The fighting 199General Evander M. Law's Alabama troops slaughtered
attacking Federals at Cold Harbor. 'It was not war'
Law wrote,'it was murder' (Public domain)they pressed south. Steady but desultory
fighting at Totopotomoy led Grant toward
scenes familiar from the earlier campaigns
around Richmond.
By 2 June the armies were concentrating
around Cold Harbor, where Lee's first great
victory had been won on 27 June 1862 in
the Battle of Gaines' Mill. The Confederate
line that was hurriedly entrenched at the
beginning of June 1864 ran right through
the old battlefield; some of the 1864 fighting
of greatest intensity would rage where the
same armies had jousted two years before.
A Northern newspaperman described the
Southern entrenchments as 'intricate,
zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting
flanks of lines ... a maze and labyrinth
of works within works and works
without works.'
On 3 June, weary of being blocked at
every turn and always inclined toward
brutally direct action, Grant simply sent
forward tens of thousands of men right into
that formidable warren of defenses, and into
the muzzles of rifles wielded by toughened
veterans. The young Northerners obliged to
participate in this disaster at Cold Harbor
knew what the result would be. A member of
General Grant's staff noticed them pinning
to their uniforms pieces of paper bearing
their names and home places, so that their
bodies would not go unidentified. In very
short order on that late-spring morning,
7,000 Union soldiers fell to Confederate
musketry without any hope of success.
A Federal from New Hampshire wrote
bluntly: 'It was undoubtedly the greatest and
most inexcusable slaughter of the whole war
... It seemed more like a volcanic blast than
a battle ... The men went down in rows, just
as they marched in the ranks, and so many
at a time that those in rear of them thought
they were lying down.' General Emory
Upton, who had been so successful at
Rappahannock Station and Spotsylvania with
carefully planned attacks, wrote on 4 June
that he was 'disgusted' with the generalship
displayed. 'Our men have ... been foolishly
and wantonly sacrificed,' he wrote bitterly;
'thousands of lives might have been spared
by the exercise of a little skill.'
Some Southerners dealing out death from
behind their entrenchments around Cold
Harbor blanched at the carnage, but a boy
from Alabama reflected on what was being
inflicted upon his country and admitted that
'an indescribable feeling of pleasure courses
through my veins upon surveying these
heaps of the slain.' A pronouncement by
that Alabamian's brigade commander,
General Evander M. Law, has been the most
often-cited summary of Cold Harbor. 'It was
not war,' Law mused, 'it was murder.'
The bloodshed northeast of Richmond
settled into steady, but deadly, trench
warfare for the week after 3 June. Rotting
corpses from the hopeless assault spread a
suffocating stench across both lines; flies and
other insects bedeviled the front-line troops;
sniping between the lines inflicted steady
casualties and made life difficult. Troops who
had been scornful of digging earthworks
earlier in the war now entrenched eagerly.
Soon they had constructed elaborate lines
and forts that stretched for miles across
the countryside.