Cold Harbor

Near Mechanicsville, Virginia, Union and Confederate forces clashed at Cold Harbor between May 31 and June 12, 1864, with June 3 producing the deadliest fighting of the engagement. The battle marked one of the closing episodes in Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Overland Campaign. When Union troops charged headlong into Gen. Robert E. Lee's entrenched lines on June 3, thousands fell dead or wounded, and the slaughter deepened existing complaints that Grant showed little regard for the human cost of his tactics.

The engagement began on May 31, when Grant once again attempted to outflank Lee's army on its right. Union horsemen captured the vital crossroads at Old Cold Harbor, roughly ten miles from Richmond, and fended off Confederate counterattacks there until infantry support arrived. By this point both commanders had lost enormous numbers of men during the campaign, and each awaited fresh troops. That evening, June 1, the Union VI Corps and XVIII Corps reached the field and struck the Confederate works west of the crossroads, gaining some ground.

The following day, June 2, both sides brought up their remaining forces, and Confederate soldiers labored to build a network of defenses stretching nearly seven miles. When dawn broke on June 3, three corps of Union troops charged the southern portion of these fortified lines. The assault collapsed almost immediately, leaving the attackers with heavy losses. Subsequent efforts to break through farther north, along with renewed pushes against the southern flank, also failed to dislodge the defenders. For over a week afterward, from that point until the night of June 12, the two armies remained locked in place along these positions, until the Army of the Potomac at last withdrew.

Background

When Grant took command as general in chief, he set several offensives in motion across the Confederacy at once. By the close of May 1864, only two of these pushes remained active: Sherman's drive toward Atlanta and the Overland Campaign, where Grant traveled alongside Meade and the Army of the Potomac, directing operations personally. Grant did not aim to seize Richmond itself but rather to annihilate Lee's army, a strategy Lincoln had long favored, believing the Confederate capital would fall naturally once its defending force collapsed. To Meade, Grant issued a simple directive: follow Lee wherever he went. He hoped for a swift and conclusive engagement, yet he stood ready to grind down the enemy through sustained losses, knowing that while casualties would mount on both sides, only the Union possessed the manpower and materiel to keep replacing them.

Grant's forces crossed the Rapidan on May 5 and pushed into the Wilderness near Spotsylvania, where Lee's Army of Northern Virginia struck them. Despite fielding roughly 60,000 troops against 100,000, Lee's soldiers fought hard, aided by thick woods that neutralized Union numbers. Two days of combat produced nearly 29,000 casualties without a clear winner. Lee had checked Grant's advance but could not push him back, and Grant had failed to crush Lee's force. Earlier Union commanders facing this stalemate would have retreated across the Rappahannock; Grant instead directed Meade to swing around Lee's right and seize Spotsylvania Court House, a vital road junction to the southeast, gambling that placing his army between Lee and Richmond would force another fight on ground more favorable to the Union.

Confederate units reached the Spotsylvania crossroads first and began digging in, a defensive necessity given their smaller numbers. Meanwhile Meade, unhappy with how Sheridan's cavalry had performed, freed it from screening the main army so it could hunt down Stuart's Confederate horsemen. Sheridan's troopers fatally wounded Stuart at Yellow Tavern on May 11, a battle that settled nothing tactically, then pressed on toward Richmond, depriving Grant and Meade of their cavalry's reconnaissance abilities.

Combat flared intermittently around Spotsylvania Court House between May 8 and May 21 as Grant probed for weaknesses in the Confederate defenses. On the eighth, Warren and Sedgwick failed to push Anderson's Confederates off Laurel Hill, a position barring the route to the crossroads. Two days later Grant launched assaults along earthworks stretching more than four miles, including a bulge in the line called the Mule Shoe. The Laurel Hill attacks again came up empty, but Colonel Emory Upton's inventive strike against the Mule Shoe hinted at a better approach.

Building on Upton's method, Grant sent Hancock's corps of 15,000 men against the Mule Shoe on May 12. Hancock broke through at first, but Confederate defenders regrouped and pushed him back. Wright's troops meanwhile fought for nearly a full day at the western part of the salient, a spot later remembered as the Bloody Angle, in some of the war's fiercest close combat. Warren and Burnside launched supporting attacks that likewise failed. The engagement ended without tactical resolution but claimed almost 32,000 casualties combined, making it the campaign's deadliest clash. Grant again looked to break the deadlock by sliding his army around Lee's right toward Richmond.

