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.