottle. According to the various tales that have come down the years, he was discovered to be drunk on duty, and was offered the choice between resigning his commission or being court-martialed. He decided to resign. 

Grant himself admitted, “Intemperance had not a little to do with my resignation.” There is little doubt that the man who eventually became President of the United States was an alcoholic as that term is understood today, and was probably a binge drinker. However, tales of his being roaring blind drunk in combat simply don’t seem to be true.  Work (of which there was plenty as General-in-Chief) and the relative nearness of Julia and the children in Washington, D.C. served as an anodyne to liquor.

President Lincoln, for one, did not seem particularly concerned about his General-in-Chief’s storied intemperance: “I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

Grant was no butcher. The son of a tanner, he had grown up among slaughtered animals, and rather than hardening him, the experience made him sensitive. He could not abide cruelty to animals nor men. The sight of blood made him dizzy; the smell of blood made him sick; gore horrified him.

More than one Civil War memoirist tells the same tale of Grant after a battle:  Grant would dutifully view the battlefield. He would not turn away from scenes of carnage. He would visit the wounded at the field hospitals. He would return to his headquarters. And then he would retire to his rooms, giving orders that he not be disturbed. His staff learned to tactfully ignore the muffled sound of wracking sobs that occasionally reached their ears from behind the General’s closed doors. After a few hours or an evening Grant would reappear among them, ready to carry on.

The cost of war was heartbreaking, but Grant understood better than most Union generals that in the Civil War the cost of war was the cost of peace.

The Battle of Piedmont:           

Having pulled most of the Confederate troops out of the Shenandoah Valley in order to fill his own depleted ranks, Robert E. Lee has made it possible for Union cavalry to retake the Valley against a remnant force. Of 5,000 Confederates in the battle, 500 are killed and almost 2,000 are captured when their line breaks. Union killed and wounded are about 800 of 10,000.

June 4, 1864---The Battle of Cold Harbor (Day Five: Trench Warfare)

JUNE 4, 1864:            

The Battle of Cold Harbor  (Day Five):           

In an example of the pillorying Grant is going to receive in the Press, the Richmond Times-Dispatch files the following report on the Battle of Cold Harbor:

  

The ground on which the battle was fought was the same with that on which the battle of '62 was fought. But the positions were reversed, we holding McClellan's and Grant holding Lee's. According to the accounts of prisoners Grant on the night of Thursday caused a quart of whisky to be distributed to each of the soldiers, and about four o'clock yesterday morning, having primed them well for the work, commenced an assault upon our works. repulsed again and again, with unprecedented slaughter, he constantly renewed the attack with fresh troops, sending his men up in columns ten deep, and, in great part, so drunk that they knew not what they were about, and pressed on with the most reckless audacity. Nothing could exceed the coolness with which they were received by our troops, who, standing behind their breastworks and suffering but little, shot them down by thousands, with as much deliberation as though they were firing at so many marks. At one o'clock the action ceased along the whole line, our troops having repulsed the enemy, who left several thousand behind him, dead or wounded, on the field. Gen. lee afterwards rode over to the field, and declared that the slaughter far exceeded that of the 12th of May.

The modern-day remains of a trench at Cold Harbor

In actuality, the bitterly sober Union troops spend the nighttime digging entrenchments. Soon, the trenches stretch for miles from Old Cold Harbor to New Cold Harbor. A seemingly-endless period of misery ensues for both sides. Lee’s earthworks form a labyrinth of interconnected trenches, rifle pits and burrows three lines deep. The Union’s initial trenches are not so complex in plan, but they are equally miserable --- filthy ditches more like elongated and interconnected foxholes, where men skulk just beneath the level of the earth like the rats they are trying desperately to avoid. 

Trench warfare is always crude and dehumanizing to the combatants. But Civil War trench warfare lacks even the crass refinements later adopted in the trenches of World War I. Sanitation is unknown. The walls of the trenches are shored with a hodgepodge of materials that make movement through the trenches difficult --- supporting timbers stolen from fences, the floors of supply wagons, huge rocks hauled into place by main force, uprooted tree stumps, and even large tree branches. Occasionally, the walls give way, and men are buried alive.  

