U.S. Civil War History & Genealogy

COLD HARBOR

Part Two
By Tom Gladwell


Continued from Part One: http://www.genealogyforum.rootsweb.com/gfaol/resource/Military/ColdHarbor.htm


Sergeant William Chambers felt curiously exuberant as he opened his eyes in the darkness. All around him, thousands of Union Soldiers were awakening to a morning that was chilly, damp, and soured by swampy odors from the nearby Chickahominy River. Chambers was one of the lucky ones. He was among the few who had managed to hold on to a blanket through some pretty rugged marching, not quite twenty four hours earlier. Chambers had shared his good fortune this night with two comrades who were grateful for the cover it had provided against the rain. As the two rubbed their eyes awake, Chambers stared at them, the grin on his face unseen in the dark. "This is my birthday," he announced. "I wonder what kind of present I will receive?" Five minutes later a Confederate rifle ball hit Chambers in the arm. That was not the kind of present he had been seeking. Chambers bound the wound as best he could in the predawn gloom, threw his precious blanket over his shoulder, and staggered off, looking for the Second Corps field hospital.

Low mist and fog still clung to the stunted pine thickets as blue coated soldiers shuffled into formation all up and down the line. Some were learning for the first time that they were going to charge the Confederate entrenchments this day. When the 19th Maine got the news, there was some hooting at the Brigade commanders by the soldiers but when it was ascertained that those officers themselves were going to lead the men there was no further hesitation. As the yet untested 36th Wisconsin stood waiting, its quartermaster stepped up and calmly began issuing clothing, shoes and socks, which had been called for. Most of the regiments still could not see what they were going to be attacking. One that could was the 25th Mass in Smith's corps. The men were moved out of their bivouac, marched a short distance, and then told to lie down in a thinned stand of woods. On the way, everyone got a look at the Confederate position. "We knew it meant slaughter to make the attempt; and gloomy forebodings settled down over the whole regiment."

From bivouacs spread all across the scrubby countryside, thousand of Union soldiers stumbled into companies that merged to create regiments that marched to form brigades that made up the divisions of the corps. There was a power in the very air, something palpable concocted out of the war sounds of so many men, perhaps forty thousand, moving to a single purpose. "We're all right today, Dave. Look there!" said William F. Daniels, a twenty year old sergeant from Massachusetts, to his friend David Wallis. "There are enough men ahead of us to go through to the Gulf of Mexico."

A young artilleryman in line in front of Brooke's advance remembered being passed by the 7th NY Heavies and being asked lots of questions "What's ahead of us ?" "Are the works strong?" "Is Longstreet's Corps in front of us?" Recalled the youthful gunner, "And I, a boy 17 years old, answered as the whim took me."

Skirmishers began to filter forward from the waiting masses of men. One of those was Private William Haines, from the 12th NJ of Gibbon's division, who now worked his way through the thick brush toward the forward line of Union rifle-pits. His squad came upon a dead Rebel sitting against a tree; Haines guessed that the Johnny had been dead for a couple of days, probably killed by Sherman's troopers on June 1. Someone poked through the Confederate's knapsack and pulled out a small loaf of corn bread, stained at one end with the dead mans blood. "But as Johnny cake was a great luxury to us," Haines recalled, "we cut off the damp end and breakfasted on the rest, first rolling him out so we could get back of the tree for a few minutes rest."

As dawn approached, Frank Wilkeson and his fellow cannoneers had been "leaning against the cool guns, or resting easily on the ponderous wheels for quite some time, waiting nervously for daylight." Now Wilkeson became aware that the storm was about to break. "Indistinctly we saw moving figures. Some on foot rearward, cowards hunting for safety; others on horseback riding to and fro near where we supposed the battle line to be; then orderlies and servants came in from out of the darkness leading horses, and we knew that the regimental and brigade commanders were going into action on foot." A bit forward from Wilkeson, the weary gunners of J. Henry Sleeper's 10th Mass Battery had finished bolstering up their position only a few hours earlier. Now they were chosen to play a special role in the unfolding drama. "A few minutes after the time specified for the attack, a staff officer rode up from General Gibbon and ordered our right piece fired as a signal gun. Then there was indeed a variable tempest."

