Grant Smashes Against the New Era of War
June 3–12, 1864: The Battle of Cold Harbor
Doug Niles
On March 9, 1864, President Lincoln made his final alteration to the command structure of the Union Army. While General George Meade had defeated Lee at Gettysburg, the president grew increasingly dissatisfied with the Army of the Potomac’s lack of aggressive campaigning in the nine months following that epic and decisive engagement. As the winter merged into 1864 with no sign of significant progress, Lincoln decided that yet another change in the command was warranted.
As a result, General Ulysses S. Grant was finally promoted to a new rank of lieutenant general, the first such in the United States Army since George Washington (though the Confederacy had several commanders of that rank). Grant was given command responsibility for all the Union armies. While he would be responsible for campaigns including areas west of the Mississippi, throughout Tennessee, Georgia, and the long southern coastline, Grant soon joined the Army of the Potomac, where he would remain for the duration of the war. He delegated William T. Sherman as commander of operations west of the Appalachians, while he would take charge of the theater to the east. Meade would remain as the army’s commander, but his superior, Grant, would be in direct consultation with him on more or less a daily basis for the remaining thirteen months of the war.
And those would be thirteen very bloody months, indeed. Both Grant and Sherman understood that the objective now must be the destruction of the two significant Rebel armies remaining. Sherman’s objective would be Joseph Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, currently in northern Georgia, while Grant and the Army of the Potomac would pursue the elusive, wily Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. For perhaps the first time, Lincoln resolved to really keep his hands off military operations, writing Grant to say: “The particulars of your plan I neither know nor seek to know. . . . I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you.”
Grant took these words to heart. He joined the Army of the Potomac in the camps north of the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers, where it had been since its desultory pursuit of Lee following the previous summer’s Battle of Gettysburg. In April 1864, the huge army began to stir. At the same time, Grant issued orders for a coordinated movement to support his operations against Lee, ordering General Franz Sigel to move down the Shenandoah Valley; General Benjamin Franklin Butler was directed to advance from Fort Monroe, on the Virginia coast, toward Richmond.
Meade brought his army south over the Rapidan, with some 105,000 men, and marched into the Wilderness, covering much of the same ground where the Battle of Chancellorsville had been fought a year earlier. It was Grant’s intention to march fast enough that he would be out of the tangled mass of new forest and trackless brush before Lee (with about 61,000 men) could react, so that the two armies could clash on an open battlefield.
But Bobby Lee was not one to let the Yankees, even under command of a new general, steal a march on him. He got his tired, footsore, but still tough force onto the march and drew up across Grant’s path. The advance in defensive tactics from previous campaigns was demonstrated immediately in the two-day Battle of the Wilderness (May 5 to 6), wherein the Rebels hastily erected entrenchments of dirt and logs and fought from behind these fortifications. Despite stubborn and courageous attacks, the Federals could not dislodge their foes. May 7 was spent pulling the wounded from the now-burning brushland and regrouping for the next operation. The Union killed, wounded, and missing totaled some 17,500, while Rebel losses were estimated at around 12,000. (Accurate records of Confederate losses during these campaigns did not survive the war.)
The veterans of the Army of the Potomac no doubt had a “here we go again” feeling about this setback, but this time they were frankly astonished when, after the army muddled through the rest of the Wilderness, it turned south. This simple, forthright proof of action had a tremendous salutary effect, and the soldiers cheered and hollered when Grant rode past them, convinced that, finally, they were on the right track.
With Lee’s army in an impregnable position, Grant simply backed away from the fight and moved east, passing around Lee’s right flank and continuing south toward Richmond—not so much because he wanted to capture the city, as because he knew Lee would have to fight to stop him from doing so. His goal remained the destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia, and he hoped to attain that objective this summer.
The next opportunity to do so came at Spotsylvania, where, once again, Lee had rushed to interpose his units in Grant’s path—and once again those Rebel soldiers scrambled to throw up an impressive array of defensive works while the Yankees gathered their strength for an attack. After several days of piecemeal battles (May 8 to 11), Grant had enough troops on hand for a major push. By this time Lee’s fieldworks had become truly extensive, and in a series of bloody attacks the Federals poked and prodded and achieved some breakthroughs. The fulcrum of the battle was a massive triangular redoubt known as the Bloody Angle, and Lee was able to shift his reserves skillfully enough that, again, the Yankees could not achieve victory. The Battle of Spotsylvania lasted some ten days and inflicted some 18,000 Union casualties (about 3,000 killed) compared to about 12,000 Rebel (1,500 dead).
Thus two of the war’s bloodiest battles occurred between the same armies, within the same two-week period. This was unprecedented, as, after every previous major engagement, the two armies had separated for a time, resting and refitting. Yet once again, Grant didn’t back away to reinforce, recover, or regroup. Instead he repeated his maneuver, disengaging from the enemy fieldworks, moving east and then south to get around Lee’s right flank.
As a side note to the infantry clashes, Union cavalry strength, command, and performance continued to improve. Grant had brought General Philip Sheridan with him from the west, and with Sheridan in command the Federal horse were unleashed on a devastating raid. On May 11 Sheridan’s 10,000 riders encountered Jeb Stuart and some 4,500 of his legendary troopers. In the Battle of Yellow Tavern the Rebel cavalry was defeated, and Stuart himself slain—a loss that struck Lee terribly. “I can scarcely think of him without weeping,” said the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Even so, the disconsolate Lee recognized the familiar dance step in Grant’s advance and moved his army southward yet again to take up a strong position on the North Anna River. He arrived here on May 22, one day before the Yankee vanguard. Grant sent a reconnaissance in force against the position but decided it was too strong to assault, and once again did his side step around the Rebel right flank.
