v1.1.1 / chapter 71 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* The arc of clashes between the Union and the Confederacy that curved across northern Virginia through May finally terminated in early June at a place named Cold Harbor, where the Federals conducted a badly-managed assault against strong Confederate defenses. The result was a ghastly, lopsided defeat that almost wrecked Grant's army. After it was done, the two armies went quiet for the moment, while the troops tried to recover from exhaustion and Grant thought over what to do next.
* The Virginia crossroads known as Cold Harbor was actually very warm and dusty in the late spring of 1864, and it was nowhere near any major body of water: its odd name was for an inn there that served cold meals. Cold Harbor was right next to the Gaines' Mill battlefield, where McClellan's plans had come unhinged two years earlier. A further direct shift southeast was ruled out by the barrier of the swampy Chickahominy River. Similarly, Lee's men had their backs to Richmond. There was no place for either side to run, and so they had to fight it out.
While Fitzhugh Lee was taking his cavalry to Cold Harbor to seize and hold it, Sheridan and his troopers were moving out with exactly the same orders. The two forces collided on 31 May. Sheridan's men were tough fighters and well-armed with Spencer repeating carbines, and after a nasty fight that lasted most of the day, the Yankees drove the rebels out and took the crossroads. The division of Confederate reinforcements looted from Beauregard, led by Brigadier General Robert Hoke, didn't begin to offload from the trains until midday. By evening, Hoke's lead brigade was moving up to the line, only to get caught up in the general skedaddle of Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry.
Sheridan was pleased that he had the rebels on the run, but he was less happy to find out from captured grayback infantry that Hoke would soon come up with three more brigades. Sheridan decided to pull out of Cold Harbor before he was overwhelmed, sending a message back to Meade: "I do not feel able to hold this place. With the heavy odds against me here, I do not think it prudent to hold on."
Federal reinforcements were on the way, at least in principle. Grant had ordered Wright to shift his VI Corps up to Cold Harbor, but Grant had ordered Wright to wait until nightfall for secrecy. Smith's XVIII Corps was in a position to get to Cold Harbor more quickly, but there had been a mixup in orders coming down from Grant's headquarters, and Smith was marching northwest towards the Totopotomoy battlefield, not due west towards Cold Harbor. Smith got to wondering if what he was doing made any sense that evening and wired for clarification. Amazingly, he got back orders that he was to continue northwest.
Sheridan was on his own, and the word came back from Grant and Meade that Cold Harbor was to be "held at all hazards". With great misgivings, Sheridan sent his men back and had them start building defensive works. He expected to be attacked no later than sunrise.
* Sheridan's apprehensions had a sound basis in reality. Lee was now as certain as he needed to be that the Army of the Potomac was shifting towards Cold Harbor, and so now the Army of Northern Virginia would shift on a shorter route and block the move, as it had the Federal advance on the Totopotomoy. General Richard Anderson was ordered to march the First Corps to Cold Harbor that night. Anderson would take charge of Hoke's division, and at dawn the combined force would drive the Yankees out of the crossroads, then deal with other Federal columns as they came up.
The Confederate assault went forward at sunup on 1 June as scheduled. Anderson had two divisions available for the assault, Hoke's and a division under Georgia Brigadier General Joseph Kershaw, with the two other divisions of First Corps still on the march at the time. Kershaw's division went forward, with his old brigade leading the charge, under the command of 40-year-old Colonel Lawrence Keitt. Keitt had little combat experience, having only arrived a week earlier with a spiffily dressed and very green regiment from South Carolina. He went into the fight in the brave and dashing style that had been fashionable early in the war, charging forward on his horse at the head of his men.
There was a reason that this sort of thing had gone out of style, and Keitt found out what it was when he got in range of Sheridan's troopers and their repeater rifles. He was struck by several bullets almost simultaneously that threw him off his horse, dead before he hit the ground. This sudden shock discouraged his green troops, who then performed what a more experienced rebel soldier called "the most abject rout ever committed by men in Confederate uniform." He added: "Some were so scared they could not run, but groveled on the ground trying to burrow into the earth." Their headlong retreat confused and panicked the rest of Kershaw's division, and the whole attack collapsed. Hoke's division never managed to even get started.
