by Bruce Catton
After the war was over someone asked crusty Brigadier General Romeyn Ayres if his famous old division of Regulars was still in service at this time. Ayres replied that the Regulars had mostly been killed.
“I had regulars—what were known as the regular division—before I went into the battle of Gettysburg,” he said. “I left half of them there, and buried the rest in the Wilderness. There were no regulars left.” 21
2. Judgment Trump of the Almighty
The rivers of eastern Virginia slant down toward the sea from the northwest. Some of them are wide and deep and some are quite insignificant except during time of heavy rains, but each one can be a barrier to a moving army. In the spring of 1864 the Army of the Potomac had to cross all of them, and the crossings could be made only where there were no defenders. These facts shaped the route of the army, and all through the month of May it moved in a series of wide zig-zags.
Wanting to go due south, the army was forever going southeast in order to find a good place to cross a river. Having crossed, it would turn southwest to get back on the route, and presently it would run into the Confederate army and there would be a fight. Since the Confederates could not be driven away from one of these spots where they elected to make a stand, the Federal army after a time would move southeast once more, sagging away from the direct road to Richmond but sooner or later crossing another river and cutting back to the southwest again. It moved like a ponderous ship tacking against a strong wind—a long slant to the left, a short leg to the right, another beat to the left and another slogging drive to the right; and if progress was slow it was steady.1
Many rivers had been crossed—the Rapidan and the Ny, the North Anna and the Pamunkey. If the Army of the Potomac was constantly being pushed toward the east, it was also gaining ground toward the south. The Confederate army always stood between it and Richmond, but the distance to Richmond was growing shorter and shorter. As May came to an end, the two armies were facing each other in a flat, featureless country of little streams and low ridges and small farms, spotted here and there with bogs and interlaced by narrow, winding roads. There was just one more river to cross—the Chickahominy, which ran across the Confederate rear just five miles away. Five miles beyond the Chickahominy was Richmond itself.
It was good to be this close to Richmond, and although they had packed more fighting and hard marching into the last month than they usually saw in half a year, the men were feeling hopeful. They seemed to be getting somewhere, at last, and a Massachusetts soldier reflected that “no backward steps were being taken,” which, he remarked, was a brand new experience. He went on: “The Army of the Potomac having been unaccustomed to the sunshine of victory, rejoiced at the change and became buoyant with hope. The discouragement that hitherto attended us vanished as our confidence in Grant increased.” He remembered that his regiment marched by a railroad siding one day and saw Grant, his uniform all dusty and worn, perched on a flatcar gnawing at a ham bone; the men cheered, and Grant casually waved the bone in acknowledgment and went on eating.
One officer insisted: “Never were the men more hopeful or in better spirits, more willing for marching, more ready to fight, than at this time,” and he said they had “an idea that we were still advancing, that there was a plan that would be carried out successfully.” Another officer wrote that “the men cannot help feeling that the worst is over, now that our great leader has pushed the enemy almost to the wall,” and a new recruit who joined up just after Spotsylvania wrote home that the veterans with whom he talked “place unbounded faith in General Grant.” A man in the DC Corps, recalling that his regiment lost its flag in the fighting east of the Bloody Angle, told how the men talked about the loss and agreed finally that it was cause for pride rather than for shame, since it proved that they had been in a very hot place; and he added stoutly, “Be it considered a disgrace by whom it may, that does not make it one.” 2
Looking back on the campaign, men remembered a series of pictures which, as one soldier said, were “like the fragments of a half-forgotten dream, distinct in themselves but without any definite connection as to time or place.” He sketched in a few of these fragments: “I see a long column of weary soldiers, winding along over hill and valley, in the night, gliding past a stately mansion, with beautiful grounds and shaded walks, and everywhere the freshness and fragrance of spring. Again I see a line of battle stretching out across an open field, the men resting lazily in the ranks. A little to the left, near some shade trees, stands a battery ready for action, the guns pointing toward some unseen enemy beyond. It is noon, and the sunlight is pouring down upon the scene, bright and clear.” 3
If they were close to Richmond at last, and feeling good about it, the Rebels were always in front of them, ready for business. Furthermore, the field of maneuver was growing very narrow. The army could no longer swing back and forth in wide arcs, going twenty miles to one side in order to get five miles forward. This was coffin corner, and there was little room to sidestep. Any road that was taken now had to lead to Richmond, and all of the roads to Richmond were blocked by pugnacious Southerners, who had trenches and gun pits wherever there was high ground.
Right now the Confederates were dug in behind the headwaters of Totopotomoy Creek, an insignificant watercourse whose turns and swampy banks offered good defensive ground. The chance of breaking this line looked no better than in the Wilderness or at Spotsylvania. It was better to go around the line than to try to go through it, and to go around it would be harder here than it had been before.
Down below the Federal left, within a mile or so of the Chickahominy, there was another of those seedy taverns that dotted the Virginia landscape—a quiet place at a sleepy crossroads, the name of it Cold Harbor, perched unobtrusively on a highway that wandered up from the Federal supply base, back at White House on the Pamunkey, and went on to cross the Chickahominy and go to Richmond.