The Cannonade : 4: 30 - 4 :40 A. M.

Quartermaster Charles B. Peck of the 36th Wisconsin had not finished issuing his supplies when the cannonade thundered alive along the Union line. The Confederate response was quick in coming. One solid shot came whizzing by close to his supply wagon, and that was enough for Peck, who "picked up quickly and got to the rear." Closer to the front line, the 12th NJ came out of the tangled undergrowth and advanced to the edge of an open field. The officer commanding company F of the regiment, seeking to inspire by example, struck a heroic pose, facing the nervous troops with one leg staggered forward. A Confederate shell screamed down the length of the Federal line, about two feet from the ground and "so close," one private in the ranks remembered, "that it seemed to knock down almost every man in the regiment, just by the force of its wind." The impassive face of the posturing company officer turned to agony as the shell tore his forward leg completely off.

In Richmond, twelve miles away, residents were jarred out of bed as their windows rattled. War Clerk John B. Jones insisted that the sounds of the cannonade "could be heard distinctly in all parts of the city."

Along the Cold Harbor lines, dense clouds of acrid, burnt gunpowder billowed over the artillery emplacements. Cannoneer Frank Wilkeson recalled, "Out of the powder smoke came an officer from the battle line of infantry. He told us to stop firing, as the soldiers were about to charge."

The Charge, First wave, Second Corps -- 4:40 - 4:50 A. M.

Francis Barlow's two leading brigades came surging out of the woods onto a broad and level field that ran in a smooth, even slope up to the enemy's works. The left of the advance, led by Colonel Nelson Miles, passed over a sunken road. The right, under Colonel John R. Brooke, crossed over the same road and hit a rail fence halfway up the hill. Brooke had placed his newest and biggest regiment, the sixteen hundred man strong 7th New York Heavy Artillery, in the first line. Watching from the second line, a member of the 148th PA remembered, "The brigade flag and its commander went forward with the first line of raw men through the damp, tall, wet grass and clinging bushes." In his artillery position, Frank Wilkeson saw a line of slouch hats pop up along the Confederate parapets, and then "the works glowed brightly with musketry, a storm of lead and iron struck the blue line, cutting gaps in it."

In Richmond, War clerk John B. Jones, who had been awakened by the rumble of the cannonade, now noted "great crashes of musketry, as if whole divisions were firing at the word of command."

Both of Barlow's leading brigades enjoyed quick success. Nelson Miles' line, led by the 5th New Hampshire, poured across a row of Rebel rifle-pits, capturing two cannon and a number of prisoners, who were sent scuttling to the rear. John Brooke's first wave of yelling, freshly uniformed bluecoats struck the portion of Breckinridge's line where the considerate brigadier in charge had let most of his men rest on higher ground behind the main defensive position. The picket force that had been left to hold the trenches was overwhelmed, and before the main body could deploy to meet the attack, it was routed as well. "It was a hand to hand fight to the finish," recalled one of the heavies. "Clubbed muskets, bayonets, and swords got in their deadly work." Then John Brooke was down, hit by canister even as his exultant New Yorkers streamed over the Confederate battlements. "Tell Colonel Beaver he is in command and to push into the works," Brooke gasped to an aid as he was carried off the field.

The advance of John Gibbon's division was bedeviled almost at once. About two hundred yards from the starting point, his men hit a deep swamp that nobody knew about. The swamp, like a wedge, broke Gibbon's line into two bodies that flowed along either side and were forced farther apart as the swamp widened towards the Confederate line. Colonel Thomas Smyth's brigade veered left, with the 14th Connecticut leading the way. One Connecticut soldier remembered that when "mounting a ridge, the men were exposed to a terrific fire from the enemy. For a time it was alive with fire. The men were dropping, wounded all along the line." The Connecticut soldiers pressed to within a hundred yards of the main enemy line and were stopped cold. Most of Robert Tyler's brigade split to the right and was stalled by a "deep ravine" close to the enemy's works; Tyler was quickly wounded and Colonel James McIvor took command of the brigade. One of Tyler's regiments, the 164th NY, swerved left around the swamp, skirted the right flank of Smyth's stopped advance, and, goaded by the frenzied anger of its commander, Colonel James P. McMahon, stabbed into the main Confederate line.