Grant next set his sights on the North Anna River, some 25 miles south. He pushed Hancock's corps forward as bait, hoping Lee would attack it in open ground, but Lee refused and instead reached the river ahead of him. On May 23, Warren's V Corps forced a crossing at Jericho Mills and repelled an assault from A.P. Hill's men, while Hancock's II Corps took the Telegraph Road bridge. Lee then crafted a dangerous scheme: a five-mile line shaped like an inverted V, its point resting on the river's only defensible crossing at Ox Ford. By withdrawing south of the river, he hoped Grant would mist

Location

This engagement took place on the same terrain where the Battle of Gaines's Mill had unfolded during the Seven Days Battles of 1862, in an area of central Virginia that would eventually be known as Mechanicsville. Historians sometimes label that earlier clash the First Battle of Cold Harbor, distinguishing it from the 1864 fight, which becomes the Second Battle of Cold Harbor in such accounts. While digging trenches, Union troops came upon bones left over from the earlier engagement, a discovery that unsettled many of them.

Despite what its name might suggest, Cold Harbor had nothing to do with ships or docks. The label instead applied to a pair of country crossroads, both named after the Cold Harbor Tavern, a property belonging to the Isaac Burnett family that offered travelers a place to stay but no warm food. Two miles east of Gaines's Mill sat Old Cold Harbor, while New Cold Harbor lay a mile to the southeast. Roughly 10 miles (16 km) separated both locations from Richmond, the seat of the Confederate government. Holding this ground gave the Union army access to reinforcements arriving by way of the Pamunkey River, along with the option of striking either at Richmond itself or at the Army of Northern Virginia.

Battle

On May 31, the horsemen who had clashed at Old Church remained locked in confrontation. Lee dispatched a cavalry division commanded by Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee to bolster Brig. Gen. Matthew Butler's forces and hold the crossroads at Old Cold Harbor. When Union Brig. Gen. Alfred T. A. Torbert began pressing harder against the Confederate position, Robert E. Lee directed Anderson's First Corps to move rightward from Totopotomoy Creek in support of the horsemen. Hoke's lead brigade also arrived at the crossroads, joining forces with Butler and Fitzhugh Lee. By 4 p.m., Torbert, together with portions of Brig. Gen. David McM. Gregg's cavalry division, pushed the Confederates back from Old Cold Harbor and started digging in. As additional troops from Hoke and Anderson poured into the area, cavalry commander Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan grew uneasy and instructed Torbert to fall back toward Old Church.

Grant, however, had not lost interest in the crossroads, and he ordered Wright's VI Corps to shift there from its position on Totopotomoy Creek. Sheridan received instructions to return and hold the ground "at all hazards." Torbert made his way back at 1 a.m., relieved to discover the Confederates had never noticed his earlier retreat.

Robert E. Lee hoped to use his freshly gathered infantry on June 1 to overwhelm the modest cavalry units holding Old Cold Harbor, yet his officers failed to work in concert. Anderson never folded Hoke's division into his plan, instead giving him the impression that he should wait until the First Corps assault was underway before joining in, since the Union defenders were themselves in disarray. Wright's VI Corps hadn't even begun moving until after midnight, facing a march of fifteen miles. Smith's XVIII Corps, sent by mistake to the wrong spot several miles off course, never made it to Old Cold Harbor in time to help Torbert.

Anderson opened his assault with the brigade once led by the seasoned Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw, now under the command of Col. Laurence M. Keitt, a South Carolina politician with little military experience. Keitt's troops advanced on the dug-in cavalrymen of Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt. Wielding seven-shot Spencer repeating carbines, Merritt's men unleashed devastating fire that mortally wounded Keitt and shattered his brigade's formation. Hoke, following what he believed were his instructions, held back from the fight, which Anderson quickly called off.

By 9 a.m., Wright's advance units reached the crossroads and set about widening and strengthening the earthworks the cavalry had begun. Grant wanted Wright to strike immediately, but the corps, worn down from its lengthy march and uncertain of enemy strength, held off. Wright chose to wait for Smith, who arrived that afternoon; the XVIII Corps then began entrenching to the right of the VI Corps while the Union horsemen withdrew eastward.