Kershaw managed to collect his troops and tried again, but with no better results. Anderson's other two divisions arrived at midmorning, but by that time so had Union General Wright with his VI Corps. They had made a long and exhausting night march, leaking exhausted stragglers all the way, but they made it in time to relieve Sheridan, who was gratified that he and his cavalry had stood up to such long odds.
* Sheridan and his troopers left their works to Wright's men, who promptly started building them up. They might have been tired, but with so many rebels in front of them it would have been suicidal to put off digging in. Warren's V Corps and Burnside's IX Corps were on the march behind them, and arrived later in the day. Hancock was holding the rearguard back on the Totopotomoy battlefield, but had orders to move out after nightfall. In addition, Smith had finally got his orders straightened out and was marching XVIII Corps to Cold Harbor as well.
XVIII Corps arrived on the afternoon of 1 June, entirely exhausted, to run into a minor fight with rebels. One Connecticut soldier tried to rouse a colleague who had simply laid down and collapsed: "Jim, there's a pile of troops coming. I guess there's going to be a fight!" The punchy soldier replied: "I don't give a damn. I wish they'd shoot us and be done with it. I'd rather be shot than marched to death."
By the afternoon, the Federal line extended north from Cold Harbor towards the south bank of Totopotomoy Creek, with Smith's XVIII Corps just north of Wright's VI Corps, Warren's II Corps above Smith, and Burnside's IX Corps blocking the flank below the creek. That left a gap between Wright and the Chickahominy to the south, but this was swampy ground, poor terrain for an attack, and patrolled by Sheridan's men until the expected arrival of Hancock and his II Corps the next morning.
Grant planned an all-out assault by the entire Army of the Potomac at dawn. Meade suggested that Wright and Smith launch an attack that afternoon to secure better jumping-off positions. Grant agreed, and the two Federal corps jumped off at 5:00 PM. They pushed Anderson's First Corps back, even punching a hole in the Confederate line when one of Hoke's brigades gave way. Anderson ordered George Pickett to send a brigade from his division to seal the breach. It was done, but Anderson knew what the Federals were up to. He faced a much more determined assault come the sunrise, and sent a message to Lee: "Reinforcements are necessary to enable us to hold this position."
* Grant was pleased with the results of the day's fighting, seeing the poor showing of Anderson and his men confirmation of his belief that the Army of Northern Virginia was on its last legs. One good kick, Grant thought, would knock the rebels down for good, and the war would be won.
If the kick had been made at sunrise on 2 June as planned, it might have worked. Unfortunately, Hancock's exhausted II Corps got lost and confused in the dark and dust and didn't arrive until well into the morning, in no condition to go into battle. In addition, Baldy Smith was still bringing up stragglers from his hasty march and needed more time for preparations. Many other things went wrong, and there was no way the Army of the Potomac was ready for the fight. The fumbles were absolutely no surprise. One of Meade's staff officers commented: "Our men no longer have the bodily strength they had a month before. Indeed, why they are alive I don't see."
The attack was postponed to the afternoon of 2 June, then the dawn of 3 June, and Warren and Burnside were told to stay on the defensive. In the meantime, granted a breather, Lee put John Breckinridge's division of reinforcements from the Shenandoah in the line south of the Anderson's First Corps, put Early's Second Corp in the line north of First Corps, and then put one division of A.P. Hill's Third Corps on the northern flank of the line and the other two divisions of that corps on the southern flank of the line.
The Confederates threw themselves into fortifying their positions. Any experienced Union soldier was aware by this time that if the rebels were given a day to dig in, they would create an all but impregnable defensive position. The Yankees knew it very well because they had learned the same skill. In fact, the swampy ground favored the defense, and the Confederate's use of that terrain was so devious that it was difficult to see just how strong their works really were.
General Warren had realized this some months earlier in front of Mine Run and saved the Army of the Potomac a large number of pointless casualties. Unfortunately, Warren wasn't on the front line at Cold Harbor, and nobody there with the authority had the presence of mind to call back up the chain of command and point out that things were much different from the way they had been the day before. In fact, nobody even really bothered to scout out the Confederate defenses. Meade's staff assumed the corps staffs had done it, while the corps staffs assumed that Meade's staff had done it. Nobody had any idea of what they were sending the troops up against. Orders to the corps commanders were vague, and there was a total breakdown in coordination.
