Grant's Tombs
WINIK, JAY
Grant's Tombs How the Union fought and failed at Cold Harbor. BY JAY WINIK In the history of warfare, few scenes seemed so ripe with promise: Nine and a half miles from Richmond, recently named...
...As much as the battle itself, the ensuing days became a sullen test of wills between Grant and Lee...
...Here too, Grant had misread his own men...
...It is June 3, 1864...
...One read simply: "June 3, Cold Harbor...
...When Grant finally relented, the damage was done: The litter bearers found but a handful of men alive...
...And thus the question that Ernest Furgurson, a former journalist turned Civil War historian, asks in his highly engaging and instructive new book, Not War but Murder: "How could such a thing happen...
...So battered are the Federals that any further suggestion of a Union attack is rejected by the men themselves...
...For four and a half long days, Grant refused to send a flag of truce and request permission to care for his wounded and tend to his dead...
...It will drag on for the better part of a full year...
...BY JAY WINIK In the history of warfare, few scenes seemed so ripe with promise: Nine and a half miles from Richmond, recently named general in chief, U.S...
...Grant, the hero of Fort Donelson and Vicks-burg and now of the whole Union, has maneuvered his gargantuan federal force of 109,000 men into place across a seven-mile stretch...
...Thus Furgurson has done readers a fine service by writing a full-length account of this pivotal conflict...
...How could such a brilliant commander commit such a catastrophic blunder as the assault at Cold Harbor...
...Both sides were appalled at Grant's callousness...
...Furgurson also fixes—appropriately—much of the outcome on Lee himself...
...As column after column of casualty lists was published, a pall of gloom settled over the North...
...For the Northern public, the message was clear: Three years into the war, after all the expended valor and energy and effort, this was the result...
...In the end, Furgur-son notes, "Grant left the details to Meade, and Meade left the details to Grant...
...Civil War buffs and all seeking to understand the gritty reality of war will relish his harrowing account...
...The day is a rout...
...In Furgurson's defense, he focuses his lens narrowly, on the battlefield, much as Stephen Sears did in his classic, Landscape Turned Red...
...And the campaign took its toll: After weeks of ceaseless fighting, the Army of the Potomac was badly shaken...
...Now, after four of the bloodiest weeks of the war, Grant readies his army for one final climactic showdown...
...It didn't wash...
...Furgur-son informs us that the Union secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, tried to delay the news of the carnage, while Grant simply pretended it was "just another bump in the road...
...Many openly feared "a danger of the collapse" of the Union war effort...
...Furgur-son offers two answers...
...On the eve of the assault, hundreds of them pinned slips of paper with their names and addresses on their uniforms, so their bodies could be identified after the battle...
...In the Overland Campaign that culminated at Cold Harbor, Grant lost some 56,000 men, nearly as many men as Lee had in his entire army...
...Indeed, it was Grant himself who, after laconically admitting that he "regretted this assault more than any one I have ever ordered," largely made the mention of Cold Harbor taboo...
...The first focuses on the convoluted arrangements that had placed an irascible General George Meade in direct command of the Army of the Potomac, but had also left an overconfident Grant, the general in chief, essentially calling the shots...
...The war now settles down into a grim siege...
...In vain, Grant stubbornly tried, again and again, to maneuver Lee into open field combat, but Lee skillfully checked Grant's every move...
...So each day the wounded begged for aid, and ordinary Union men watched in dismay as black vultures glided overhead...
...At the time, however, that final outcome was not so apparent...
...Ego, vanity, and resentment in turn led to bureaucratic inertia...
...In two days, Lincoln will be renominated as the Republican candidate for president, and Grant means to give him a great gift: the imminent end of the war...
...Our men feel they have gained the morale over the enemy and attack with confidence...
...As Furgur-son reminds us, historians often brush past Cold Harbor in a few pages, treating it with the same disaffected tone that Grant himself would use in his memoirs...
...Dug into defensive position, Lee, who has himself fallen sick, lacks the men and firepower to do what he likes best: go on the offensive...
...What lay behind it...
...Within days, Grant slips his army away, crossing the James...
...In fact, as Furgurson reveals, Lincoln was so worried that he vowed to continue the war if it "took three more years...
...So at dawn the grand assault comes, all along the lines...
...By the battle's end, 10,000 Yankees are dead...
...In plain sight of the Union army, the ground was littered with thousands of dead and dying that it would neither bury nor rescue...
...swollen corpses exploded in the sun...
...to do so would be to tacitly admit defeat...
...Furgurson writes with passion and immediacy...
...The place he has chosen is a dusty crossroad named Cold Harbor...
...Though sick, desperate for reinforcements, and deprived of the ability to go on his cherished offense, Lee brilliantly maneuvered his smaller army, leading to this, his last great victory of the war...
...Most historians have followed his lead...
...The result was a disjointed, slipshod attack against a Confederate army that had become masters at defense...
...One wishes Furgurson had delved further into the deep Northern angst that followed the Wilderness Campaign and Cold Harbor...
...It is the worst defeat of the Union armies in all the war, the horror of the thing being its speed...
...rebel army, led by Robert E. Lee, is exhausted, half starved from lack of rations, and outnumbered two to one...
...Furgurson notes that while this was happening, Federal generals were enjoying a champagne lunch...
...In the aftermath, a Cold Harbor syndrome glumly set in, whereby the ranks of the Army of the Potomac, much like the European armies in trenches along the Western Front a half century later, literally dreaded attacking again...
...Poised against him, the Jay Winik's newest book, April 1865: The Month That Saved America, about the Civil War, is due out in April 2001 from HarperCollins...
...Pivotal is the word...
...Even Lincoln himself moaned, "The heavens are hung in black...
...A common public image is that after Gettysburg, Union victory was inevitable, a mere matter of time...
...Furgurson concludes: "Never did generals so blatantly place concern for their own reputations above mercy for their soldiers lying dying in the sun...
...Worse still was the effect on Northern morale, which in Furgurson's telling slumped lower than at any time in the war...
...Lee's army is really whipped," Grant boasts to Washington...
...some 7,000 men were cut down —slaughtered is more accurate—in the first ten minutes alone, with roughly five acres of Union dead and wounded neatly arranged along the Confederate front...
...The question by then, of course, was whether the Union would hold firm for even another year—which leads to a quibble: At times, this book might have been served by greater political context...
...Maybe even Richmond itself...
...But this is merely a question of nuance and emphasis...
...and the cries of their comrades got fainter and fewer...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...This is odd, given the fact that the carnage was more horrifying than the spectacular rebel triumph at Marye's Heights in Fredericksburg or, for that matter, the disaster of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg...
...I was killed...
...This is no small question...
...Yet the most poignant section of this book is not the dismal attack, but its tense aftermath...
Vol. 6 • October 2000 • No. 4
