Not War but Murder - Cold Harbor, 1864

by Furgurson, Ernest B.

• ISBN13: 9780679455172
• ISBN10: 0679455175
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780307427045
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Knopf
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

On the morning of Friday, June 3, 1864, Generals Ulysses S. Grant and George G. Meade brought their overland campaign against Richmond to its climax in an all-out assault on Robert E. Lee's entrenched Rebels at Cold Harbor, less than ten miles outside the Confederate capital. The result was outright slaughter--Grant's worst defeat, and Lee's last great victory. Though Grant tried afterward to forget the battle, and historians have often misunderstood its importance, Cold Harbor remains what Bruce Catton called "one of the hard and terrible names of the Civil War, perhaps the most terrible one of all." Now Ernest Furgurson, an eloquent narrator and analyst of the war, tells the harrowing story of this pivotal conflict. Like his earlier account of the Battle of Chancellorsville, his latest work is rich in detail and revealing anecdotes: Federal generals consume a champagne lunch while more than a thousand of their wounded lie untended on the field. The Confederate Congress votes itself a 100 percent pay raise while bread prices skyrocket in the South. An angry Union surgeon saws off the leg of a malingerer. Yankee and Rebel soldiers, slipping between the lines after dark to rescue the wounded, find themselves in the same hole and negotiate a private truce. Furgurson explores the minds of both privates and commanders, showing how friction between the overconfident Grant and the irascible Meade proved disastrous; how Lee, with fewer than half as many troops as Meade, repeatedly outmaneuvered Union forces; and how Northern election-year politics influenced Grant's strategy, pressing him to try to win the war with one final head-on attack. Cold Harbor was a watershed moment of the Civil War. After Grant's defeat, the struggle dragged on; the war of maneuver became a war of siege, and stand-up attack gave way to trench warfare--tactics that would become familiar in France half a century later. Above all, Cold Harbor was the most uselessly bloody, one-sided battle of the war, whose terrible human cost is captured in one chilling diary entry, scrawled by a mortally wounded soldier: "June 3, Cold Harbor. I was killed."

Author Biography

Ernest B. Furgurson, author of the widely praised <b>Ashes of Glory</b> and <b>Chancellorsville 1863</b>, is a native of Virginia and a descendant of Confederate soldiers. He was on the staff of the <i>Richmond News Leader</i> before beginning a long career as Washington and foreign correspondent for the <i>Baltimore Sun</i>. He and his wife live in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

List of Maps	ix
Preface	xi
Prologue: The Circumstances of the Case	3	(3)
The Rising Sun	6	(20)
We Must Strike Them a Blow	26	(12)
Rely Upon It the End Is Near	38	(17)
Damn Them Let Them Kill Me Too	55	(19)
Hold Cold Harbor at All Hazards	74	(13)
The Splendor of Our Victories	87	(12)
You Cannot Conceive the Horror	99	(17)
Richmond Dead in Front	116	(20)
It Was Not War, It Was Murder	136	(19)
A Simple and Absolute Impossibility	155	(14)
All a Weary, Long Mistake	169	(12)
You Kneed Not to Be Oneasy	181	(13)
Like a Scene in an Opera	194	(17)
Killing Without Any Battle	211	(9)
A Nice Friendly Chat	220	(12)
The Heavens Hung in Black	232	(11)
Across the Last River	243	(14)
Epilogue: Dust to Kindly Dust	257	(4)
Appendix 1	261	(16)
Appendix 2	277	(4)
Notes	281	(14)
Sources	295	(18)
Index	313

Excerpts

Preface

From June 3, 1864, to this day, for those who know anything about the American Civil War, the name Cold Harbor has been a synonym for mindless slaughter.

U. S. Grant admitted that he never should have ordered the all-out attack against Robert E. Lee's entrenched troops there on that Friday, and afterward he did his best to pretend that it had never happened. One of Lee's staff colonels called the one-sided Southern victory "perhaps the easiest ever granted to Confederate arms by the folly of Federal commanders." When the North realized how seriously the Union army was bloodied there, the muttered barroom description of Grant as butcher swelled into the public prints. Speaking as newspapers ran long lists of the dead and wounded, Abraham Lincoln, who would have fired any previous commander after such a debacle, grieved that "it can almost be said that the 'heavens are hung in black.' " His closest friend in the press, Noah Brooks, reflected the mood in Washington when he wrote that "those days will appear to be the darkest of the many dark days through which passed the friends and lovers of the Federal Union." A hundred years later, Bruce Catton called Cold Harbor "one of the hard and terrible names of the Civil War, perhaps the most terrible one of all."

Those words, among the many written about Cold Harbor, remain true. It was Grant's worst defeat, and Lee's last great victory. Thousands of soldiers who survived agreed with Confederate general Evander Law that "It was not war, it was murder." But it was much more than one head-on attack and ruthless repulse.

The Cold Harbor campaign, from the Union army's crossing of the Pamunkey River to its departure for the James, was more than two weeks of infantry and cavalry clashes, each sharp enough to stand in history as a separate battle if it had come at some other time and place. The climactic fight of June 3 was more complicated than alleged by earlier writers, and it lasted longer than the ten minutes, twenty minutes, or one hour so often reported by veterans who witnessed only their own part of the struggle.

Too often brushed past as barely a chapter in the story of the 1864 overland campaign, Cold Harbor demands much closer study than most historians have given it. The West Point Atlas of American Wars, for example, devotes six maps to First Bull Run, where about one-fourth as many casualties were suffered on both sides as at Cold Harbor. It covers the Wilderness with nine maps, and Spotsylvania Court House with eight. Cold Harbor proper gets one half-page, small-scale map, in which the action covers about two inches at the upper margin. That is roughly the same proportion of attention that Grant gave to Cold Harbor in his official report of the campaign and his memoirs. Less than 10 percent of the published Official Records of the overland campaign, from the Rapidan River to the crossing of the James, are from the Confederate side, a fact that has strongly influenced later assessments of what happened.

Strategically and tactically, Cold Harbor was a turning point of the Civil War. After it, the war of maneuver became a war of siege; stand-up attack and defense gave way to digging and trench warfare, the beginning of tactics that became familiar in France half a century later. And psychologically, Cold Harbor provided a case study of command relationships that should be taught in every military academy. When Grant arrived from the West to become general-in-chief of all Union armies, he believed that the prowess of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia was a myth that could be shattered by unrelenting pressure. As it turned out, his relations with George G. Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac, and Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war, may have been as crucial to what happened as his misreading of their stubborn enemy.

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Excerpted from Not War but Murder - Cold Harbor, 1864 by Ernest B. Furgurson
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