The troops themselves had a pretty good idea of the realities of the situation. An officer observed soldiers engaged in what he thought was sewing up their coats. In reality, each was writing his personal particulars on paper and pinning the paper to the back of his coat so his body could be identified for his next of kin.
* Rain began falling on the on the afternoon of 2 June and continued intermittently through the night, with some bursts of hail. The precipitation slackened off when the sun came up. The Federals went forward and immediately blundered into an earthly approximation of hell. The Confederates hit the Yankees with fire that one on the receiving end described as "simply terrific". Another called it "one continual crash of thunder", and a third claimed it "seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle, and was just about as destructive."
The entire assault of three Union Army corps, totalling about 60,000 men, was all but broken in minutes. Some Yankee troops tried to push on here and there for a little longer, to no better effect. One soldier recalled seeing the men in his company fall to the ground in a group, and he fell to the ground as well, assuming that the order had been given to do so. The company commander came over in a rage and ordered them to get up again, but he was wasting his breath: most of them were stone dead. Another officer said that "nothing but the judgement trump of the Almighty would ever bring these men on their feet again." In that short period of time, the Federals lost 7,000 men to about 1,500 rebels, the most lopsided Union defeat since Fredericksburg. The Yankees were cut down so rapidly and the charge halted so quickly that rebels wondered when the Federals were going to make their real attack.
The Union troops stayed in place under fire, digging themselves in like badgers, trading futile shots with the well-protected Confederates. The Yankees did not retreat, but they would not, could not, go forward. The order came down from on high several times that day to "attack again". One captain angrily replied: "I will not take my regiment in another such charge if Jesus Christ himself should order it!" To the extent that the order actually reached the men, they simply stayed where they were and used up some ammunition in a burst of fire to no particular effect. If the generals wanted to pretend they were leading, the men would pretend they were fighting.
Grant gave up the pretense early that afternoon, ordering that offensive operations be stopped, though in practical fact there was nothing resembling offensive operations in progress by that time. Grant, normally thick-skinned about failures, recognized that he had blundered, and told his staff that evening: "I regret this assault more than any other I ever ordered."
Though Grant had good reason to be annoyed with the Army of the Potomac's high regard for Robert E. Lee, there were Union officers who felt that Grant on his part had been underestimating Lee. Meade was one, writing his wife: "I think Grant has had his eyes opened, and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee's army is not Tennessee and Bragg's army."
As for Lee, that afternoon he had reported to Richmond with all the satisfaction due him under the circumstances: "Our loss today has been small, and our success, under the blessing of God, all that we could expect."
* To compound Grant's bad management of the battle, he then displayed the same despicable indifference to the suffering of his truce that he had demonstrated before Vicksburg. He refused to call for a truce to remove his wounded until 5 June, sending a message to Lee asking for a truce so that "both armies" could remove their wounded from the field of battle. Lee, only now recovering from his illness, had no wounded of his own in front of his lines, and replied to Grant with strained courtesy: "I fear that such an arrangement will lead to misunderstanding and difficulty. I propose therefore, instead, that when either party desires to remove their dead or wounded a flag of truce be sent, as is customary. It will always afford me pleasure to comply with such a request as far as circumstances will permit."
On 6 June, Grant sent a second request, foolishly trying to juggle his words around to repeat his request that the "two armies" remove "their" dead and wounded. Lee replied as before. That evening, Grant finally made a simple request for a truce to remove his dead and wounded, and Lee agreed to it. Grant shot back a note to Lee complaining about Lee's obstinacy. Lee ignored it. Federal parties went out the next day, but by that time there were very few wounded left alive to retrieve.
That left the unpleasant job of picking up and burying the dead. As troops from the two sides met on the field, one Confederate officer, reflecting on the one-sided battle and the wreckage it had left, told a Federal: "It seemed almost like murder to fire on you."
* Grant was frustrated. The Army of the Potomac just could not move quickly and fluidly. He was dissatisfied with his corps commanders. His best corps commander, John Sedgwick, was dead, and Hancock was not quite what he had once been, since his Gettysburg wound continued to sap his strength.