The Cold Harbor trenches lack “duckboards” --- a raised wooden flooring which allows troops to walk on a smooth surface while allowing runoff and rainwater to collect and drain away from underfoot. The duckboards the Civil War troopers do not have would also keep the rats, snakes, spiders and worms out of their sight, at least during daylight. 

The average trench trooper at Cold Harbor is sleeping on the muddy dirt at the bottom of the trench in company with all sorts of critters among stagnant pools of water, urine and floating human waste. Flea, tick, spider and centipede bites are common, as are attacks by rats.

A man daring enough to peer above the parapets will likely be drilled between the eyes by an enemy bullet. Artillery fire is trained to a nicety upon the enemy’s trenches, and the first wartime shouts of “incoming!” echo eerily across the field. Since the Confederacy is using many captured Union guns, it is difficult for the men --- reduced to a weary troglodytism --- to recognize one gun from another, and men are often blasted out of existence at complete unawares.         

All through the days and nights of June 3-5, the horrors of the trenches are punctuated by the screams of wounded, mostly Union, soldiers, who are lying in the heat and stench of No-Man’s Land, begging for water, begging for help, begging for a bullet to the head so as to be put out of their misery. Grant sends messages across the lines to Lee --- he is unwilling to couch his request to rescue his wounded in terms of a “truce” --- and Lee, who knows very well what Grant wants, is uncharacteristically obstinate, and even cruel. By the time Lee and Grant arrange a brief respite to recover the wounded, most of the men have died in agony.

June 3, 1864---Slaughter at Cold Harbor

JUNE 3, 1864:              

The Battle of Cold Harbor (Day Four):     

Union troops swing into action at Cold Harbor at 4:30 A.M. in a frontal assault upon Lee’s entrenched lines. The battle begins in fog and ends in disaster for the Union in less than an hour. 

By 5:30 A.M., the Union has lost over 7,000 men. Many of these men fall during one horrific ten minute segment of time, between 4:45 A.M. and 4:55 A.M. In the predawn darkness, cannons were fired pointblank at the advancing men and flying lead thickened the very air like a plague of locusts.  Said one observer, “The men went down in lines.”

 

The “Bloody” 8th New York Infantry Brigade sustains the heaviest casualties of the battle, losing about a third of their number in that terrible assault.

Only in four places do Union troops reach Lee’s lines. In only one place does the Union penetrate Confederate defenses; but without reinforcements, the men (those who are not slaughtered) fall back.

The fault is all Grant’s. Grant has convinced himself (after the Battle of The North Anna River, and despite the cost of the battles since then) that Lee’s army is on its last legs. He is not right. But he is not entirely wrong either, as history will prove. 

Lee, even with his back to the wall, has managed to exploit Grant’s weaknesses.  Although Grant is a strategic genius, he has always been an indifferent tactician who has not outgrown his belief in the 18th Century Napoleonic massed frontal assault. Until today.

Today he has taken the same bait Lee offered him at The Muleshoe. It is the very same bait he refused to take at the Hog Snout. Grant will never take it again.

His decision on June 2^nd not to attack with exhausted troops may have been a wise one, but his failure to reconnoiter the Confederate positions (hidden by trees and rolling hills) in the interim has proven nearly fatal.  

The assault formally goes on until 12:30 P.M., but by 6:00 A.M. hardly any Union troops are in action.  General William Farrar “Baldy” Smith leading the 18^th Corps, is insubordinate in a face-to-face confrontation with his Commander, and flatly refuses to follow Grant’s orders to press the attack. It is telling that nothing happens to Smith. Other Brigades simply refuse to move when so ordered. The refusal to renew the attack is nearly universal. Again, Grant does nothing to the insubordinate troops.    

Long after Cold Harbor, Grant wrote: "I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made . . . No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained." 

The Battle of Cold Harbor goes on for nine more days from Union and Confederate entrenchments.  

In total, the Union sustains nearly 13,000 casualties during the protracted battle, half of them in that deadly opening hour. The Confederacy loses 6,000 men total.

Although Cold Harbor was “the easiest victory of the war” for the Confederacy, it would prove to be Lee’s last.

If the Overland Campaign has accomplished anything, it has altered the momentum of the Civil War permanently in favor of the Union. No longer will The Army of The Potomac retire behind the Rapidan River to lick its wounds. It will fight on. And so it is proved at Cold Harbor.  Grant orders his men to dig in. Trench warfare has become the new métier of the Civil War.