The Charge, First wave, Sixth Corps -- 4:40 - 4:50 A.M.

On the Sixth Corps front, the attack by Russell's and Rickett's divisions, advancing in one great line, was stopped quickly as a torrent of fire broke across the front and flanks of that line. Not all of Russell's men took part. Emory Upton, for one, was not prepared to sacrifice his men in a hopeless gesture. He later phrased his official report this way "June 3, another assault was ordered, but, being deemed impracticable along our front, was not made."

Most of Rickett's men, on the other hand, did try it. "We never even reached the enemy's works," remembered Captain Lemuel Abbott of the 10th Vermont. "We advanced under a murderous fire in our front from the enemy's artillery, sharpshooters, and when in range of its main line of battle.... were simply slaughtered."

The Charge, First wave, Eighteenth Corps -- 4:40 - 4:50 A.M.

The first indication Colonel William Oates had that trouble was coming was the sound of a volley of rifle fire in the woods in front of where his 15th Alabama was posted, on the left of Evander Law's brigade. Oates looked up and saw Major Lowther, the officer who had tried to avoid skirmish duty, running up a ravine toward Anderson's Brigade on the right. Behind the major came the skirmishers themselves, dodging and ducking, and behind them a column of Union troops ten lines deep, with arms at trail, yelling "Hazzah!" Oates ordered his men "to take arms and fix bayonets. Just then, I remembered that not a gun in the regiment was loaded. I ordered the men to load and the officers each to take an ax and stand to the works. I was apprehensive that the enemy would be on our works before the men could load."

The bluecoats, advancing along a small stream, with marshy sides that offered some flanking protection, were from "Baldy" Smith's Eighteenth Corps. They belonged to Colonel Griffin Stedman's brigade of Generals John H. Martindale's division. The regiment advanced with the caps off their pieces and their bayonets fixed. Stedman was right in the thick of it, using a ramrod as a sword to wave his men on. "Forward! Forward!" he shouted. Stedman later described the enemy line as "a wicked red-green gash of piled up earth and felled pine trees." The 12th New Hampshire led the rush across an open plain that gradually narrowed toward the left. Rifle and cannon fire chewed at the flanks. A soldier in the 2nd New Hampshire, which brought up the tail of Stedman's brigade, remembered, "It was a straight dash of 400 yards to the enemy lines. As the column plunged forward, it left an awful trail of dead and wounded at every step of its progress."

The yelling New Hampshire men of the 12th got close before Alabama Colonel William Oates had matters in hand. "I thought of my piece of artillery. I called out, 'Sergeant, give them double charges of canister; fire, men, fire!' The order was obeyed with alacrity. The enemy was within thirty steps. They halted and began to dodge, lie down and recoil. The fire was terrific from my regiment, the 4th Alabama on my immediate right, and the 13th Mississippi on my left, while the piece of artillery was fired more rapidly and better handled then ever I saw before or since. The blaze of fire from it at each shot went right into the ranks of our assailants and made frightful gaps through the dense mass of men." Added another Alabamian, William McClendon, "It was hardly possible for a ball to pass through without hitting someone." Colonel Pinckney Bowles, commanding the 4th Alabama, recalled, "Our artillery was cutting wide swaths through their lines...hands, arms, legs, and muskets were seen flying high in the air with every discharge." A Massachusetts soldier who was watching from the reserve remembered the moment: "So intense was the fire that the division in front seemed to melt away like snow falling on moist ground." According to a New Hampshire man in the midst of the carnage, "It seemed more like a volcanic blast than a battle."

The men of the 12th New Hampshire now stood through a nightmare. Sergeant Piper of Company B noted that "the men bent down as they pushed forward, as if trying, as they were, to beast a tempest, and the files of men went down like rows of blocks or bricks pushed over by striking against each other." Sergeant Tuttle of Company K recalled "Though the order was to lie down and dropped myself among the dead, I did not discover my mistake until my living comrades had advanced some little distance beyond me." In Company H , Private A. J. Farrar looked on in horror. "I saw them all go down," he said.

