Keith S. Bohannon - Cold Harbor to the Crater : the end of the Overland Campaign

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from Catherine Lawrence and Eric Papenfuse.

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Cover illustration: Thomas Nast, The Campaign in Virginia: On
to Richmond! Harpers Weekly, June 18, 1864 (Library of Congress,
Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Collection)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cold Harbor to the Crater : the end of the Overland Campaign/
edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Caroline E. Janney.
pages cm. (Military campaigns of the Civil War)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4696-2533-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4696-2534-8 (ebook)
1. Overland Campaign, Va., 1864. 2. Cold Harbor, Battle of, Va., 1864.
3. Petersburg Crater, Battle of, Va., 1864. 4. Petersburg (Va.)History
Siege, 18641865. 5. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865
Campaigns. I. Gallagher, Gary W. II. Janney, Caroline E.
E 476.52. C 65 2015 973.736dc23
2015010513

GARY W. GALLAGHER & CAROLINE E. JANNEY

GARY W. GALLAGHER

ROBERT E. L. KRICK

KATHRYN SHIVELY MEIER

KEITH S. BOHANNON

JOAN WAUGH

GORDON C. RHEA

M. KEITH HARRIS

CAROLINE E. JANNEY

KEVIN M. LEVIN

STEPHEN CUSHMAN

A French diplomat visited the battlefield at Cold Harbor shortly after the armies departed. Federal assaults had failed there on June 3, 1864, leaving a nightmarish landscape. One sees on this ground, wrote Alfred Paul to superiors in Paris, only entrenchments, rifle pits, chevaux-de-frise, scattered tree branches, corpses in putrefaction badly covered with a little ground almost carried away by the latest rains. Heat and moisture had left the air foul, polluted by the exhalations of these human remains, and the flies rise from beneath the step of the horses as black clouds that poison the atmosphere. Two months later, a teenaged girl in Fredericksburg, Virginia, reacted to news of the battle of the Crater, which she called the Yankees last new plan to exterminate our soldiers lives by blowing our men high sky. Confederate counterattacks had sealed the Union breakthrough on July 30 and then restored the line. In the pit which they had dug for us, recorded Mary G. Caldwell in her diary, there were about 300 negroes and whites killed. It is said that our men just closed around this pit and killed them. How little did they think when they made the mine to blow our men open that it would be their own fate.1

Pauls and Caldwells accounts deal with events that define the chronological framework for Cold Harbor to the Crater. Between the end of May and the beginning of August, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee oversaw the transition between the Overland campaigna remarkable saga of maneuvering, digging, and brutal combatand what became a grueling, eight-and-one-half-month investment of Petersburg that eventually compelled Confederates to abandon Richmond. We consider the initial assaults at Petersburg on June 1518 to be the last phase of the Overland campaign, an opportunity to earn a quick Union success that almost certainly would have doomed the Rebel capital. Until the U.S. failure at the Crater almost six weeks later, a protracted siege at Petersburg was far from certainafter it, few observers on either side expected anything else. In choosing this model, we depart from one that sees Grants crossing of the James River on June 1215 as the close of the Overland campaign and the fighting on the 15th18th, when Maj. Gen. William F. Baldy Smiths Eighteenth Corps and Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancocks Second Corps attacked Gen. P. G. T. Beauregards badly outnumbered forces, as the start of the siege of Petersburg.2

The narrative of these operations is familiar. On May 2021, following more than two weeks of combat and 60,000 combined Union and Confederate casualties at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, U. S. Grant once again attempted to place his army between Lee and Richmond, angling to get around the Rebels right flank. Lee anticipated the move and took up position behind the North Anna River, where fighting continued on May 2326. By the end of the month, after additional action at Totopotomoy Creek and Bethesda Church, the Army of the Potomac and Army of Northern Virginia found themselves on nearly the same ground where Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan had faced Lee two years earlier during the Seven Days battles. On June 13, near a crossroads just northeast of Richmond called Cold Harbor, Federals attacked their heavily entrenched enemy. Storied frontal assaults by the Union Second, Sixth, and Eighteenth Corps, together with other fighting on the 3rd, resulted in 4,500 Union and 1,500 Confederate casualties (the former figure far lower than innumerable treatments of the action would have it), and overall Grant lost approximately 14,000 and Lee 8,500 men between May 23 and June 3.3

Dubbed a butcher by many Confederate newspapers and the Copperhead wing of the Democratic Party, the Union general in chief remained focused on the task at hand. Holding Lees attention with part of his army, Grant pulled the majority of his troops out of the trenches at Cold Harbor and sent them across the James River to threaten Petersburg, a key road and rail junction twenty-five miles south of the Rebel capital. This maneuver, which one perceptive Confederate later praised as the most brilliant stroke in all the Federal campaigns of the whole war, included construction of an impressive 2,100-foot-long pontoon bridge. Fooled by Grant, Lee delayed three days in sending reinforcements to Petersburg, leaving Beauregard with only 2,500 soldiers on June 15 to contend against roughly seven times that number in the Union Second and Eighteenth Corps. But despite losing their initial line of well-prepared works, the Confederates held on for four days, abetted by a combination of lethargy, confusion, and exhaustion on the Federal side. Lees veterans began to reinforce Beauregard on the 18th, and by the end of that day a priceless opportunity for Grant had slipped away. In the course of the four days, regiments of United States Colored Troops (USCT) saw action (notably on the 15th), while some white units, grown weary of assaulting entrenched Confederates for many weeks, refused to advance.4