by Ron Chernow
There was now an expectant sense that here, eight miles northeast of Richmond, a climactic battle was about to unfold and Grant’s army might bulldoze its way through Lee’s line and thunder straight into the outskirts of town. “A few days will solve the question of Richmond,” Rawlins prophesied, “and whether a long siege, or a sharp decisive battle is to terminate it.”23 Soon after dawn on June 1, Lee’s army administered a four-hour drubbing to Sheridan, who held out until Horatio Wright’s corps arrived around 9 a.m. Late in the afternoon, Grant made successful forays against the rebels, who tried multiple times that night to recapture lost ground. Although the fighting had been savage that day, with the Union killed and wounded numbering two thousand, some tactical gains had been achieved. As Badeau observed, “The ground won, on the 1st of June, was of the highest consequence to the national army; it cost two thousand men in killed and wounded, but it secured the roads to the James, and almost out-flanked Lee.”24
As his army dealt with pitiless heat and choking dust—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said he was “nearly dropping from my saddle with fatigue”—Grant revolved battle plans in his mind.25 Charles Francis Adams Jr. described him “thinking very hard and looking abstracted, pulling his beard, whittling and smoking.”26 Lee fought on home turf, having bested McClellan on the peninsula two years earlier, while for Grant the swampy terrain of ravines and thickets was terra incognita. When Grant’s brother Orvil arrived in camp, he brought along a friend, F. M. Pixley, who offered a portrait of Grant’s smoldering intensity.
At the evening mess table I met Gen. Grant, and after a very hasty meal, I watched him for an hour as he sat by the camp fire. He is a small man, with a square resolute thinking face. He sat silent among the gentlemen of his staff, and my first impression was that he was moody, dull and unsocial. I afterwards found him pleasant, genial and agreeable. He keeps his own counsel, padlocks his mouth, while his countenance in battle or repose . . . indicates nothing—that is gives no expression of his feelings and no evidence of his intentions. He smokes almost constantly, and . . . has a habit of whittling with a small knife. He cuts a small stick into small chips, making nothing . . . There is no glitter or parade about him. To me he seems but an earnest business man.27
On the night of June 1, Grant pondered his next move. The northern public wanted bold action, not excuses. Keen to steal a jump on the enemy, Grant had two corps at Cold Harbor and a third expected at daybreak on the morrow. Lee had not had time to prepare elaborate defenses. Quick, decisive action, Grant thought, might produce a dramatic breakthrough to Richmond, routing the Confederate government. The alternative was to shuffle farther south, below the James River, in the neighborhood of Petersburg, and link up with Butler’s army. Grant feared, however, that the northern public might quarrel with any delay as reminiscent of George McClellan’s failed strategy. Writing to Julia at 9 p.m., Grant sounded shaken and uncertain, not like himself. He informed her the rebels were “making a desperate fight” and that he wouldn’t see her and the children until the campaign had ended. He concluded on an atypically bleak note: “With the night booming of Artillery and musketry I do not feel much like writing you so you must excuse a short letter this time.”28
On June 2, the weather was sweltering. Grant and his staff were quartered near Bethesda Church, and its pews were taken outside to provide seating for them before torrential rains drove them indoors. The idyllic scene gave scant warning of the disaster ahead. Grant had hoped for a dawn attack against Lee, but then put it off twice because of delayed troop movements, wrangling commanders, and hungry men exhausted from nocturnal marches. Grant wanted to make one last effort to flush Lee from behind miles of trenches and log parapets, forcing him into the open. In retrospect, it would seem a fool’s errand. At Cold Harbor, Lee inhabited swampy terrain that played to his strong suit, his men crouching behind gullies and thickets that interposed natural barriers. The enforced delay in Grant’s offensive enabled Lee’s men to perfect a labyrinth of trenches that would defy any forward movement by the Army of the Potomac. These defensive advantages more than offset the federal edge of 109,000 men versus 59,000 Confederates. To maximize his chances, Lee even stripped men from field hospitals.