This time the Pamunkey River was in the way, and the Federals needed two days to cross the swampy bottomlands. This crossing gave Lee time to react, and even though he realized he was getting dangerously close to the Confederate capital he had little choice but to counter Grant’s move. So he moved south and created a fortified position near Mechanicsville, along Totopotomoy Creek. Again Grant concluded that the position was too strong to take with a frontal attack, so with a careful study of the map, he directed Meade to order his army one more step southward, sending cavalry ahead to occupy the strategic crossroads of Cold Harbor—another one of those insignificant country stations that assume their place in the history books because many thousands of opposing men try to claim the place at the same time.
Cold Harbor was about the last place on the map where Grant could perform his now almost routine maneuver. South of the crossroads the ground dropped into the swampy, tangled bottomlands of the Chickahominy River, where McClellan’s army had encountered so much trouble during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. Beyond the Chickahominy was the wide, deep James River, a significant barrier to further operations in that direction.
Sheridan’s cavalry arrived at Cold Harbor on May 31, hours before Lee’s men, and the Yankee troopers bravely held on against Rebel cavalrymen. Then, on June 1, they stood firm against Confederate infantry until Federal infantry came up to stiffen the line. Both sides poured troops into the position over the night of June 1 to 2, but with Rebel troops barely arriving on the scene they did not have time to construct the fieldworks that had thwarted every previous attack in what was coming to be known as the Overland Campaign.
Grant ordered an attack for early on June 2, but now one of his most reliable corps commanders, General Hancock of II Corps, let him down. Hancock, who had fought heroically before, during, and after Gettysburg, was beginning to show the stress of a long and unforgiving war. Suffering from fatigue and the continued aftereffects of a painful, nearly fatal wound in his thigh, he was not the commander that he had been a year before—nor was his corps the elite fighting unit of Cemetery Ridge. In the advance, II Corps became lost among the tangled, poorly defined roads and did not reach their positions until the night of June 2. As a consequence, Grant delayed his attack for twenty-four hours, ordering it to commence in the early morning of June 3.
It probably goes without saying that Lee’s veterans put that extra day to very good use, digging trenches, felling trees, clearing fields of fire, placing batteries, and gathering supplies for the coming fight. The position was naturally strong, with the left flank anchored on Totopotomoy Creek, the right on the Chickahominy River, and the whole position on a low, gently curving ridge. A newspaper reporter described the position thus: “intricate, zigzagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade opposing lines, works within works and works without works.” Capping the challenge, the Union attackers would have to wade through a swamp before they even reached the ground where they could commence their charge, and all of their advance would be exposed to Rebel fire.
It seems clear that the men in the ranks knew what was coming, even if their commanders didn’t. They grimly anticipated heavy losses. For the first time during the war, thousands of soldiers who were going into the attack took the time to write down their names and home addresses, sewing these grim labels to the backs or the insides of their uniforms so that, when they were killed, their relatives could at least be notified as to their fate.
The offensive was targeted against Lee’s right flank. Three corps were ordered to make the attack side by side, with Hancock’s on the left, Wright’s in the center, and Smith’s on the right. Grant and Meade assumed that their corps commanders would order careful reconnaissance of the ground, but they did not specifically direct this and none of the corps commanders thought to do it on his own. In any event, the Rebels had posted swarms of skirmishers ahead of their defensive works, so any attempt to gather information would likely have been unsuccessful.
At dawn, the three corps, some 50,000 assault troops, moved forward through a thick, dreary mist. They slogged across the swamps, many men having to wade through waist- or even shoulder-deep water. Then they struggled onto the barely dry ground before the Rebel works, and faced as withering a storm of fire as any troops in the world ever faced before the turn of the twentieth century. The Yankees pressed forward with courage, and some of Hancock’s men even captured the initial line of works—only to be plastered point-blank by Confederate guns that enfiladed the captured trenches and turned them into a killing ground.
Within half an hour the thrust of the attack was broken, and survivors huddled on the ground with the dead. However, instead of withdrawing—and being without orders to do so—the Federal soldiers began to dig in on the ground they had captured at such cost. Lacking entrenching tools, they used cups and bayonets to entrench, and even employed the bodies of slain comrades as parts of their desperate breastworks. By midday, hearing from the corps commanders that the attack was hopeless, Grant gave permission to halt the attacks, but this was only acknowledging the reality that had been established many hours earlier.
Union losses on this day were some 7,000 men, about a third of them slain. Most of the men fell during the first hour of the battle. Rebel casualties numbered 1,000 to 2,000. The Battle of Cold Harbor would continue for nine more days, until June 12, but the combat in those days bore little resemblance to what we have come to think of as “battles of the American Civil War.” The troops on both sides hunkered down in deep trenches, while sharpshooters—men despised by both sides—took careful aim and killed any man who showed his head. There was no maneuver, no coordinated attacking—there was just hunger, and killing, and dying.
In many ways, Cold Harbor marked the end of a way of making war that had been around since the advent of portable, reasonably accurate firearms. While the tactics of Antietam, Shiloh, and Gettysburg showed traits that would have been recognizable to Frederick the Great or Napoleon, the men who fought and died at Cold Harbor provided only a grim foreshadowing of the massive killing grounds of Verdun and the Somme.
Grant recognized the mistake of his attack at Cold Harbor, writing in his memoirs: “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. . . . At Cold Harbor no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.” Grant being Grant, he wasn’t finished, of course. Soon he would astonish Lee by moving south of the James River across a pontoon bridge nearly half a mile long. He would lay siege to Petersburg, and slowly throttle the Army of Northern Virginia with a steadily more elaborate ring of trenches. Eventually Lee would be forced to flee, and his valiant but tattered army brought to bay at Appomattox.
But from Cold Harbor on, the whole face of the war had evolved into a new kind of monstrous horror, a horror that would shadow the face of battle for many decades to come.