As the leading ranks fell apart, the rearmost, the 2nd New Hampshire, was suddenly on the cutting edge. The men dived for cover and began trying to hold the advanced position, taking heavy losses as they did so. One bullet struck close to the head of Lieutenant George T. Carter of Company I, throwing up a geyser of dirt. "Carter's got it!" someone in the ranks yelled. "No, I guess not!" Carter shouted back, raising his head to show everyone that he was all right. At that instant "he did get it from a bullet which inflicted an ugly wound." "In less than ten minutes from the word Forward," a 12th New Hampshire officer wrote afterward, "there was no brigade to be seen." Stedman's brigade finally reeled back "under the heavy front and cross fire, to the edge of the woods, but within short musket range of the line they had gallantly attempted to carry."

The Charge Second Wave, Second Corps: 4:50 - 5:15 A.M.

The sudden success of Barlow's two leading brigades was terribly short lived. As Nelson Miles' outfit, the 5th New Hampshire, took stock of the situation, "It was now seen that regiment was between the enemy's two lines without connections upon either flank. The colonel upon ascertaining that no supports were at hand, gave the orders to withdraw. So near was the regiment to the Confederates second line that some of the men were captured before orders were given to retreat." It was the intention of the regiment's commander to fall back only to the front side of the Rebel works and to hold there until supports came up. But many of the New Hampshire men of the 5th were raw recruits, and once they started out of the inferno, they were not going to stop. The Federals flowed out of the rifle-pits they had taken and ebbed back to the sunken road. Colonel Richard Byrnes's brigade tried to support Miles' but "no sooner had the attacking party begun moving than the enemy opened fire and a terrible and destructive fire it was, sweeping the ground in all directions." "Our men fell in heaps," the battle report of the 28th Mass. later noted.

A vicious Confederate crossfire ripped the ground between the supporting brigades and the works held by the 7th NY Heavy Artillery. By now the New Yorkers, who were holding a small portion of the main Confederate line, were being hit by a counter attack, Joseph Finegan's Florida brigade, reinforced by the 1st Maryland, came boiling forward. "A most desperate and sanguinary hand-to hand struggle then ensued," recalled William Goldsborough, a Marylander, "in which the bayonet and short swords of the officers were used with dreadful effect."

"We has lost all semblance of organization," remembered one dazed New Yorker. "Green soldiers though we were, our short experience had taught us to know when to run, and run we did, I assure you".

John Gibbon's two supporting brigades were also stunned by the awesome enemy fire. The same swamp that had split Gibbon's first wave now did equal damage to the second. His attack plan called for the first to press on until it was stopped, at which point the second wave was to push through the first to continue the advance. But instead of pushing through Smyth's stalled brigade, "Paddy" Owen moved his men past Smyth' and formed of his left. Owen's brigade "massed in solid square by order of General Owen, rushed parallel with the enemy's works through the cleared field which was swept by shot and shell," said one Irishman. He continued, "We turned and rushed toward the front, crossing the sunken road and swamp. Ascending the hill, we madly charged across the level space, and are met with a cyclone of bullets." "The moment the troops begin to press forward over our advanced rifle-pits, and encounter the severe fire of the enemy," a member of the Philadelphia Brigade recalled, "the order 'Forward to the works!' took the place of all attempts at preserving relative formation." On Owen's right, Colonel Henry McKeen's brigade underwent the same storm of iron and lead as they moved toward the main Confederate line, where "the red clay soil of the enemy's entrenchments soon showed in the distance." This shell swept arena may have seemed the last place for Yankee opportunism to flourish, but flourish it did. As the 19th Mass. entered the storm, its color bearer was shot down. The regimental commander turned to Corporal Mike Scannel and told him to pick up the flag and carry it. "Too many Corporals have already been killed carrying colors," Mike shouted back, "I'll make you sergeant on the spot." "That's business," Scannel answered. "I'll carry the colors."