Nobody underestimated the perils awaiting the Union army the next morning. As in many Civil War battles, fatalistic soldiers penned their names and addresses on snippets of paper, fastened to the backs of their coats, in case their corpses had to be identified. Grant believed that bloody warfare since the Wilderness had debilitated Confederate morale, making him willing to risk a colossal gamble, a frontal assault that would pierce a hole in Lee’s line. He would throw three corps under Hancock, Wright, and William F. “Baldy” Smith against Lee’s right, hoping to destroy that portion of the enemy army and blast an opening to Richmond. He bet big on a climactic battle that would obliterate Lee’s army and end the war. He may also have hoped a resounding victory would secure the coming election for Lincoln. Finally, he may have feared that if fighting lasted into summer, hot weather and disease would decimate his army.
At 4:30 on the misty morning of June 3, sixty thousand Union soldiers dashed toward the center and right of the long Confederate line, braving a hail of musket fire and artillery that rained thickly down upon them. Some federal units had transient success, taking the first line of rifle pits and prisoners, but these bright spots were soon dwarfed by calamitous losses. Thwarted by marshy land, brush, and woods, the ill-fated charge ran straight into a many-layered defense system that was impenetrable. One journalist evoked the “intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade opposite lines . . . works within works and works without works.”29 Not a single Confederate soldier needed to venture outside these well-protected shelters. Meanwhile, Union soldiers, crashing through smoke and flame, proved easy prey for Confederate marksmen who mowed them down in dreadful numbers, turning the battlefield into a charnel house. The air grew dark with rifle bullets, shells, solid shot, and rolling smoke. “It seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle,” one soldier said, “and was just about as destructive.”30 So murderous was the Cold Harbor gunfire that Union soldiers dropped to the ground, using dead bodies of fallen comrades as defensive sandbags. The bulk of the fighting had ended by 7:30 a.m. At eleven that morning, Grant rode out from his rear position to confer directly with his commanders. After listening to their gloomy reports, he suspended further operations a little after noon. His army had paid a fearful price for the misguided assault, losing 7,000 men, mostly in the first hour, against 1,500 casualties for Lee. In the lacerating verdict of the Confederate general Evander Law, Cold Harbor was “not war but murder.”31 One of Lee’s staff officers sneered at Grant’s costly error, calling Cold Harbor “perhaps the easiest victory ever granted to Confederate arms by the folly of Federal commanders.”32
There was plenty of blame to go around Union headquarters. Lee had been more meticulous in preparation and thorough in reconnaissance than Grant, who had issued vague orders to Meade. Grant and Meade had neglected to scrutinize the territory with sufficient care and badly coordinated the movements of squabbling corps commanders. Grant had left the execution to Meade, leading the latter to criticize him tartly for “honoring the field with his presence only about one hour in the middle of the day,” he grumbled to his wife.33 Meade sounded a still more cynical note about Grant: “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.”34
It took time for Grant to fathom the full scale of the disaster. When he wired Halleck at 2 p.m., from a place he called “Coal Harbor,” he gave no hint of the calamity. “Our loss was not severe nor do I suppose the Enemy to have lost heavily.”35 On the same day, writing to Stanton, Dana conveyed no sense of an infamous defeat with atrocious casualties, estimating the Union dead and wounded at only three thousand.36 That day Rawlins insisted to his wife that Cold Harbor had bee
n an “indecisive” battle with equal losses on both sides.37 Still, by day’s end, many Union commanders grasped that they had lost four or five bluecoats to every gray uniform. As Grant eventually admitted, with extreme understatement, it was the one attack during the Overland Campaign that “did not inflict upon the enemy losses to compensate for our own loss.”38
In time, Cold Harbor became a byword for senseless slaughter, a club with which Grant was beaten by opponents. It became the theme of every tirade contending that he was a filthy butcher. Lee, who refused to crow about his victory, was genuinely perplexed as to what had provoked Grant into this supreme blunder. “I do not know what General Grant meant by his attack this morning,” he told a staff officer. “It was too heavy for a feint, yet I hardly think he expected to break through here.”39
In his Memoirs, Grant expressed special remorse for what had happened: “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made.”40 But he didn’t describe the scene in any detail. In his antiseptic description of columns sent into battle, the casual reader derives no sense of the harrowing fighting. The manuscript of his Memoirs shows that Grant inserted the famous passage on Cold Harbor as an afterthought. It is written on paper of a darker color with a note Grant appended to his secretary: “Put this in after Cold Harbor. About the time the Army reached the James River probably would be best.”41 The belated incorporation suggests it took courage for Grant to include this blunt indictment of himself. In later years, he admitted that Cold Harbor was the one battle “that I would not fight over again under the circumstances.”42 If Grant’s confidence made him an inspirational leader, it could also expose him to catastrophic mistakes engendered by overconfidence.