This war went by a queer script of its own, and it had a way of putting all of its weight down on some utterly unimportant little spot that no one had ever heard of before—Shiloh Church, or Chancellorsville, or some such—and because armies contended for them, those place names became great and terrible. Now there was Cold Harbor, a wide spot on a lonely dusty road, set in a broad plain that was furrowed by tedious ravines and went rolling off to a chain of low hills on the south and west.
The weather was hot and the landscape looked barren, and a Federal officer who visited the place wondered how it had ever got its name. There was no harbor within miles, and the place was far from cold—was, in fact, as he reflected, very much like a bake oven—and the roads were ankle-deep in powdery dust that hung in low, choking clouds whenever a marching column went by, and it seemed that no man in his senses would ever want to come here. Years afterward, a veteran remarked that of all of the battlefields of the war, Cold Harbor was the one spot he had never heard any old soldier express a desire to revisit.4
Cold Harbor lay beyond the flanks of the armies. If the Federals were going to side-step once more they would have to come through here. Conversely, if the Confederates planned a countermove of their own this was a good spot for them to take, because if they held this crossroads they would be closer to the Yankee base at White House than the Yankees were themselves. So as May came to an end the storm clouds of the war drifted down to Cold Harbor, with a hurricane of fire to sweep the dreary plain, and the name of the run-down little tavern became a name to remember forever.
The cavalry got there first. Phil Sheridan had led his horsemen back to the Army of the Potomac a week earlier after a wild, eventful swing that took him to the very edge of Richmond. He had destroyed a good deal of Confederate property, he had released certain captured Yankees who had been on their way to the Richmond prisons, he had had a big fight with the Confederate cavalry—and he had done one of the grim things that had to be done if the Confederacy was to die: he had killed Jeb Stuart. Now the raid was over and cavalry was back on the job again, and on May 31 Sheridan
brought two mounted divisions cross country, shook them out into a line of battle, and drove them yelling and clattering over the crossroads.
Confederate troops were already there. Lee and Grant had simultaneously realized the need to occupy this spot, and Rebel cavalry stiffened with infantry had come on the scene just in time to meet Sheridan’s hard drive. Sheridan’s men forced them out—they had at last turned from mere raiders into hard men of war, these cavalrymen, and their magazine carbines gave them prodigious fire power at close range, and they got off their horses and fought on foot and got a grip on the flat land around the crossroads, sending the Confederate advance guard back in defeat.
Lee was not going to take this meekly, and he sent in a fresh division of infantry to drive Sheridan’s troopers out. The troopers hung on, working the levers of their carbines fast and kicking up the dust with low-flying bullets, and when evening came Sheridan sent back word that he did not think his men could stay where they were. He was told to stay anyway because Federal infantry would be up shortly, and while the dismounted cavalrymen dug in their heels and fought, couriers rode northeast to where General Wright had his VI Corps, on the right end of the Yankee line, and told him to get his men around to Cold Harbor as fast as they could travel.5
The Army of the Potomac had moved by its left many times in this campaign, but it always did it in reverse order; if the army had simply faced to its left and started marching it would have invited a ruinous flank attack. On a shift to the left, the first troops to move were always those on the extreme right. They would fade back, move around behind the army, and come up on the other end of the line.
So it was today. The VI Corps held the right; now it left its trenches and during the night and early morning it went slogging along through choking dust which raised a foul, strangling cloud over every regiment and made it impossible to see the length of a company. Intermittent messages kept coming from Sheridan—hurry up, hurry up, cavalry alone can’t hold this position much longer—and one of Wright’s staff officers who rode on ahead to Cold Harbor found Sheridan “the most nervy, wiry incarnation of business, and business only, I had yet met.” The men remembered this march as about the worst they ever made, and when they got to Cold Harbor in midmorning of June 1, dirt-caked and completely worn out, they were happy to find that the firing had died down. They formed line of battle, an empty echoing plain before them, and most of the men dropped in their tracks and fell into a drugged sort of sleep.6
Reinforcements were coming. Down on the James River Butler’s army was huddling ingloriously in its haven at Bermuda Hundred, and Grant had notified Butler that if he could not fight there he could at least send some of his men up to help the Army of the Potomac. So General Baldy Smith put 16,000 men on transports and took them down the James, around Point Comfort, and up the Pamunkey to White House. He was under orders to get down to Cold Harbor as fast as he could, and he should have reached the place while Sheridan’s fight was going on, but there had been a mix-up in his orders and he made a wearing, useless march up the river before higher authority caught up with him and put him on the right track. Late in the afternoon of June 1, Smith’s men came down to the crossroads by the tavern and began to file into line on the right of the VI Corps—very tired, short of ammunition and artillery, with a great many stragglers wandering about on the lost roads somewhere off to the rear.7