"We could see no man to shoot at," a member of McKeen's brigade complained bitterly. McKeen himself received an agonizing mortal wound, so command passed to young Colonel Frank Haskell of the 36th Wisconsin. The regiment was a new one, and its commander, a Gettysburg hero, whose star was on the ascent. As the leading regiments either fell apart or flopped down, the 36th Wisconsin, which had begun the charge in the rear ranks of its brigade, was suddenly in the advance. Then, it too slowed to a stop while Haskell surveyed the situation. He recognized the futility of trying to go forward in the face of such fire and gave the order, "Lie down, men." "The order had hardly been carried out," remembered the regiments historian, "when a bullet struck Haskell in the head killing him instantly."

Up at the Confederate main line, the gallant rush made by the 164th NY had disintegrated when its colonel was shot down on the parapet of the enemy's works, clutching the regiment's colors.

The Charge, Second Wave, Sixth Corps: 4:50 -5:15

On Wright's Sixth Corps front, with the two leading divisions having been bogged down by ravines and gunfire, General Thomas Neill's reserve division was ordered in on the right. Neill moved the men forward in column, like a great battering ram, but he hit an unopenable door. Wheaton's brigade overran a line of rifle-pits and was stopped; its advance had put it ahead of Rickett's brigade on the left and Brook's Eighteenth Corps division on the right. Wheaton's men were hit from the front and both sides as alert Confederates hustled into flanking trenches and shot down the length of Neill's front line. The Union approach was tracked by Southerners belonging to Kershaw's Brigade, whose officers had difficulty in keeping their troops from firing too soon as the Yankee line swept closer. "But when close enough, the word fire was given, and the men behind the works raised, deliberately resting their guns upon the works, and fired volley after volley… The result was telling, men falling on top of men, rear rank pushing forward the first rank, only to be swept away like chaff."

The Charge, Second Wave, Eighteenth Corps: 4:50 - 5:15

Even as Griffin Stedman's shattered brigade reeled back, "Baldy" Smith was riding forward to take personal control of matters. As he and his staff advanced, "they saw dead men behind them, dead men to the right and left, wounded men creeping to the rear or trying to find shelter from other wounds." Smith found his division commander Martindale readying his supporting line, George Stannard's brigade, to attack. Smith quickly realized that any advance by Martindale in the center would be disastrous unless it was coordinated with an advance by Brook's division to the left. Yelling for Martindale to keep his troops under cover until Brooks got moving, Smith rode over to see what was holding up his first division commander. Shortly after Smith left, Martindale heard the swelling roar of gunfire and cheering from his left, guessed that it was Brooks advancing and ordered Stannard in.

The firing was not Brooks advancing, however, but rather Neill's battering ram being stopped. Stannard's brigade dutifully attacked without support on either side and was gnawed all around. According to a soldier in the 27th Mass, "the surface of the field seemed like a boiling cauldron from the incessant pattering and ploughing of shot, which raised the dirt to geysers and spitting sands." A member of the 25th Mass. remembered, "We moved slowly up the slight elevation beyond which a thousand deaths awaited us...We were at once under a murderous fire." Colonel Pickett waved his sword over his head, and shouted orders "Come on boys; forward, double-quick Charge!" Lieutenant Graham and Captain Foss of Company F, who had promised to watch out for each other, were together when Foss fell, shot in the thigh, "Go on Jim," Foss yelled to Graham, "I have one of them!" Graham rushed to find the next in command. On the way he was hit and killed. As the regiment pushed near the main Confederate line, it was literally shredded.

The only worry Stannard's advance caused the Confederate brigadier Evander Law was the fear that his fast firing men would run out of cartridges before the attack was over. The battle hardened Alabama colonel William Oates was appalled by what he saw: "The charging column received the most destructive fire I ever saw... I could see the dust fog out of a man's clothing in two or three places at once where as many balls would strike him at the same moment." One Massachusetts soldier, driven mad by the destruction, jumped up and raced to the rear toward cover but "was completely riddled in less time than it takes to write it."

Three times Stannard's brigade rose to march forward, and three times it was beaten back. In the process, all of George Stannard's staff officers were put out of action, two killed and four wounded. By the time "Baldy" Smith got matters organized in Brook's division, it was all over for Martindale's.

