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.

June 2, 1864---The Battle of Cold Harbor (Day Three)

JUNE 2, 1864:   

The Battle of Cold Harbor      (Day Three):          

After a forced night march, the Union Second, Sixth and Eighteenth Corps arrive at Old Cold Harbor after dawn. The men are so physically exhausted that Grant can make no use of them. He gives his men most of the day off, scheduling the opening of his planned assault until 5:00 P.M.  As the day passes, more footsore Union troops straggle into Old Cold Harbor. He delays the attack again, until 4:30 AM on the 3^rd.

While Union troops arrive and bivouac, Lee puts his arriving men to work digging entrenchments and building earthworks. 

If he had launched an initial attack, Grant may have just been able to overcome the works as they stood on June 1^st. By June 3^rd, the Confederacy has built itself a fortress.

 

Union General Don Carlos Buell, who has been without a Command since the Battle of Perryville in 1862, resigns in disgrace from the Union Army.

June 1, 1864---The Battle of Cold Harbor (Day Two)

JUNE 1, 1864:             

The Battle of Cold Harbor   (Day Two):            

The Confederacy appears to be in deep trouble. For the last month, The Army of Northern Virginia has been forced to give ground steadily as Ulysses S. Grant and The Army of The Potomac have pressed southward in the face of determined resistance. Battle after battle has been fought. Soldiers in blue seem to appear from a well-nigh inexhaustible source. The Confederacy has no such source. In just a single month of intensely concentrated combat, Grant has managed to advance from the Rapidan River to the outskirts of Richmond, a distance of 60 critical miles.

Although most historians hold that most of the many individual battles of Grant’s Overland Campaign were tactically inconclusive, Grant has displayed strategic genius. By simply pressing forward regardless of the intransigence of the enemy, he has forced Robert E. Lee to, time and again, take up blocking positions in an attempt to keep Grant from the gates of Richmond.

As of the morning of June 1, 1864, Lee’s blocking maneuvers have been a failure. Although he has been able to inflict fearsome casualties on the Union Army, this has not deterred Grant from moving forward. As the sun rises, Union troops are in control of the town of Old Cold Harbor, just ten miles from Jefferson Davis’ desk.

Lee’s only advantage is speed, and today he uses it. The Union Army is scattered hither, thither, and yon over a forty mile front twenty five miles deep stretching from the North Anna River to the Chickahominy River. Lee knows it will take time --- a precious day at least --- for the Federals to organize and move in force.

Lee’s smaller army can maneuver faster, and today he puts out the call. His men abandon their positions and race toward greater Richmond.  In the meantime, Lee sends what infantry and cavalry units he already has toward Old Cold Harbor. Lee knows that Union troops are there, and he is determined to retake the crossroads.

Lee orders an attack shortly after dawn, hoping to overwhelm the small Union force at Old Cold Harbor before more Northern troops can arrive. This plan goes awry when the Commander of the assault force, Colonel Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina is killed early in the battle. Keitt’s green 20th South Carolina regiment panics. The inexperienced men in the vanguard beat a frantic retreat. The panic spreads, and the Confederates run off, allowing Sheridan's troops to hold the crossroads. The Union sustains 2,200 casualties, the Confederacy 1,800.

Lee eventually masters his men, and they dig in, just as they have been doing throughout the Campaign. Grant decides that he does not have enough men on hand to overcome an entrenched enemy, and so he decides to wait for the bulk of The Army of The Potomac to arrive before renewing the attack. The delay proves costly. Lee’s forces arrive first.