At 4:30 on the morning of June 3, 1864, Union soldiers in the fields east of Richmond crouched in the wet grass and waited for the signal to advance. Many had already pinned scraps of paper to their coats with their names and hometowns, knowing they might not survive to be identified. One soldier wrote in his diary a single line for that day: “Cold Harbor. I was killed.
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Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had approved the assault hours earlier. He knew the Confederate lines before him were not ordinary field works. They were seven miles of freshly dug trenches, rifle pits, and artillery positions, strengthened overnight by veterans who had been marching and fighting for a month.
He knew his own men were exhausted after thirty days of almost continuous combat. He knew the ground ahead was open in places, swampy in others, and swept by interlocking fire. He ordered the attack anyway. To understand why, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of the Overland Campaign.
When Grant crossed the Rapidan River on May 4, 1864, he brought a new strategy to the Eastern Theater. His objective was not Richmond or terrain. It was the Army of Northern Virginia itself. He intended to keep striking Robert E.
Lee’s army until it could no longer fight. He had the numbers, roughly 118,000 men against Lee’s 64,000, and he had the backing of a president who was tired of generals who retreated after losses. The first test came in the Wilderness. There, in tangled woods where visibility dropped to twenty yards and smoke hung like fog, the fighting was savage.
Grant lost nearly 18,000 men in two days. Lee lost about 11,000. But when the smoke cleared on May 7, something unprecedented happened. Instead of pulling back across the river as every Union commander before him had done, Grant turned his columns south.
Soldiers in the ranks noticed. One wrote home that the army was going to Richmond and was going to stay there. At Spotsylvania Court House, the fighting reached a new level of horror. On May 12, at a place the soldiers called the Bloody Angle, men fought hand to hand for twenty hours in pouring rain, using bayonets and clubbed muskets.
The dead piled so high that living soldiers climbed over them to keep firing. Grant lost another 18,000. Lee lost perhaps 13,000. Still Grant refused to retreat.
He slid east and south, always trying to get around Lee’s flank. By late May, at the North Anna River, Lee built a V-shaped entrenchment that looked inviting, a trap designed to smash both Union wings if Grant attacked the center. Grant saw it and refused to spring it. Instead, he slipped away again, marching southeast toward the crossroads village of Cold Harbor.
Lee, short on men and time, raced to meet him. Cold Harbor was named for a tavern that offered cold rooms but no hot meals, an ironic name for what was coming. Union cavalry under Philip Sheridan seized the intersection first and held it against counterattacks until infantry arrived. On June 1, Wright’s Sixth Corps and Smith’s Eighteenth Corps, fresh troops from the Army of the James, carried the first line of rifle pits and took prisoners, but the cost was high.
A few days earlier, Grant had written to Henry Halleck in Washington that he felt Lee’s army was “really whipped” and that success was already assured. He knew the Confederates were down to roughly 50,000 effectives, many of them barefoot, many of them boys and old men. He knew they were pinned against the Chickahominy River with their backs to Richmond. What he did not fully appreciate was how deeply they had dug in.
Overnight on June 1 and 2, Lee’s men turned a makeshift line into a fortress. They felled trees, piled dirt, and sharpened stakes. They sighted artillery to rake every approach. Grant’s corps commanders had not been given time to conduct proper reconnaissance.
The attack was set for the afternoon of June 2, then postponed because Hancock’s Second Corps got lost in the dark and arrived exhausted. That delay gave Lee’s engineers another full night to perfect their defenses. Grant knew this. He had read the reports.
He had seen similar works at Spotsylvania and his men had carried them anyway. He believed relentless pressure and weight of numbers would finally crack the Confederate shell. He also knew the political clock was ticking. The presidential election was five months away, and Northern newspapers were already calling the campaign a butcher’s bill.
If he paused, the war might drag into another year. On the night of June 2, he gave the order to attack at first light. The assault began at 4:30 a. m.