William F. Smith to George Meade At Grant's headquarters, the steady clicking of the field telegraph and the constant arrival of new dispatches was posing its own problems. "Some of the messages were rather contradictory," Grant's aide Horace Porter admitted, adding that they "became still more conflicting as the attack proceeded."

Sitting at headquarters, George Meade was curiously isolated from the battle. "There has been no fight of which I have seen so little as this," his aid Theodore Lyman wrote. "The woods were places so as that the sound, even of musketry was much kept away, and the fighting, though near us, was completely shut from view."

About this time, the first of Lee's messengers returned from A. P. Hill. The third Corps commander had shown the courier the Federal dead lying on top of one another. "Tell General Lee," Hill said, "it is the same all along my front."

Defeat
Union 5:15 - 8:00 A.M.

All along the bleeding front, a few, final, convulsive lunges were taking place. Even though Martindale's advance was by now shattered beyond hope of repair, William Brooks tried to move his division forward on the left. It never had a chance. "The bullets did not whistle, they came with a rush like lighting," a dazed Connecticut soldier recalled. In a battle where horrible woundings were only too common, one of Brook's brigadiers, Gilman Marston, had the dubious distinction of being knocked out of action by a tree limb that was clipped by a solid shot. A couple of enterprising New York soldiers, seeing an instant opportunity to retire from the field with honors, grabbed the stunned general and began hustling him to the rear. Marston regained his senses and yelled at the New Yorkers to put him down. In a short while he was back along the firing line.

Confederate: 5:15 - 8:00 A.M.

In front of Evander Law's Alabama brigade, one Union regiment simply melted away save for the color-bearer, who was unaware that there was no longer anyone behind him, steadily advanced with the flag. "Go back! Go back! We'll kill you!" some of the Alabamian's shouted. But still the Union soldier came on. When he got close enough, a few Confederates even stood up and waved him away. Then, remembered an officer in the 4th Alabama, "He finally stopped, deliberately looked, first to the right rear, and then his left rear, and then seemingly for the first time taking in the situation, with the same moderation gathered in the flag, right-shoulder-shifted his charge, came to and about faced as deliberately, and walked back amid the cheers of Law's men, who never saw anything equal to it before or since."

Confederate : After 8:00 A.M.

With the fighting so close to the Confederate capital, it was inevitable that some VIP's would come out to see the action first hand. At around noon, Postmaster General John Reagan showed up with a couple of lawyer friends. They quizzed General Lee about the condition of the Southern army, giving the gray-haired commander another chance to repeat his pleas for more troops. One of the visitors asked Lee if the cannon fire was especially heavy this day. Lee nodded but gestured toward the battle lines, where the musketry was firing in such volume that the postmaster likened it to the tearing of a sheet. "It is that," Lee said with no emotion, "that kills men."

Union After 8:00 A.M.

Everywhere, the battered Federals were entrenching at the point where they had been stopped. On Hancock's front, the 152nd NY reported, "We fell back an average distance of 100 feet from the Rebel works, and began to throw up breastworks, using case knives and tin plates." The men of the 19th Mass found a rail fence just to their rear and immediately began to pass rails to bolster the cover. Horatio Wright's soldiers dug in, "improvising all sorts of implements for this purpose." Along "Baldy" Smith's bloody line, the troops used material that was suddenly available in abundance. "We piled up bodies in front of us and covering them with earth, made them serve as a defense. The dirt would sometimes sift down and expose a hand or foot, or the blackened face of the dead."

George Place, one of Stedman's hard-hit soldiers, was stumbling back to cover of the woods after being struck under the left eye by a ricocheting rock and in the arm by a Confederate bullet. Just as he reentered the woods, he was grazed in the small of the back, "As I received the third blow," he remembered, "that old familiar expression hit him again, 'blackjacket, he's got no friends,' passed across my mind."

The orders to renew the assault met a varied fate. Along John Gibbon's line a member of the Philadelphia Brigade, no such command ever "reached the front of the Second Division." On other parts of the line, when the word to advance came, the soldiers just stepped up their rate of fire without leaving the shallow trenches they had scoped out. When staff officers brought the orders to Stedman's mangled brigade, one New Hampshire officer exploded. He "denounced in righteous wrath the generals, high and low who was guilty of ordering such a murderous charge as that...and declared with an oath that he would not take his regiment into another such charge, if Jesus Christ himself should order it."