Concerned that Wright and Smith alone could not manage the coming attack, Meade tried persuading Warren to lend support, writing to the V Corps commander that Wright and Smith would strike that evening and that it was highly desirable for Warren to join unless he judged it impossible. Warren chose to send Brig. Gen. Henry H. Lockwood's division, which set out at 6 p.m., but poor reconnaissance of the local roads meant Lockwood never reached the fighting in time to matter. Meade also worried about his exposed left flank, unanchored on the Chickahominy and vulnerable to Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry. He asked Sheridan to send scouts into the area, but Sheridan balked, insisting he could not move his men before nightfall.

The assault Grant had wanted that morning finally got underway at 6:30 p.m., with both Wright's and Smith's corps advancing together. South of the Mechanicsville Road linking New

Aftermath

Cold Harbor stands as the last triumph Lee's forces achieved in the conflict. A month later, a portion of his army did prevail at the Battle of the Crater during the Petersburg siege, but that clash never grew into a full engagement between the two armies. In terms of losses, however, Cold Harbor proved the most one-sided contest of the war. Grant's soldiers, pressing a hopeless assault, suffered between 10,000 and 13,000 casualties across twelve days of fighting. Combined with earlier fighting that May, the Union's casualty count since the start of the month climbed past 52,000, while Lee's losses stood near 33,000. Even at such a steep price, Grant's larger force ultimately emerged from the campaign having lost a smaller share of its men than Lee had.

Historians disagree on exact figures for the casualties suffered at Cold Harbor, and various popular sources offer differing tallies. Writers such as Catton, Esposito, Foote, McPherson, and Grimsley focus on the major assault of June 3 and converge on roughly 7,000 Union casualties against about 1,500 for the Confederates. Gordon Rhea, widely regarded as the leading modern authority on Grant's Overland Campaign, challenges this consensus. In his 2002 study titled Cold Harbor, Rhea combed through casualty records and concluded that the morning attack on June 3 produced only 3,500 to 4,000 Union men killed, wounded, or missing. He places the day's total Union losses around 6,000, compared with 1,000 to 1,500 for Lee. Rhea observes that despite the grim toll, Grant's principal attack that day was smaller in scale than the single-day losses Lee absorbed at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Pickett's Charge, and was roughly on par with Malvern Hill.

McPherson offers this assessment: the assault at Cold Harbor, which Grant ordered, cost the Union seven thousand casualties out of fifty thousand men engaged, with most of that toll coming in under thirty minutes. Grant himself acknowledged the error, yet the episode earned him a reputation as a "butcher" indifferent to his soldiers' lives, and Cold Harbor came to symbolize stubborn, wasteful tactics. McPherson notes that at Gettysburg, Lee's own men suffered nearly identical losses, close to seven thousand casualties, also within roughly half an hour, during the Pickett-Pettigrew charge. Yet that attack is remembered as a display of courage and honor rather than folly, a contrast McPherson argues reveals much about how history has judged Grant versus Lee, and the Union versus the Confederacy.

Near the end of his life, as he composed his memoirs, Grant confessed his continuing regret over ordering the final assault at Cold Harbor, writing that no benefit had come from the terrible losses endured.

The engagement fueled growing opposition to the war among Northern civilians and left Grant saddled with the nickname "fumbling butcher" because of his costly judgment. It also sapped morale within his own ranks. Still, the broader campaign accomplished what Grant needed: however reckless the assault had been, it stripped Lee of the initiative, forcing him into a defensive posture centered on protecting Richmond and Petersburg. Lee managed to reach Petersburg just ahead of Grant, but he then spent nearly the rest of the war, except for its closing week, holding a fortified line in defense of Richmond. Confederates understood their prospects were bleak, yet many held out hope that Lee's fierce, costly resistance might carry political weight, perhaps undermining Lincoln's chances in the 1864 election in favor of a candidate more inclined toward peace. Those hopes collapsed when Atlanta fell in September, and from that point the Confederacy's defeat became simply a question of time.

During the fighting, the Burnett family's tavern, which no longer exists today, served as a makeshift hospital. Union troops stripped it of anything valuable, sparing only a crystal compote dish that Mrs. Burnett managed to protect. The Garthright House likewise functioned as a field hospital during the battle, and its exterior still stands preserved today.