Three Union corps, Hancock on the left, Wright in the center, Smith on the right, stepped off almost simultaneously. There was no grand plan or elaborate coordination, just three hammer blows meant to overwhelm the line at multiple points. Hancock’s veterans charged through thickets and swamps. Barlow’s division overran Breckinridge’s Confederates and captured three guns and several hundred prisoners.
For a few minutes it looked like a breakthrough. Then Confederate artillery and reserves closed the gap. Gibbon’s division bogged down in ravines and took murderous crossfire. Wright’s Sixth Corps carried the outer rifle pits but could go no farther.
Smith’s Eighteenth Corps, advancing across open ground, walked straight into canister and musketry. One Confederate officer later said the federal dead lay so thick in front of his position that a man could walk the length of the line without touching the ground. By 7:30 the fighting was essentially over. The Union had gained almost nothing.
In roughly one hour, some accounts say the worst lasted only ten minutes, nearly 7,000 Union soldiers fell. Confederate losses were perhaps 1,500. Survivors dug in where they lay, sometimes using the bodies of their comrades for cover. The lines were so close in places that men could hear the enemy breathing.
Grant rode forward around 11:00 to speak with his corps commanders. Hancock said the enemy was too strong in his front. Wright thought a coordinated push with support might work. Smith was openly pessimistic.
Grant listened, then wrote a note to Meade at 12:30 p. m. saying that since the corps commanders were not confident of success, further advance was suspended. That afternoon, Grant sent a dispatch to Washington that made for painful reading.
He reported that the assault had driven the enemy into his entrenchments at all points but without gaining a decided advantage, and that the loss was not severe. He had just watched the worst single-day slaughter of his career and still downplayed it. Later, in his memoirs, he wrote the sentence that has defined his reputation ever since: “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.
” He regretted it more than the failed assault at Vicksburg, more than the Wilderness, more than Spotsylvania. At Cold Harbor there was no compensating strategic gain. The ground won was worthless. The Confederate army was not broken, and thousands of young men had been lost for nothing.
For the next three days the armies glared at each other across no man’s land while the wounded screamed in the sun. Grant and Lee haggled over a truce. Grant wanted unarmed litter parties to go out without formal flags. Lee insisted on the proper courtesies of a flag of truce.
The delay was agonizing. By the time the details were worked out on June 7, most of the wounded who could have been saved were dead. The sound of their cries carried on the wind for days. Public opinion in the North turned against Grant for a time.
Newspapers called him the butcher. But Cold Harbor was not the end of the story. Grant had kept Lee pinned in place for twelve days, and while the armies clawed at each other he was already thinking ahead. On June 12, under cover of darkness, he pulled the entire Army of the Potomac out of its trenches, crossed the James River on a pontoon bridge more than 2,000 feet long, and marched toward Petersburg.
Lee, expecting another fight at Cold Harbor, was caught flat-footed. The movement to Petersburg, the real objective all along, began the siege that would finally strangle the Confederacy. Grant never tried to excuse Cold Harbor. He owned it.
He had known the risks, the fortifications, the exhaustion of his men, and the danger Lee’s army still posed. He also believed the only way to win the war was to keep fighting and keep bleeding the enemy until the Confederacy ran out of blood. In that narrow, terrible sense, the assault at Cold Harbor was consistent with everything Grant believed about modern war. It was attrition on a grand scale, the price he was willing to pay so that later, at Petersburg and Appomattox, the price would not have to be paid again.
The men who survived Cold Harbor carried the memory differently. One private wrote years later that the assault taught him something about command: even the best generals sometimes ask the impossible of ordinary men. Another from a New York regiment said simply, “We went in expecting to die, and most of us did. ” Their sacrifice did not win the day at Cold Harbor, but it helped win the war.
Grant absorbed the lesson, adjusted, and kept the pressure on until the Confederacy had nothing left to give. He knew the cost, the ground, and the odds, and he still gave the order because by the spring of 1864, stopping was no longer an option. The war had to end, and Grant had decided it would end on his terms, no matter what it took.