Some who saw Grant after Cold Harbor sensed a deep sadness. William Wrenshall Smith encountered him returning from the battle and depicted him as “much depressed. He dismounted and took a seat on the stone. What is the situation, I asked? Bad—very bad, he replied.”43 Samuel Beckwith noticed that after Cold Harbor Grant’s face developed “a careworn expression that indicated sleepless nights and wearisome days.” When he delivered a message to the general’s tent, he found him sunk in thought. After absorbing the telegram, Grant sighed. “Beckwith,” he said, “the hardest part of this General business is the responsibility for the loss of one’s men. I can see no other way out of it, however; we’ve got to keep at them. But it is hard, very hard, to see all these brave fellows killed and wounded. It means aching hearts back home.”44
As the nation meditated the death toll at Cold Harbor, the wounded lay squirming in misery on the battlefield next to the bloated, decomposing corpses of deceased comrades. In some places, according to Horace Porter, the ground was carpeted with fallen soldiers wedged so tightly together over thirty- or forty-yard areas that the revolting stench of mortality hung heavy in the blazing heat.45 Since the slain and injured lay within easy range of snipers on either side, they couldn’t be removed until a truce was declared, but this was held up by an unfortunate tussle over military protocol.
Most men stranded in the open were Union soldiers. Hence, on June 5, Grant suggested to Lee that “unarmed men bearing litters” be allowed to gather the dead and wounded during a cease-fire, and he declared his readiness to abide by any method suggested by Lee.46 The next day, Lee quibbled over technicalities, suggesting these casualties should only be removed under a flag of truce—by which Grant would have to admit tacitly defeat at Cold Harbor. He seemed intent on teaching a lesson to Grant, who promised his stretcher bearers would carry “a white flag and not to attempt to go beyond where we have dead or wounded.”47 Sticking to military etiquette, Lee insisted upon a flag of truce instead of men waving white flags. Finally, at 7 p.m. on June 6, Lee agreed that Grant could send out orderlies to collect soldiers between 8 and 10 p.m. This message didn’t reach Grant’s headquarters until the allotted time had expired, leaving dead men rotting on the blood-soaked soil. The next morning, Grant regretted to Lee “that all my efforts for alleviating the sufferings of wounded men, left upon the Battle-field have been rendered nugatory.”48 By the time relief crews scoured the field on the night of June 7, all but two wounded soldiers had died as the generals bickered; another 432 men brought into Union lines were already dead. Historians sympathetic to Lee blame Grant in this affair, arguing that his ruffled pride could not accept the flag of truce proffered by Lee. Grant, for his part, blamed Lee’s rigidity for the needless loss of life.