Not surprisingly, the victors of this battle were less than eager to present themselves as targets. One member of the Philadelphia Brigade reported hearing Confederate officers urging their own men to "advance and capture the few hundred Yankees" but no counterattack came out of the entrenchments.

Some concerted effort seems to have been made among the reserve troops to ready a new assault. In the Eighteenth Corps, a large body of infantry, mostly from Brook's division, was formed into column thirty two ranks deep, "a solid body of men literally covering the ground." At the same time, "over the Sixth Corps a large part of that corps, about 15,000 men, were similarly massed.

But the commanders in the field had had enough, both Barlow and Gibbon told Hancock that any further attack was "inadvisable." "Baldy" Smith got a verbal order from Meade to renew the assault, but he refused to obey it. Wright repeatedly said that he would attack, but only if Smith and Hancock did as well.

It was all over.

HEADQUATERS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC
JUNE 3,1864 - 1:30 p.m.
ORDERS
FOR THE PRESENT, ALL FUTHER OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS WILL BE SUSPENDED.

In his diary, the Fifth Corps artillery commander Charles Wainwright, made note of the actions of the two other Union corps at Cold Harbor; "The Fifth Corps being strung out on a line some five miles long could do nothing save demonstrate and fire artillery... Burnside was to have attacked with his whole corps at daylight, as a diversion to the attack on the left, but as usual, not ready till the matter there had been decided."

Confederate: Afternoon

The dead were everywhere and in every conceivable posture. "Men lay in places like hogs in a pen." a Southerner in Kershaw's Brigade recalled "some side by side, across each other, some two deep, while others with their legs lying across the head and body of their dead comrades." John Haskell, an artilleryman whose battery had repeatedly enfiladed "Baldy" Smith's corps, could see that "the ground in front of our works was covered black with dead." A Virginia cavalryman named Charles Minor Blackford struggled to describe the scene in a letter to his wife, finally having to content himself with the comment, "I never saw anything like it." A young Georgian in Hoke's Division concurred: "I have been upon some twenty battlefields, but the enemy's loss was greater on this field than I ever saw before."

At some point, squads of Northerners found themselves trapped too close to the Confederate lines to make their way back. Most tried to lie low, but as soon as they were spotted they were captured. One wounded Federal stumbled into the portion of the line held by William Oates' Alabamians and gasped that there were more unwounded blue coats nearby. Oates' sent out a company, and it brought in a hundred Yankees, including a colonel. He said he had been in many places, Oates remembered, "But thus was the worst."

Union Afternoon

"The man who moved, even an arm, was remorselessly shot." A Massachusetts solider recalled angrily. "Samuel Evans of Company D lay badly wounded in front of his regiment the 140th PA. His friend John Hathaway saw him move slightly to indicate that he was still alive. Armed only with a canteen of water, Hathaway "deliberately stepped out and in full view of a strong Confederate line walked to where his friend was lying." Not a shot was fired as Hathaway made Evans comfortable and gave him some water. But as Hathaway turned to go back to the Union's line, nearly a hundred riflemen opened up on him. Hathaway was hit and knocked down, finally crawling to safety "in fainting condition." Evans was dragged in later but died a few days afterwards. On the portion of the line held by the 25th Mass, unwounded survivors of the charge watched in helpless horror as a terribly mangled man lying between the line cut his own throat with a jackknife to end his agony.

Confederate Night

After dark, troops on the Confederate left learned of events on the opposite flank. The word came by means of what one soldier called "an improvised telegraphy." As he later explained, It was nothing more than passing word from man to man and on this occasion came, Pass it along the line that we have whipped the enemy on the right."

Confederates were surprised at how light their losses had been this day. "In fact," wrote Dr. LeGrand of Mississippi, "so few wounded had been brought in by dark, that the regimental surgeons were ordered to visit their commands in person and see that the wounded had all been brought off."