The plain was covered with dust raised by the marching men, and the dust hung in the air like a gritty cloud bank. The artillery began to hammer at the Confederate works, half a mile away, and the smoke mingled with the dust and the setting sun looked dull-red and enormous through the haze. As the reinforcements moved in, Wright’s men roused themselves reluctantly. A Connecticut soldier tugged the arm of a sleeping comrade and told him: “Jim, there’s a pile of troops coming. I guess there’s going to be a fight.” Jim blinked and declared: “I don’t care a damn. I wish they’d shoot us and be done with it. I’d rather be shot than marched to death.” 8
It was remembered later that the men seemed stupid with weariness as they formed line of battle, and the feverish excitement that often ran through a body of men lining up for a charge was missing. The road from Cold Harbor toward Richmond led off between fields and little plots of woodland toward the rising ground where the Rebels were waiting, and the road served as the guide line for the attack, with Wright’s troops on the left of it and Smith’s on the right. The men got under way at last, and where the ground began to rise they came on the entanglement of felled trees and sharpened saplings which the Rebels had put thirty yards in front of their firing line. As the Federals began to tear this apart the Southern riflemen opened fire with one long, rolling volley—“a sheet of flame, sudden as lightning, red as blood, and so near that it seemed to singe the men’s faces,” one survivor described it. Up and down the front of the two army corps the attacking lines wavered, and here and there men turned and ran for the rear. Then the lines surged forward again, and on the slopes near the Richmond road Ricketts’s division and some of Smith’s men broke into the Rebel works, taking prisoners and sending the rest of the defenders flying.
Ricketts’s men were out to redeem themselves. They were Milroy’s weary boys from the valley, the ones who had broken and fled in panic in the Wilderness fight, and the rest of the VI Corps had let them know that they were accounted second-rate soldiers not worthy of belonging to a good fighting corps. Ricketts had been nursing them along ever since, and he seems to have pulled them together and made soldiers out of them, and on this evening their division was the only unit in the VI Corps that gained its objective. To right and left the Confederate line held firm, and as the evening deepened into a wild twilight there was a furious fire fight.
Emory Upton had his brigade up close to the enemy, as usual—he had just learned that he was being promoted brigadier general because of his feat at Spotsylvania—and in line with the gospel he had been preaching he was on the firing line personally, helping his men to beat off a sharp Rebel counterattack. One of his regiments, the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, began to waver, and Upton galloped into the middle of it, shouting: “Men of Connecticut, stand by me! We must hold this line!” The wavering stopped and the regiment held, and one soldier remembered seeing Upton, dismounted, standing in the front rank firing an infantry musket. When one disheartened officer came up to report that he did not think his command could drive the Rebels back, Upton snarled at him: “If they come there, catch them on your bayonets and pitch them over your heads!” 9
Darkness came at last and the fighting died away, and the Federals dug in where they were and counted their losses. These were fairly heavy—a total of some 2,200 for the two army corps—but the Confederates had had substantial losses, too, and 750 Southern prisoners were on their way back to the provost marshal’s stockade. All in all, the day’s action had been a success. The Confederates had been driven out of Cold Harbor and the Federal grip there was secure. Also, it appeared that this might be a good jumping-off point for a major attack.
Cold Harbor was not far from the Chickahominy, and there was no more room for shifting to the left. But the place was right on the Confederate flank, and while Lee had sent a good many troops down here they had been kept very busy and it did not seem probable that they could have built a strong defensive line. If there was any place along the line where an attack might succeed, it was right here, and success here would be dazzling because the Chickahominy ran across the Confederate rear and a beaten army trying to retreat fast across that river would be in dire trouble. Here, perhaps, was where the blow that would end the war could be struck. On top of these considerations there was the obvious fact that a blow could not very well be struck anywhere else. It was either fight here or develop a whole new campaign.10
These points had great weight, and Grant considered them and decided accordingly—which is to say that he ordered an all-out attack for daylight the next morning, with Wright’s and Smith’s corps to be reinforced b
y the twenty-odd thousand in Hancock’s command, and with the rest of the army throwing its weight in where it was. Yet between a decision by the lieutenant general commanding and the ultimate appearance on the firing line of the soldiers who must make that decision effective there were many separate steps, and at Cold Harbor all of these were steps leading down into great darkness. There is a house-that-Jack-built quality to the tale: this went wrong because that went wrong, and that went wrong because of what happened just before, and that in turn.… Attitudes of mind and habits of thought formed when Cold Harbor was as remote as the mountains of the moon were still at work, each one affecting what was going to happen next, all of them put together forming a recipe for disaster.
Whatever was going to be done would have to be done very quickly. The whole idea was that at half-past four on the morning of June 2 the Confederates facing Cold Harbor would be off balance, unprepared to resist a solid blow. That assumption might well be correct; and yet it was as certain as anything could be certain that the Confederates would not stay off balance or unprepared very long, and that what was possible at dawn might be utterly impossible by midafternoon. The big attack that was set for dawn, in other words, had better take place at dawn and not at some other time.