Grant had been impressed by Warren at first, and had even noted that he might make a good leader of the Army of the Potomac if some unexpected misfortune brought down Meade. However, Warren's fussy, touchy, and obstinate streak had been coming very much to the surface in the campaigning over the last month, and his management of his corps was faltering; both Grant and Meade found him so tardy during the Bloody Angle fight at Spotsylvania that they had considered relieving him of command but thought better of it. Burnside was showing no more competence than he ever had, though he fortunately hadn't performed any of his trademark major bumbles during the campaign. He also didn't like taking orders from Meade, and Meade wasn't the sort to be considerate about the matter. Grant still had a high opinion of Baldy Smith, but Smith wasn't getting along well with the other corps commanders. Many of them had known him before and were well aware of his sniping attitude towards those above him, and this was in fact being manifested in Smith's griping about the way Meade handled things.
The distrust of the leadership of the Army of the Potomac filtered down the ranks. Emory Upton wrote his sister: "Some of our corps commanders are not fit to be corporals. Lazy and indolent, they will not even ride along their lines; yet, without hesitancy, they will order us to attack the enemy, no matter what their position or numbers. Twenty thousand of our killed and wounded should today be in our ranks."
Grant heard much the same. One day Brigadier General James H. Wilson, now a commander of Sheridan's cavalry, visited Grant in his tent. Wilson had been one of Grant's staff in the Vicksburg days, had favorably impressed Grant, and could pretty much say what he pleased. Grant asked bluntly: "Wilson, what is the matter with this army?"
Wilson replied that there was so much wrong that he could hardly describe it, but he could propose a simple solution. One of Grant's staff officers was Colonel Ely Parker, a big full-blooded Iroquois Indian. Wilson suggested that Parker be given a tomahawk, a scalping knife, and a good quantity of bad whiskey, and order him to scalp a number of major generals. Grant asked which ones. Wilson said it didn't matter, Parker should just kill the first ones he came upon until he brought in the scalps of about half a dozen. Wilson felt that matters would improve after that.
* The two armies sat staring at each other at Cold Harbor for a week. There were no more rash assaults. A message was sent from II Corps headquarters to General Francis Barlow asking him if he thought an attack was advisable. Barlow honestly liked to fight, but even he didn't think it was a good idea, saying "the men feel just at present a great horror and dread of attacking earthworks again ... I think the men are so wearied and worn out by the harassing labors of the past week that they are wanting in the spirit and dash necessary for successful assaults."
Everyone was exhausted. General Warren told a colleague: "For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it has been too much!" One colonel tried to write home and had little to say: "I can only tell my wife I am alive and well. I am too stupid for any use."
George Meade had been remarkably even-tempered during the campaign to this time, but after Cold Harbor those around him could see that he was building to an explosion, griping about how the newspapers were always talking about Grant and never mentioned him. The blowup occurred on 7 June. Meade got hold of a five-days-old issue of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER and read through a report of the fighting. The article was generally flattering to him, but said that Grant had stepped in and "saved the army" at one point. Meade, furious, summoned the reporter, a fellow named Edward Crapsey, demanded an explanation of him, and then ordered him thrown out. The next day, 8 June, Crapsey was paraded in front of the troops, mounted backwards on a mule, and wearing a placard announcing that he was a LIBELER OF THE PRESS. He was then told to get out and not come back. The end result was that no newspaperman had anything good to say about Meade in the press for the next six months.
* This was a bad-tempered comedy, but the troops in the line had very little to laugh about. Although both sides were heavily dug in, there was still a nagging daily wastage of lives. Mortars lobbed shells into the trenches, and there was the murderous nuisance of sharpshooter fire. Sharpshooters were particularly hated, since their activities seemed less like purposeful fighting than sheer pointless malice. They would even kill men who were relieving themselves. One Federal gunner wrote later: "I hated sharpshooters, both Confederate and Union, and I was always glad to see them killed."
The wastage was more troubling to Grant because Halleck had notified him on 7 June that losses could no longer be made good. After sending almost 50,000 replacements to make up for casualties and those whose enlistments had expired, Halleck could only say: "I shall send you a few regiments more, when all resources will be exhausted till another draft is made."
Now Grant had to make do with what he had. Fortunately, except for the shirkers and bounty men, the troops still wanted to fight. There was a general sense that the war was now totally in earnest and that it was being driven, however clumsily and bloodily, to its conclusion. The Army of the Potomac may have been frustrated again and again since the beginning of May, but they still had the initiative and the greater force. They needed to push the Army of Northern Virginia into a corner and hammer on it until it dropped.
