battle of cold harbor essay

Heavy artillery was the sound early this morning, at 4:30 A.M. on June 3, 1864, near Cold Harbor, Virginia. Rebel defenders, well protected in their trenches, held their fire until the Union soldiers were within lethal range. Fifty thousand blue uniformed soldiers left their trenches and advanced toward the Confederate entrenchments. When the Federal troops approached the line of fire the Confederate soldiers moved down the front ranks with volleys of rifle and canister fire. The Union soldiers were dropping like flies.
"That dreadful storm of lead and iron seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle," recalled a Union captain. A soldier described it as "a boiling cauldron from the incessant pattering of shot which raised the dirt in geysers and spitting sands."
The courage of the Union soldiers left the Confederates amazed, yet appalled at the death their murderous volleys were causing. Confederate General Evander Law, shocked at the thousands of dead and wounded said, " I had seen the carnage in front of Marye's hill at Fredericksburg, and on the ‘old railroad cut' which Jackson's men held at the Second Manassas; but I had seen nothing to exceed this. It was not war; it was murder."
A battle that took less than an hour left 7,000 Union soldiers and 1,500 Confederates dead.
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Fascinating Fact: A diary was found on a Union soldier who was killed in the attack. Before leaving his entrenchments that morning, he had written for June 3, 1864, "I am Killed."

Battle Of Cold Harbor

May 31 - June 12, 1864

Other Names: Second Cold Harbor

Location: Hanover County

Campaign: Grant’s Overland Campaign (May-June 1864)

Date(s): May 31-June 12, 1864

Principal Commanders: Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. George G. Meade [US]; Gen. Robert E. Lee [CS]

Forces Engaged: 170,000 total (US 108,000; CS 62,000)

Estimated Casualties: 15,500 total (US 13,000; CS 2,500)

The Confederate Army under command Gen. Robert E. Lee, was organized pratically as it was at the beginning of the campaign, with the excpection of some slight changes in commanders and the accession of the divisions of Breckenridge, Pickett, and Hoke. Various estimates have been made of the strength of the Confederate forces at Cold Harbor. Maj. Jed Hotchkiss, topographer for Lee's army states it as being 58, 000 men, which is probably not far from the truth.

The Army of the Potomac posed many problems for Grant in terms of command, however. First, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, the army’s commander and the victor at Gettysburg, had chafed under criticism from the administration and the press, as well as congressional investigations, because he had failed to pursue and destroy Lee’s army in the days following Gettysburg. Meade was seen as irritable, slow, overly cautious and best when on the defensive — not the sort of man to execute Grant’s aggressive strategy. The men who would be Meade’s four infantry corps commanders during the coming campaign were also somewhat suspect. The best of them, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, was a tenacious and talented fighter, but the wounds he received at Gettysburg had not yet healed, and his poor health affected his ability to command.

Grant’s campaign during the summer of 1864 was distinguished by almost constant hard and desperate fighting. This style of warfare not only made incredible demands on the average soldier but it also had a severe impact on those in the chain of command and as a result the entire command process. The decision to make the attack was based on poor information and invalid assumptions about the morale and military capabilities of the enemy. More important, the decision to launch the fateful assault and its delayed execution reflected a total lack of command cohesion.

Cold Harbor is about 3 miles north of the Chickahominy River and 11 miles from Richmond. Grant considered it an important point as several roads centered there, notably among them those leading to Bethesda Church, White House landing on the Pamunkey, and the several crossings of Chickahominy, offering facilities for the movement of troops in almost any direction.

Forty thousand Union troops charged out of the woods at Cold Harbor, Virginia, into a spray of Confederate fire. Attackers fell by the hundreds as they approached the enemy entrenchments. The effort quickly proved hopeless, but the troops remained in the field. For the next nine hours of June 3, 1864, Union soldiers hugged the ground, digging in as well as they could. Many of them used the bodies of fallen comrades for protection while attempting to answer the Confederate fire. Union commanders repeatedly ordered their men to renew the assault, but the soldiers refused to budge. Finally Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant called off the attack. In the initial charge, which had lasted less than 10 minutes, nearly 7,000 Union soldiers had been killed or wounded. Not until World War I would an army suffer such a high casualty rate. Grant, the Union's recently appointed general-in-chief, would one day write in his memoirs,'I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered. But in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Cold Harbor, Grant took a very different tone as he drafted his post-action report to the War Department.Our loss was not severe, he wrote,nor do I suppose the enemy lost heavily.

Stark evidence of the futility of Grant's assaults at Cold Harbor were the Union soldiers who remained unburied where they fell in early June 1864 until the war's end, when this photograph was taken. Soldiers assigned to bury the dead were able to identify some individuals, but many were interred as unknowns in the nearby National Cemetery.

Not all troops went home after the war. In an attempt to locate the bodies of thousands of men who were missing in action, soldiers helped scour battlefields. Many fatalities had been buried in shallow graves; others, like the skeletal remains at Cold Harbor, had been exposed to the elements for months.

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