Some small-scale operations took place after dark as Confederate officers moved to smooth out irregularities in their lines. One was in front of Breckinridge's position, where the Federals had temporarily breached the line. General Finegan ordered a raiding party to clear the Yankee pocket that was still holding on nearby. The Florida soldiers chosen for the assignment grumbled about charging out into the open for such a small action. Young Captain C. Seton Fleming, chosen to lead the raid, "made a little speech to his men. He told them he was ordered to go, was going, and called upon them to follow him... " The Florida boys trusted Fleming, who had helped draft their reenlistment resolution earlier in the year. Fleming had his own doubts about the wisdom of the orders, but he led his men forward. Almost at once, gunfire rippled from the Federal works and sent the Confederate party reeling back. Left behind in the scrambling retreat was the body of the young captain.

At 8:45 P.M. Robert E. Lee wired Jefferson Davis in nearby Richmond, "Our loss today has been small, and our success, under the blessings of God, all that we could expect."

A young North Carolinian writing home this evening said, "I think this will be one of the most awful battles that has ever been fought in this war."

Union Night

By the time night fell, most of the wounded who were to survive had crawled or been brought in. Those who still lived and lay in the no man's land knew what their fate would be. Among the papers gathered by the burial parties several days later was a bloodstained diary with this final entry : " June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed."

Union losses reached high into the ranks. In Hancock's corps, three young colonels; H. Boyd McKeen, Frank Haskell, and James McMahon were mourned by their fellow colonel Nelson Miles, who recalled that the three had "bivouacked that night together and slept under the same blanket, they were laughing and speculating as to the results of the morrow. When dawn came, they all gallantly led their regiments and were all dead in fifteen minutes."

Once again, Federal doctors labored through a nightmare. Recalled a soldier in the 81st NY., "Our surgeons worked nobly, looking like so many butchers, many were bareheaded, with sleeves rolled up to their arm pits, some of them spotted all over with blood, they really looked horrifying."

A few Southern combat patrols ventured out into the darkness, but they roused such a furious reaction that they quickly scuttled back without much loss. Many of the vengeance hungry Federals remembered these probes as full-scale attacks that were smashed back with great loss to the enemy. "Come on! Come on! Bring up some more Johnnies," a few screamed. "You haven't got enough!"

Frank Wilkeson watched the 7th New York Heavy Artillery come back. "They seemed to be dazed and utterly discouraged," he remembered.

A returning member of the 36th Wisconsin was struck by the curious appearance of the trees near the jump-off point. They "looked as if there had been a storm of large, heavy, wet flakes of snow sticking to the trunks." Examining the trees more closely, The Wisconsin soldier realized that the effect "was done by the balls of the enemy knocking of the bark, showing the white wood."

When the 12th NJ finally took up its line for the night, Private William Haines found himself behind the same tree from which he and his fellow skirmishers had rolled away the dead Confederate before feasting on his johnnycake.

Sergeant William Chambers, whose birthday was today, finally stumbled upon a field hospital and had his wounded arm treated. Chambers had spent the whole day looking for help, stopping every now and then to pour water on the wound in an attempt to keep down the inflammation. "When he finally found a heap of straw to lie down on," related the regiments historian, "he was astonished to find on each side his two comrades of the night before, both wounded, and the same blanket covered the three again."

There was never an accurate accounting of Union losses for this day. A surgeon in Hancock's corps guessed the casualties to be "not much less than 5,000." The Confederate First Corps artillery chief, E.P. Alexander, later estimated the number to be seventy three hundred, while Provost Marshal Marsena Patrick of the Army of the Potomac, was told by General Meade that their losses exceeded eight thousand. Drawing upon hospital records, Meade's chief of staff, Andrew Humphreys, put the June 3 totals at 4,517 wounded and " at least 2,100 killed. What ever the final determination, from this day on, the Army of the Potomac headquarters ceased to ask for morning reports from the company commanders. The numbers of lost men were potentially too explosive an issue for the staff to allow that data to be so easily assembled.

Grant and the Army of the Potomac would again try to swing around Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. And, again, Lee stopped them. This time at Petersburg, but that's another story.


THE END




Copyright © 2001 Tom Gladwell
(email: TUBES14@aol.com)
All Rights Reserved


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