Cold Harbor culminated a four-week campaign distinguished by a savagery unseen in the war. Since May 4, the furious crescendo of fighting had produced appalling casualties: sixty-five thousand for the Union side versus thirty-five thousand for Confederates. Though his losses approached the size of Lee’s entire army, Grant had inflicted comparable losses on Lee, equivalent to 40 percent of the Army of Northern Virginia. J. F. C. Fuller, the British military historian, and Bruce Catton have pointed out that Cold Harbor did a disservice to Grant’s reputation since his armies tended to lose a smaller percentage of their men in battle than those commanded by Lee and most other Civil War generals. No statistical evidence buttresses the charge that Grant was needlessly careless with lives. For all the hand-wringing over Cold Harbor, it was no more disastrous an assault than that conducted by George Pickett under Lee’s auspices at Gettysburg, although the death toll was then somewhat lower.49
Grant never apologized for the carnage, nor did he find his failure particularly surprising. He had to force Lee into the open, while the latter hid behind breastworks and rifle trenches. Lee “had the advantage of being on the defensive . . . and I had to attack and attack, but every blow I struck weakened him, and when at last he was forced into Richmond it was a far different army from that which menaced Washington and invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was no longer an invading army.”50 Grant was resigned that this method would exact a huge tally in lost lives. “Fighting, hard knocks, only could accomplish the work.”51
All the bloodshed made it easy to miss the significance of Grant’s accomplishment. By steadily pushing Lee eighty miles south, he had robbed him of mobility and prevented him from assuming the offensive. Grant now controlled the direction of the contest, and, if he lost individual battles, he was winning the war. After Cold Harbor, his fighting spirit remained unquenchable and he insisted that “success was only a question of time.”52 He was rankled by charges that, during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, McClellan took the same army by boat from northern Virginia down to Chesapeake Bay without incurring the grievous losses of the Overland Campaign. His rebuttal was terse: “I captured Lee’s army; McClellan didn’t.”53 By moving overland, Grant had shielded Washington from harm; had he gone by water, he would have been forced to leave behind ample forces to protect the capital. He cited the irreplaceable losses Lee suffered and the slow, inexorable grinding down of his army. He also took pride in the campaign as a logistical feat in which he moved a train of four thousand wagons “over narrow roads and through a densely wooded country.”54
It was harrowing to see so many soldiers maimed, disfigured, and killed, and Gouverneur Warren undoubtedly spoke for many when he exclaimed, “For thirty days it has been one funeral procession past me, and it has been too much!”55 Emory Upton recoiled in horror at Cold Harbor. “I am disgusted with the generalship displayed,” he told his sister. “Our men have, in many cases, been foolishly and wantonly slaughtered.”56 The palpable dismay reached right into Lincoln’s cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Welles shuddered that Grant had paved the road from Washington to Richmond “with the skulls of Union soldiers.”57 Even northern politicians advocating a more muscular military style blanched at Cold Harbor. “For god’s sake try and arrange [peace] with the South,” former congressman Martin Conway warned Lincoln, “on any basis short of their resumption of federal power on the cornerstone of slavery.”58 The opposition press feasted on Cold Harbor’s casualties. “What is the difference between a butcher and a general?” a Copperh
ead editorial inquired. “A Butcher kills animals for food. A general kills men to gratify the ambition or malice of politicians and scoundrels.”59 After Cold Harbor, Grant could never cast off the butcher epithet, a mortifying burden for this plain, decent man. “They call me a butcher,” he mused after the war, “but do you know I sometimes could hardly bring myself to give an order of battle? When I contemplated the death and misery that were sure to follow, I stood appalled.”60
In the aftermath of the campaign, Lincoln faced almost unendurable pressure to stanch the bloodshed. He watched in despair as sick and wounded soldiers from Cold Harbor turned Washington into a vast infirmary, overrun with amputees and embalming establishments. Death was omnipresent in the capital. Mourning “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” Horace Greeley told Lincoln he feared “the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.”61 One particularly vitriolic critic of Grant resided in the White House. “He is a butcher,” Mary Lincoln said of Grant, “and is not fit to be at the head of an army.”62 One evening, as he viewed ambulances transporting wounded soldiers, the president observed sadly, “Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering, this loss of life is dreadful.”63 To deal with the legions of dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed the creation of a national military cemetery, surrounding the former Lee mansion at Arlington, and Stanton approved the measure the same day.
