Originally aired on June 07, 1996 - In part 93 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the bloody June 3, 1864 battle at Cold Harbor. It was a conflict that U.S. Grant would relent in his memoirs.
#93 – Cold Harbor
Some words in Civil War history have a chilling overtone to them: Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, for example. They are battle-names, and the bloodshed in those engagements was shocking. To that list should be added another, somewhat obscure, name. It was the June 3, 1864, fight at Cold Harbor, Virginia.
Throughout the month of May in that third year of the war, the armies of U. S. Grant and R. E. Lee had been side-slipping in a semicircle through Virginia. Heavy fighting had marked the moves in the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, and points to the southeast. A determined Grant then made an unusually wide sweep in an effort to gain an important road junction only ten miles northeast of Richmond. Yet Lee again moved adeptly and beat Grant to that intersection with the strange name of Cold Harbor.
Confederates spent the better part of a day and a half building a six-mile elevated network of trenches, gun emplacements, and skirmishers’ lines that were as strong as any the Civil War produced. When Grant got to Cold Harbor and saw Lee again blocking his advance, the Union general lost his temper. He ordered a major attack for 4:30 the next morning. It would not be another flank movement; no, this time it would be a head-on assault against the center of the Confederate line.
Rain showers occurred the night of June 2-3 as soldiers huddled in the wet darkness and waited for combat. Tradition has it that Billy Yanks who were to make the attack were so certain of defeat that they wrote their names on slips of paper and pinned them to the backs of their shirts so that their bodies could be identified after the battle.
A Vermont soldier had kept a meticulous war diary up to that point. Sometime after midnight he made a simple entry: “June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.” He would be.
The Union attacks that Friday began shortly after daylight. Union lines swept forward; Confederate cannon and musketry opened with one unceasing roar. A Union observer noted quickly that the assaults were “a wild chain of doomed charges, most of which were smashed in 5 or 10 minutes, and none of which lasted over a half-hour”. For the most part, Federal units were blown apart before they could get to within 50 yards of Lee’s position.
One Northern colonel managed to lead his regiment to that point. He jumped atop the parapet and shouted for his men to follow him. The colonel went down, his lifeless body draped on the top of the earthwork. It was hit so many times by stray bullets thereafter that when an armistice went into effect a few days later, the officer could be identified only by the buttons on his uniform coat.
A Union sergeant remembered the men in his squad involuntarily bending forward as they charged, as if they were moving into a driving rainstorm instead of concentrated musketry. Another Billy Yank in the attack saw all of his companions suddenly drop to the ground. The soldier thought that an officer had ordered everyone to lie down, so he did the same. Later he learned that every one of his compatriots had been killed in one blast of gunfire.
No attack in the Civil War had been broken up as quickly or as easily – nor men killed as rapidly – as at Cold Harbor. The thirty minutes of effort cost the Union army over 7,000 casualties. Cold Harbor demonstrated many things, one of which was that no general then alive could match Lee when it came to building field fortifications.
Grant learned that the hard way. Twenty years later, near the end of his life, the Union commander still expressed remorse that the attack at Cold Harbor was ever made.
