Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

breastwork of logs and earth separated the combatants. Our men would reach over the breastworks and discharge their muskets in the very face of the enemy. Some men clubbed their muskets, and in some instances used clubs and rails. … The slaughter of the enemy was terrible. The sight next day was repulsive and sickening, indeed. Behind their traverses, and in the pits and holes they had dug for protection, the rebel dead were found piled upon each other. Some of the wounded were almost entirely buried by the dead bodies of their companions that had fallen upon them. Many of the dead men were horribly mangled, and the logs, trees, and brush exhibited unmistakeable signs of a fearful conflict.28

The 2nd Corps actually tore its way through the Bloody Angle, but a fallback line had already been improvised by the Confederates, and the Federal attack ground to a halt. By the close of day, with another 18,000 casualties to add to those in the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac was still unable to dislodge Lee from his position around Spotsylvania Court House. But Grant had lost nothing of his pertinacity. On May 14, true to his promise to fight matters out “if it takes all summer,” Grant again decided to move around Lee’s right.29

From that point on, Grant’s campaign became a deadly leapfrog with Lee, Grant and the Army of the Potomac always looking to slide quickly and deftly around Lee’s right, and Lee always moving just fast enough to get his army in front of them again. In a violent arc of turning movements, over poor roads and through bottomless mud, always dropping closer and closer to Richmond, Grant pushed his army one step ahead of Lee, until finally by the first of June, Grant had fought his way down to another desolate little crossroads called Cold Harbor, only ten miles northeast of Richmond.

At that point he ran out of maneuvering room. In front of Grant was Lee, his men arriving just in the nick of time on June 1 to throw up instant entrenchments and repulse an initial assault by the Army of the Potomac’s 6th Corps; on Grant’s left was a familiar and fatal stream, the Chickahominy River, trickling into the James; on the right was the road back north, which he had promised not to take. His options gone, Grant ordered a massive frontal assault on June 3, and the results were even worse than Spotsylvania. In less than eight hours, 4,500 Federal soldiers were shot down. The regimental chaplain of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, which had been pulled out of its comfortable barracks in the Washington fortifications to fight as infantry in this campaign, noted that his unit lost their colonel and 51 others dead, plus 333 wounded, in one charge on June 1. The traumatized chaplain wrote home despairingly, “You cannot conceive the horror & awfulness of a battle. I never wish to hear another much less see it. I went out to see this but found myself in such danger I soon fled. … Pray for me. I cannot write—am not in a fit state of mind.” 30

Now was the moment of decision for Grant. He had sustained 55,000 casualties since crossing the Rapidan a month before, and he was losing still more veteran soldiers as regimental enlistments expired. The old story that Grant was a military butcher who simply kept feeding an unlimited supply of Union reinforcements at the Confederates until the Southerners were finally overwhelmed by sheer numbers surfaced for the first time after Cold Harbor, although it is surprising how, even with the horrendous casualty lists, Grant still lost proportionately fewer men than Lee. All through the war, Robert E. Lee lost more men in one offensive gambit after another than any Federal commander; even when facing Grant directly, Lee still lost a higher percentage of his forces in battle than Grant, despite the fact that Grant took the offensive at every point from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. Nor did Grant always have a bottomless barrel of fresh troops to draw upon. Andrew Humphreys, as Meade’s chief of staff, recorded after the war that the Army of the Potomac received only about 12,000 effective reinforcements during the first six weeks of the overland campaign, while it lost not only the names on the bloody casualty lists but also thirty-six infantry regiments that simply chose to go home rather than reenlist. Over the long haul, Grant husbanded the lives of his men far more effectively than Lee; it was Lee, not Grant, who bled armies dry.31

One other thing that was evident, too, was that Grant was far from overwhelming Lee or anyone else at Cold Harbor, and all Grant had to show for a month’s grinding campaigning was the lesson that the Confederates could not be beaten by an army marching overland at them. The McClellan odor had made anyone else’s proposals for sieges and operations along the James guilty by mere association. But Grant had now played all the cards there were to play on the overland route, and the Army of the Potomac was no closer to victory now than when he started.

From the proximity of the enemy to his defenses around Richmond it was impossible by any flank movement to interpose between him and the city. I was still in a condition to either move by his left flank and invest Richmond from the north side or continue my move by his right flank to the south side of the James. While the former might have been better as a covering for Washington, yet a full survey of all the ground satisfied me that it would be impracticable to hold a line north and east of Richmond that would protect the Fredericksburg railroad—a long, vulnerable line which would exhaust much of our strength to guard, and that would have to be protected to supply the army, and would leave open to the enemy all his